Is Goethe right? A reflection on the first post of this blog

Hello again,

I'm here now to explain and make some comments about my first post with Goethe's sentence One who doesn't know another language doesn't truly know his own. Do you think this famous German writer is right? Why?

Well...here is my opinion...

I think he's totally right. When one starts learning another language, one starts being more aware of the mechanisms of his or her own language. I say that taking into account my own experience as a speaker of a foreign language. As the acquisition of the first language is a subconscious process, we generally don't think about why we say things in the way we say. However, after learning another language, one start to compare what is differences between the two languages. For example, the verb use in English is sometimes pretty different from the use in Portuguese. I would say "I have 4 classes this semester", in Portuguese, but in English the most common is to say "I'm taking 4 classes this semester."

I decided to post Goethe's sentence to make you to think what is the importance of learning another language.

I believe that children can especially benefit from an early learning process, because they will also start this comparison earlier in their lives. As Bialystok, Luk, and Kwan show in the article I posted, Bilingualism, Biliteracy, and Learning to Read: Interactions Among Languages and Writing Systems, bilingual children do better in writing and reading test than monolingual children.

What do you think? Do you believe that children benefit from early foreign language learning or not? And why?

Let's make a discussion about this topic!

See you,
Amanda