Nah. If I’m gonna do any gratuitous language learning, it’ll be either Old (medieval) French or else Occitan. And Mr. Boy’s top item on his list is Elvish.

I suggest not because it is now a living language, but because it has great propaedeutic values as well.

Esperanto helps language learning!

You can see this at http://www.lernu.net

We do the DVD’s the other way around, voice-over in the language we’re trying to learn, which works even for illiterate people (75% of my children), if you are watching the same film you’ve already seen 3,000 times in your native language (100% of my children). Disconcerting, though, when the mouths don’t match up — animation voices-over better than real people.

I like the idea of watching in English with foreign subtitles below, especially for a new language. (I do this with Spanish sometimes.) Might start doing this with Mr. Boy, since he’s a compulsive reader. Good reminder.

Having taught myself a few languages from scratch, I know from experience that your observations are correct and effective.

Another fun tip, more for adults than kids: Watch movies with the subtitle on in the target language. I learned lots of Chinese when I lived there by watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, in English, but with Chinese subtitles. When I heard a particular grammar pattern that I wanted to know (eg. “I wish that it had…”) I would pause it and write down the words subtitled. Caveat: BEWARE TOTALLY BOGUS TRANSLATIONS. Surprise: sometimes translators just put any dang thing they like. “What the.. he didn’t say that at all!!”

Also, again, for adults: Forget the nouns, learn the verbs: have, do, go, like, want, hope/wish, eat, should, can, let, make, leave, come, need, think, teach, feel, and learn descriptive adjs flat heavy shiney round big small pointy. While my expat friends were struggling to remember the words for table and chair, I was talking to people, and if I didn’t know the word for table, I would just ask, “What’s this again? Big flat thing, you eat there?” You’d be surprised how little of a conversation actually requires concrete nouns.

Nouns are easy to describe, but verbs, especially basic verbs, almost impossible.

I was having a conversation in Spanish with a co-worker once. My spoken Spanish is pretty weak, and I sometimes miss basic words because I hear them wrong. He used a sentence with the word “hacer”, meaning “to do or to make”, but I heard “aser”, and didn’t know what it was. I asked him, “Que es ‘aser’?” He looked surprised. “‘Hacer’? No sabes ‘hacer’? Hacer! Hacer es… es… como, haceeerlo. Hacer!”

Roughly translated: “To do! Do! Do is like, when you DOOOO something. Like DO.”