How My Kids Learn English

Let's talk a little bit about how kids learn English. So, this is a video in which I'm speaking at normal speed, by the way. This will be good practice for your listening. Of course, the subtitles are right there. So, hopefully, you can follow along as I'm talking about this. I want to talk about the subject of kids learning English. And I'm not giving a guide or anything like that, or I'm not really trying to make a ton of comparisons between us and kids. I just want to talk about this subject in general because it's really interesting. I have young kids and it's fascinating to watch them learn their native language. It's a really interesting process that they go through. So, I'm just going to give some general notes about these things that I've noticed. And I hope that this will be an interesting topic for you to listen to as you practice your listening, just practicing your English listening comprehension with me, right? So, also remember that if you like this type of content in which I speak at normal speed, make sure to sign up for my advanced podcast episodes. That link is down below. Okay, let's talk about what it's like for a kid to learn English. Well, first of all, as a parent, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of hard to realize how much your kid is learning in just any given moment because you're with them all the time. You don't really notice their progress until you look back and you say, wow, you know, they didn't used to be able to, or they weren't able to say this before and now they can say this. Or maybe you watch old videos that you have of them and you realize, wow, they couldn't say anything back then and now they say all these different things. So, it's kind of hard to really track and follow this really closely in the moment because it happens very slowly, but like little by little, they start to be able to speak. And after a while, you realize, whoa, they're saying all these different things. So, it's pretty cool. My kids are growing up bilingual. So, it's a different situation from the average kid in the US because the average kid in the US, they just have to focus on one language, really. It's just one language, one system, one grammatical system, one set of vocabulary. That's it. However, my kids are growing up bilingual. So, that changes a lot. It's double the words they need to learn, double the rules, double the sounds, just a lot of stuff that they have to learn. And then separating those languages in their brain, right? Which happens, by the way, it happens at a very young age. It's really fascinating to see that happen. But it's a lot of stuff that they have to learn compared to the average person here in the US. And so, of course, their development in each language is a little bit slower than the average kid who's only learning one language because they're spending all day in that language, with that language, hearing those sounds, those words. My kids get half the time in each language, right? So, they hear Spanish from their mom, they hear English from their dad. So, of course, it's natural that their development is a little bit slower in each language than just a monolingual kid. But they have double the vocabulary and sounds and all that to learn. So, it's normal. And then they get to learn two languages, which is really cool. So, let me talk about their English and how it's been for them learning English. By the way, my son is like four and a half. My daughter is two in a few months, maybe. So, at first, they say single words. At first, it's not even like proper sounds for that word. But you can tell they're saying a certain word. Like, I remember my daughter would always say car instead of car, right? She wouldn't make the R sound. She would just say car, car, whenever she'd have like a little toy car or whatever. Or like right now, instead of saying bread, she says bed, bed instead of bread, right? Because that BR is a little bit tricky. The easiest type of sound for them to make is just like one consonant, one vowel. So, like ca, da, ma, right? Those are the easiest sounds for kids to make, where it's just like they start with a consonant and then they end with a vowel, just one sound. That's like typically what you hear at the very beginning. You hear, you know, ma, da, ca, you know, these types of sounds, right? But then these start to become actual words, right? They start to be able to say phone, for example, right? And they'll say one word, right? They'll just say one word here, one word there. And really, they're doing a lot of imitation. That's basically how they're speaking. That's how they're saying these words. They hear you say it as the parent and then they say it, right? And that's kind of a lesson for us, right? If kids learn their first language like that, obviously, you know, it's something that we can relate to as second language learners. Like we're really just imitating what we hear, right? It's not like there's some really complex secret code to learning words, right? At the end of the day, if you hear someone say a word many times and you repeat it, you're eventually going to know that word, right? So that's how it works with little kids as well. Their sounds start to become better over time as well. So they can actually say the word clearly. Like my daughter, four or five months ago, a lot of her words were like not properly said. Like we knew what she was saying, but it wasn't well-formed. Whereas like now, a lot of her words are well-formed. Like it's very clear what she's saying. So that's kind of cool. After the one-word utterances, of course, they start to say two words, these two-word phrases. So for example, my daughter might say da-da-shoo, right? So now she's putting together two words to create a phrase. Obviously, it's