Bilingual Bedtime Stories.

How did the Easylinguistics Team learn Spanish?

No two of us are the same; we’re as unique as our individual methods for learning languages! In our first few blogs we’re going to look at the methods that three of the authors of Easylinguistics stories have used to learn languages.
These three authors have all achieved fluency although their individual styles are as different as their personalities! But there is one thing that they all did. Strange coincidence or the reason that they all achieved fluency????????

Our 3 methods are:
The Osmosis Technique
The Ice Man Technique
The Combined Technique

In today’s blog Ella tells us about some of her language learning experiences and how she has learned Spanish using the Osmosis Technique.

The Power of the Subconscious Mind / The Osmosis Technique – Ella’s Way

Whilst working on luxury cruise liners I met an Italian. Although I dreamt of living in Rome, he dreamt of living in London. I spent hours laboriously practising Italian with self-study courses, but all to no avail. Six months later his mother called and asked him to go home, so we packed our bags and set off for Nettuno.
His beautiful sisters understood me well when I spoke English, but soon his mother forbade me to speak my mother tongue. It’s commonly known that total submersion is the quickest way to learn a language but it’s not the most fun! The relationship with the Italian didn’t last much longer but a passion for languages had been ignited!
I missed the Italian but not nearly as much as I missed his Country and his
language! I bought countless Italian novels and videos and visited Italy as often as possible.
My Italian kept improving and eventually helped me to get a job as a flight attendant. I loved the Italian trips to Rome, Milan and Venice and thanks to my Italian flag I was often assigned those trips. I eventually passed an Italian `A´ Level with a B grade!

In 1999 I bought a barn in France to renovate. I signed up for a few classes and bought a self-study course, was bored silly by it and started buying novels.
I started off with girly novels meant for teenagers. The intense concentration needed to read in a language that I barely spoke often sent me to sleep at any time of day.
Take note insomniacs!

Within a few months I was already reading adult novels and managing to stay awake. Soon I noticed that I wasn’t translating as I read and even when it came to quite complicated grammatical structures. That was when I realised the power of reading when you’re learning a foreign language. It’s as if the language sinks directly into your subconscious mind! I wished I’d taken an `A´ level in French at that time!

On the 11th September 2001 and I took the midnight train to Barcelona to start a new life. The months after September 11th were traumatic for the whole world but especially airline crew. I became scared to go to work! At the same time I was excited about my new life in Spain and the prospect of learning a new language.
I bought myself a phrase book and from day one started speaking Spanish. I spoke Italian, with a few Spanish words from the phrase book thrown in, mixed with the odd French word!
Determined to learn Spanish quickly I signed up for a weeks school every month.
That’s where I met my partner in Easylinguistis, Jacqueline Garcia, the Director of OK Idiomas in Sitges.

A few years later I read a book, which was to change my life. The message in that book seemed like magic to me! Could the human mind really be that powerful? The book was `The Power of the Subconscious Mind´ by Joseph Murphy. Miracles have been brought into my life using the power of my subconscious mind. I have since read that book over and over and many more similar books.

It was September 11th 2008 and I was having coffee with Jacqui and Dan, who like myself speak fluent Spanish. We talked about alternative methods that we’d all used to learn Spanish. Like myself they’d read Spanish novels and watched movies to help improve their Spanish, Dan had read comics. I was amazed, none of my other friends had read in Spanish, but then few of my other friends had become as fluent in Spanish so quickly without having Spanish partners! Could this be The Key to achieving fluency rather than just getting by?

Jacqui told us that she written some bedtime stories, which she was going to send to a publisher. As Jacqui is the Director of a Language Academy the question:
‘Could your stories be used to help children to learn languages?’ sprung from my mouth.

As a linguist and a businesswoman, Jacqui loved the idea of translating the
stories to form bilingual bedtime stories and self-publishing. We thought a bit more and came up with a couple of problems. An adult reading a short story would only read it once or twice before getting bored and a monolingual parent wouldn’t read the foreign story very well to their children. The solution? To record the story, narrated by natives and add some relaxing music to help the cherubs sleep.
As parents we both knew how exhausted we sometimes are at the end of the day and the bedtime story is putting us to sleep while our little ones are still wide awake!
We knew it was ambitious but we also knew that it would be an amazing way to aide children in learning a second language. Bilingual Audio Books for adults would make this powerful language accelerating technique accessible to those who don’t enjoy reading in foreign languages.

The concept of learning languages through the power of the subconscious mind, doesn’t work as well as we’d expected… it exceeds all expectations!

