Children don't have to go to cram school now. Children are the happiest and parents are the most anxious. In this regard, how should we help our baby learn English well?
How old is it appropriate for a baby to start learning English? How old is it appropriate for a baby to start learning English? The United States has done a study on the English proficiency of immigrants:
It is found that people who have lived in the United States for the same period of time and immigrated to the United States before the age of 7 tend to have a higher English level than those who immigrated after the age of 7, while those who are 15 tend to have a much worse English level.
Bertrixia Kuhl of the University of Washington once said in "Baby's Genius Language Ability":
Children can easily accept a language before the age of 7. Once they are over 7, their ability to accept and learn will decline. By the age of 17, their ability to learn a language has dropped to the lowest level.
In fact, it is not difficult to find that children's language ability develops rapidly at the age of 2-3. Children of this age are all completed at this stage, from babbling at the beginning to being able to say a lot of words completely and express rich meanings.
This is enough to show that the earlier language learning, the better, and so is English learning. Children are about 2 years old and can be enlightened in English.
Will learning English too early affect our mother tongue learning? Although the earlier children learn the language, the better, but everyone will inevitably worry that letting children learn English too early will affect their learning of Chinese.
Actually, don't worry about this at all Experts in the United States have long conducted bilingual surveys of children's children:
The study found that children can easily learn two languages before the age of 3.
In fact, looking back, we will know that when we were studying Mandarin, didn't we learn local dialects easily?
Although children may use two languages in the process of learning, as children continue to learn and understand, they will be proficient in distinguishing and using the two languages.
How to better let children learn a second language? Environment is very important for language learning. If there is a good language learning environment, language learning is very fast. Because if you want to master a language, the best way is to use it.
Although we may not be able to learn English and let our children live in an environment where English is used, we can try our best to create a learning environment.
We can let children watch more English cartoons and picture books, listen to more English children's songs, use some English teaching software, and interact with children in English in daily life. In this way, children can learn step by step and accumulate slowly. Over time, children's mastery of English will get better and better.