not a correct phrase, right? She should say da-da-shoo with the possessive S on the end. But nevertheless, it's a phrase. So it's interesting when the one-word utterances become two-word phrases. It's like an exciting thing. And they start to be able to communicate more with that. Because now the sentence is like double the length. They can include more information in there, right? Instead of just shoo, it's da-da-shoo, right? So there's more information encoded into that phrase. So the communication starts to become a little bit more complex. You start to be able to say or just have conversations, let's say, with them. So that's really cool. Their words continue to become clearer, of course, especially once they're saying two-word phrases like that. A lot of times their words start to just become clearer, their sounds. And then three-word utterances. That is like the next step after the two-word utterances, right? So instead of da-da-shoo, it might be da-da-shoo there or something like that, right? So now they're putting together these different words, and there's a lot of information in there. But really, they're including mostly nouns, verbs, adjectives, maybe adverbs, like the words that really have a lot of meaning to them, right? So da-da-shoo there, right? However, they're not really including all the prepositions and the articles and things like that that they might need. The possessives and these little grammatical function elements, right? So they're not saying the yet, right? They're not saying, I don't know, in the house. They might just say in-house or house or whatever. They have to start to develop the ability to put together those little building blocks of articles, determiners, and stuff like that. But as their phrases get longer, after the two-word, three-word phase that they're in, then they start to include those little building blocks, those little function words that they weren't able to say before. So you can see little by little how their ability to communicate information increases with more words and using different types of words. So that's really cool. Once they have all these building blocks, like my son, for example, who is older than my daughter, he has these building blocks, right? He can say the little words that have just more grammatical function meaning rather than like a noun or a verb or whatever. So once they have these building blocks and they're saying full sentences or communicating to you well, they still run into problems, right? They're still young. They're still early on in their linguistic journey, even in their native language. And so they still run into issues. They still make a lot of mistakes, right? So a good one with English, not a good one, but a good example of this is like with inversion with questions. So for example, like I could ask, how many did you do, right? So I have this inversion and I put the did, right, the auxiliary verb there, like how many have you done, right? So we invert our sentences. We change the order of them with an auxiliary verb in English when we ask questions. So instead of saying, how many did you do? My son might say, how many you did, right? So he doesn't invert it and he doesn't have that 100% yet. I'll correct him and then maybe he'll correct it himself. But really, he's not at the stage where he asks these questions completely correctly. Other kids his age do, some don't, some do. Like I said, my kids are bilingual. So you can forgive them for developing a little bit more slowly because they have all the rules in both languages to learn, right? So I'm not very worried about that type of thing. But that's inversion is a good example of a problem that they run into. Or maybe they do invert. I remember hearing my nephew, this was when he was maybe like three and a half or something like that, or four. I forget how old he was. Maybe he was three. But he was trying to invert or he was trying to ask the question, like, where are they? And instead of where are they, he just said, where is them, right? So he's thinking like, where is dada, where is mama, where is them, right? He's just substituting them there. Obviously, that's wrong. But you can see how he came to that conclusion, right? So a lot of these grammar rules, they're actually understanding that there's these patterns and they're trying to say things correctly. But the rules are a little bit more complicated than what they're thinking. And so they can't follow these irregular patterns and things like that. Like I just heard my friend's son the other day, instead of saying, I fell, I think he said, I falled or I felled or something like he needed to put a D on the end. Because in his mind, that's how the grammar works, right? I walked, I talked, I felled or I falled or whatever he said, right? So it's interesting to see how they try to apply grammar, but then the irregular rules trip them up. So that's pretty cool to see that working in their brain. And you don't really realize when they get these rules down. It's kind of hard to remember when my son started to say things correctly. It just kind of happens gradually. So again, like I said at the beginning, it's more like when you watch old videos of them or whatever, and you see how they used to talk. And then you go, oh yeah, you're saying all these things much better now, right? That's a way that you notice it. Kids learn a lot of English or whatever language they're learning. I'm just talking about English right now. Here in the US, they learn a lot of English from their friends, their environment, the people around them, and the entertainment they watch. So a lot of what my son can say right now doesn't actually come from me. Most of it comes from me, I assume. But a lot of it comes from the things that he watches, the things he hears from his