The Osmosis Technique

After having to study other languages, Catalan just seemed to seep in through my skin! I’d tried taking classes but given up. After a strong start I lagged behind.
The classes were taught in Spanish and most of the other students were Latinos who had been living with Catalan partners for years. I missed a lot of classes through work and finally did something quite foreign to me. I quit!
A few years later with no conscious effort I suddenly realized that I understood most of what was being said. I realized this when friends and neighbours, both
English and Catalan told me that my children were speaking Catalan to me. I’d thought they were speaking Castellano with a few Catalan words thrown in. It turns out they were speaking Catalan with a few Spanish words thrown in!

When I first met the twins’ father’s family I could just get the drift of their conversations in Catalan but I would often get lost. It never bothered me, if I
wanted to know what they were talking about I only had to ask and they’d explain to me in Spanish. The twins’ father liked the TV on whenever he was awake and I learnt to switch off to it. That’s when I believe that I finally started learning Catalan. Dan mentioned the same thing. At the rugby club when his friends’ start speaking Catalan he used to just switch off, but nowadays he understands most of what they say! Strange coincidence?

I remember seeing a genius test on the computer. There was a lady dancing and the image was rotating in a clockwise direction. It said that if you could make the dancing lady change direction then you’d just tuned your mind into genius mode.
Determined I stared and stared at the screen but nothing happened. I got bored and started to daydream, as my eyes went out of focus the dancer changed direction. Am I to conclude that when I’m daydreaming that I’m in genius mode? Or that when I’m not focused on the problem that the answer will just materialise in my mind? Or that by hearing a foreign language without consciously listening could eventually lead to me understanding that language? They do say that geniuses have their Eureka moments in the middle of the night or whilst napping.

Could this be how I learnt Catalan with no conscious effort? Here I have to admit that I don’t actually speak Catalan although I know I could if I ever met a Catalan who didn’t speak Spanish.
I’m using The Ice Man Technique to learn Catalan, when I finally start speaking I’ll be fluent!

For the last few months, I’ve been listening to one of our stories, `Pela the Class Pet´, in Catalan.
Although it’s a children’s story I never tire of listening to it, partly because I
wrote it myself! It’s based on the time that the twins brought home their class Pet for the weekend, a tortoise named Pela who was a hundred and three years old. Pela wasn’t looking forward to the weekend because the twins are very naughty and I always speak English. In the end we had a wonderful weekend, Pela behaved a little badly herself and even learnt some English!
The subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, as is the human ego!
I would like to invite anyone who is struggling to learn Spanish or Catalan to write a story for Easylinguistics and when it’s produced into an audio story see if their Spanish or Catalan doesn’t improve the way my Catalan did!

I have one bitter regret. I wish I’d taped myself reading aloud or attempting to
speak in Catalan a few months ago. I recommend that anyone using Easylinguistics stories tape himself or herself reading the story when they first hear it and then tape themselves again a few months later. And if you do, we’d love to hear the results!
The difference in my accent whilst reading in Catalan is nothing short of amazing!

I’m waiting in anticipation for my next story `Lady Maria the Class Pet´ to be
recorded along with ‘Little Boy Blue’ by Jacqueline Garcia and `The Door revolution´ by Danny Berkovitch.

Do you ONLY speak English????

A few years ago while visiting a Malaysian friend in Singapore her daughter asked me,
`Do you speak Malay?´
`No´ I replied,
`So do you speak Chinese? ´
She asked,
`No´ I replied
`Do you ONLY speak English?´
She asked incredulous, eyes wide open.
`No I speak Spanish´
`But you’re not Spanish!´
She replied by now totally confused.

In Singapore everyone speaks English as well as their mother tongue of Malay,
Mandarin or Hindi. In Holland, Scandinavia, Quebec, Catalonia, Galicia, The Basque Country and Wales people grow up bilingual and think nothing of it. In England few
people speak a foreign language and make excuses ranges from `I’m lazy´ to `I’m a scientist not a linguist!´

I’ve asked many Dutch and Scandinavians how they learnt to speak English. The usual reply is that in their countries the TV is not dubbed so they watch almost everthing in the original version and thus grow up multilingual.

I asked my Singaporean friend how she taught her daughters English. She explained that she’s always read bedtime stories to them in English, since they were babies.
The English aren’t lazy or lacking in linguistic skills, they just haven’t used the
right methods to learn languages!

See in our next blog how Dan learnt Spanish using the ICE MAN Technique!

copyright Easy Linguistics 2009

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