When is the Best Time for Learning a Foreign Language?

The best time for learning a foreign language differs from person to person and with circumstances. Even so, it is possible to make some useful generalizations.

The best time for anyone to learn another language is when they are a child.  If you learn a second or third language when you are young, before puberty, and you learn it from native speakers, you will learn to speak it naturally, without an accent. 

A "foreign" accent comes from the difficulties of overcoming the details of how you learned to speak your mother tongue and the "set" the language centers of your brain took at that time.  It shows up in people who learned a second language after puberty. 

Dr. Henry Kissinger, for example, speaks excellent English with a German accent.  Although his knowledge of English is deep and thorough and his command of it is impeccable, he learned to speak English when he was 15, so his native German still comes through in his accent every time he speaks. The same is true for the current governor of California, Arnold Schwartzeneger.

Apparently the "language centers" in the human brain take a "set" during puberty, lose much of their flexibility and effectively dictate that the version of your mother tongue that you learned as a child is the only language you will truly be able to speak without an accent. 

Interestingly enough, philologists tell us that if you learn three languages before puberty, your language centers will remain adaptive and flexible.  Anyone who has learned three languages as a child will usually be able to learn a fourth or fifth language later in life, and learn to speak it without an accent.  (For more information about how children learn languages, the eBook, "Easy to Learn Spanish for Kids" by Ian Sanchez is an excellent source.)

Knowing that doesn't help us much as adults, but it may help us in guiding the educations of our children and grandchildren.

For adults, the best time to learn a foreign language is just before you are going to have the opportunity to use it.  If you learn it and don't use it for a while, it will tend to slip away from you and your abilities in that language will decline.  (In my personal experience, if I am emersed in a Spanish-speaking environment for even 2-3 weeks, I notice an awkwardness and difficulty of speaking in my native English when I return to a place where I need to use it! The process has started and I have been forgetting my English!  But it comes back... :-) )

Fortunately, the easiest way to learn languages today is with modern interactive audio language training, in recorded digital format.  You download the learning course in digital MP3 format, learn the language and then you can quickly refresh your knowledge at any time by just running rapidly through the course again.

When you get the course in MP3 format you download it to your computer.  From there you can download lessons to your iPod, or burn CD's to play in any CD player. 

Forget classrooms!  Downloadable digital media goes with you anywhere.  It gives you the flexibility to learn a language at any time, at almost any place.  YOU have charge of when you learn a language, and you know that your instructors are teaching you with a perfect accent!

Going to Argentina? Take your iPod with you and spend the time on the plane learning Spanish, for use when you get there!  Going to Europe?  It's a long flight across the pond.  You could watch the movie, look at the ocean out the window or spend your time learning German or French! 

And continue your learning in your spare time while you are there.  You will find that since you get a chance to use it frequently, your learning will be speeded up and you will tend to remember how to say....(whatever it was that you needed at that moment, in the language of that place!)

For more information about learning French, German, Italian or any language, use this link: Learn Another Language To learn more about learning Spanish, rapidly and easily, visit: Rocket Spanish - Learn Spanish MP3 To read a review of Rocket Spanish visit: Review of Rocket Spanish 

Jorge Chavez has been an internet entrepreneur and marketer since 2002. He began to learn Spanish after he was 30, now is bilingual English-Spanish.  He has monolingual friends, relatives and clients who only speak Spanish and others who only speak English. 

In 2006 he opened the Chavez Language Center online at http://language-center.ya23.com