friends. I remember seeing something, research done about how impactful it is, the environment around a kid, specifically their friends, not necessarily their parents, but what they hear their friends say, what they hear people on the street say. This really influences the type of language that they speak, the type of communication they have. So that's a really big thing. My son says new words and phrases all the time, and I have no idea where he learned them. I'm like, where did you learn that? I ask that all the time because I'm like, I know you didn't learn that from me. I didn't say that. But he saw it somewhere else or whatever. He heard it, and then he adopted it. So it's startling how many new things they learn from sources that aren't you as the parent. It's pretty interesting. Lastly, I just want to talk about reading. My son is learning to read right now. And for me, it's amazing that young children can learn how to read in English. In other languages, this is not necessarily the case because they're phonetic. Like Spanish, you just learn the sound of every letter, and you can basically learn to read. Like someone who's learning to read as a second language learner in Spanish, they can learn to read pretty quickly because you just have to know the sound of each letter, right? And even if you don't know what the words mean, you can say them, right? Whereas in English, you probably already know by now, but English, like the way that it's written and the way that it's spoken is extremely different. And so this system is unbelievably complicated. And so imagine trying to teach this to a four-year-old, right? You're teaching them the sound of the letter A, but then unfortunately, the letter A can be said five, six, seven different ways depending on the word, the sounds around it, how reduced it is, how stressed it is, just its normal sounds. They just ask these questions like, why is it said like this now? I thought you told me that the A makes this sound. It's super complicated. I feel really bad for kids that are in this process because it must be so frustrating for them. Why is it pronounced like this? You just told me it was like this. Why isn't it like this, right? My son, he has an O in his name that is reduced, right? If you've ever watched my pronunciation seminars or my listening practice seminars, you'll know what I'm talking about when I talk about reduced speech, right? So he has an O in his name that's reduced. And he asked the other day, why isn't the O in my name an O sound or an AH sound? And I, of course, didn't really have the ability to, or he didn't really have the ability to understand when I explained to him about the stress system in English. But it's just super complicated to even explain to a kid why certain letters are pronounced certain ways in certain words. In English, this is just a mess. And so I commend all these kids for learning how to read at a young age because it's really hard. Again, this is not the case in other languages, but in English, it's extremely hard. So, you know, if that's, you know, when you hear me talk about reduction and stuff like that, if you want to learn more about that, make sure to sign up for my membership, so you can get my training. You can learn about these things, the schwa sound, why the O is not always pronounced AH or O, but it's pronounced UH, right? Why, right? Why does that schwa sound come about, right? So if you're interested in that, make sure to sign up for my training. Click on the link down below. So a lot of what they're reading just does not match up to the sounds that they're learning. And so they just learn to sight read. In other words, you're just learning what the sound of a word is without really paying attention to the individual letters. Like the word THE, right? It's not T-EH, right? That's not how you pronounce that word. It's THE. So they just learn to sight read that. Like, okay, every time you see those three letters, it's pronounced THE, right? So that's kind of how we learn to read. Eventually, we're not relying on our knowledge of sounds because in English, that doesn't really take you very far, right? You just learn how to sight read all these thousands of words. So it's pretty incredible how that happens. And I'm just watching the beginning stages of that with my son right now. And I'm really excited to see this happen. I'm super stoked for him to learn how to read because I'm a big reader. It's one of my greatest passions, hobbies. I love reading. So I really want my son and my daughter, of course, and any of their future kids to be big readers as well. So it's really fun for me to watch them read. But I don't know how they do it. It's like super complicated in English when you're a four-year-old. Wow, I commend them. And it's exciting, but it's hard. So overall, these are some of the notes that I have about what I've seen from my kids learning to speak English. This wasn't really a guide for you, but it's just kind of like an interesting topic. So much of how they learn is just related to exposure, experience, repetition, imitating, recognizing patterns, even just their desire to want to say certain things. So a lot of it is just like it's not really technical. It's just repetition, exposure, all these different things, desire, these other factors. And it's just interesting to watch all this happen. So I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it was good practice for your listening. Remember to sign up for my training if you want help understanding, pronouncing, different things like that. If you want my advanced episodes in which I speak like I'm speaking now at normal speed, make sure to click on the link below. Check out that membership, okay? Thank you all for watching this video, and I'll talk to you in the next one.