Language and reading notes

Just some brief notes and observations that I have made of learning to speak and read.

I have been trying to teach my self Russian since the summer and I have had some interesting experiences that can relate to the classroom. I have been thinking about the differences there are between me teaching myself and how a child will learn to speak and read and all so some of the similarities. By learning a new language it puts me in place to understand slightly better some of the problems faced by children in learning to read and write.

This is some what of an experiment for me as I wanted to find a good way of teaching my self Russian and do it better than any teacher has ever taught me French. I started by teaching myself the Cyrillic alphabet with the aim being able to read. Reading books is apparently a good way of learning a language so I'm told. After two days of intensive study I had learnt the alphabet and a few more days after that I was able to read Russian quite well, if not very slowly.

Now this is where I start to find problems, the first being, what good is it being able to read if you don't understand anything your reading? I found that although I could sound out the words I didn't know what any of them meant. This can often be the case with children who are taught to sound out each word but are never told what the words mean. But here is where children, as native speakers, should be able to pick up the meaning fairly easily. As, in most cases, they can already speak fairly fluently before arriving at school, children will already know, or have heard, the words they are reading. They will already know most of the grammatical rules even if they aren't aware of them, and they are constantly submerged in the language. In my case I am able to read words I have never heard, in a language I have little experience in, that has a completely different set of grammatical rules to my own.

Being surrounded by language is the most natural way of picking it up. When we are very young we are constantly being bombarded with words. We may not be able to say any of them but as we start to see them in context very soon meaning will become clear. We learn words by seeing examples and variations of them in the real world. To learn what the word car is a child is not brought to a car and told "this is a car" but will see have experience of cars by being outside and seeing them go by. As more examples are collected the child will learn the difference between a car, van and lorry and build up a bank of different examples of what a car is.

I have experienced this first hand when trying to learn Russian and it is very easy to remember words said in context. The one word that I learnt in seconds is мороженое, the word for Ice cream. I learnt this word so easily because at the time I was told it I was holding an ice cream. The point I am trying to make in this article is that it's easier for a child to learn to read if they already know the words. The best way for them to learn the words is to hear them, either through conversation, audio books or just being told them. It is no good being able to decipher symbols if you don't know what they mean.