Learning...

[ChynaDoll2006]

In your opinion what is the most quick and effective way to learn a language as an adult?

I do not speak Swahili yet but I would like my future children (ttc) to be able to. I will give them music, DVDs, books etc in Swahili but i need to be able to speak enough myself. Maybe to an intermediate level?

How do you think I should go about learning it?

Why Swahili?

Depends how much time and money you want to invest. The best way would be to go and live in a Swahili-speaking area and take immersion classes while there.

Failing that, an immersion-style course here would help a lot, as would many commercially available courses.

Or, of course, a Swahili-speaking partner.

Depends, too, on whether you plan to teach your children yourself or to support their learning from someone else, and whether you plan to attempt to bring them up bilingual or teach them Swahili as a second language.

If you have any aspirations at all towards bilingualism then, no, intermediate won't be good enough - either you or your partner will need to be native-standard.

Sorry to be discouraging - I may well be missing something, as you haven't given us a lot to go on.

Good luck whatever you decide, and maybe a Swahili expert will be along soon and discredit all I've said!

Thanks for your response.

I would like my children to be able to speak it very well, but not bilingual as I think that would be too much work for me!!!

I think I'm just going to go for the immersion idea and get as good as I can. Then I will teach the children all I know and probably get additional tuition as well.

If it's not bilingual I think it's very doable with even intermediate - though you then have to be careful-ish, perhaps, about what age you start, as it might confuse them if you are offering two language systems but one of them is only partial - do others kno more about this than me?

Good luck - why Swahili, by the way?

thanks! because my DP is a pan-africanist, and Swahili is the official pan-africanist language. we are both going to learn it but as I will be with the baby more me learning is a priority!

Fair enough.

Only fair to warn you, though, that most people trying to bring their children up this way end up relying a lot on others - it is hard work talking to a baby in another language because they are so unpredictable and you rely on your instincts to respond to them - but, linguistically, your instincts are the very thing you have to override because you do not want to speak your native language. As a result, we tend to look to DVDs, CDs, and playgroups/playdates with other speakers/visits to an appropriate country or area in this country to "round out" the language experience for the child. Have you got that sort of thing in place and have you identified a reliable source for that sort of things over the months to come?