Are you remember how to learn your mother tongue? Maybe your reply is “this is natural, it doesn’t need to learn or I don’t remember, because I was a baby, this is a gift from “Heaven” or this is a part of our body when we grow up, we can speak the language. Do you have thought about how to learn your mother tongue when you were a baby? We can use the same pattern or method to learn our second or more languages when we know how to learn our mother tongue.

Everyone can speak one language at least, we started to learn our mother tongue when we were a baby, we just heard the sound and try to practice, maybe no people know what the baby said, but they were keeping practice every day and their parents help them to pick up their mother tongue. The baby grown up their pronunciation is better, we have had this experience but forgot how to pick up our mother tongue, and look like natural can speak our mother tongue, in fact, we have given effort into our language, such as:

1) practice, practice and practice! Baby words hard to understand, because they are learning to talk, they don’t know what is ashamed, so, they talk loudly and keep practicing, so when they grow up to 2 or 3 years old, you can know what they said, because they already practice 3 years, every day to speak the language; like an adult learning a second language need the time to practice and use it. You need to know the skill and method, will be more effective.

2) the environment can’t stop us to learn a new language. Baby heard the voice; they will follow the voice and want to know what that means. They observe their parents or family member and learn intonation and facial expressions from them. Adult also can create a language learning environment, listen to the new language pronunciation and learn to speak, we are easy to create the environment now, we have the internet, many language APPs, and online language course.

3) Communicate with people and interact, we want to express our feeling. We need to make friends, need to buy food, need to eat and drink, we need to talk and people know what we want. We need to know the language before opening our mouths, this is our driving force. When you travel the world, you can speak the local language, you are most welcome, and local people treat you like a part of them.

4) motivation, our mother tongue is learned for living, and our second language is learned for a better life, anyway, learning more language is good for us, expand our friends and more opportunity. You also can explore the world, and experience different cultures.

5) happy learning, you can observe the fact, babies and children, who are learning a language are in happy moments, they’re not pressured. We need to learn from them, this is the key points that make us happy learning and learning fast.

Language is not difficult for us if we need this language, we are very fast to pick it up. In many families in China, their family speaks the countryside language at home, and their kids speak mandarin at school, and mandarin is a common language in the school. My brother’s family is Cantonese speaking family, his daughter speaks Cantonese at home and speaks mandarin at school, her mandarin is very fluent and her family teaches her English, she is only 3 years old and already can speak 3 languages. She is in a happy environment to pick it up. The environment lets her learn 3 languages, the different place speaks a different language, and she knows her classmates don’t know Cantonese. So, she needs to speak the same language at school. She is very natural to pick up mandarin, and she can separate every language she knows, when I speak Cantonese to her, she replied in Cantonese to me, Mandarin also, she clearly these languages how to use.

I am a language learner, I am keeping learning my second language, I learn it and need to use it, let this second language be a part of us. I never think I can write an 800 words essay, I just tried it and follow the instruction, believing I can be fluent in English in the future. My motivation to learn English is I want to have more opportunities in my life. I use my action to open my door.