The beating of a small heart through an ultrasound transducer: the first sounds of a new life. After a few months of dwelling inside the safe surroundings of your mother’s belly, listening to the distant voices and sounds of the world outside, you burst screaming in to life. From that moment a life long language learning begins.
Your first teachers are your parents, your siblings, your family and first friends. You learn quickly through adopting to your surroundings. Imitating the sounds and gestures of the people around you. After only a few years you master your mother tongue. If you’re lucky (at least from a language point of view) you might grow up with a second and even a third source of language sound and start life as bilingual. Then you start school and most of us start learning a second, and maybe a third language. Unlike your first years the language learning is less powerful: the sounds and surroundings are limited to a language teacher (I really hope you have an amazing one) and a couple of hours per week.
At this stage of life you basically have two choices: you either tell yourself that you have no talent for languages. Or you tell yourself that it is time to go out finding the people and places that create the sounds of human life.
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