Chris is Susan's tutor. They are talking about language learning. Listen to their conversation and fill in the missing words in the notes below.
Chris: Hi, Susan, how are you getting on with your English studies?
Susan: It's hard. I have been in England for a year, but I still have a lot of problems both in speaking and reading.
Chris: Don't worry. You have to be patient and practise them more.
Susan: It's very strange, you know, my son, Eric, he is only four, but he seems to learn English much more quickly than I do. Why is this? Why is it easy for young children to learn a language?
Chris: That's a good question. I think part of the answer is that children have so many needs. They need to be helped by grown-ups. They have to make their needs known and they are always watching the effect of what they say and trying new ways of getting what they want. Children are learning new things all the time.
Susan: I agree with you. We adults need to learn new things as well, especially when we settle in a foreign country. But it takes us a longer time to get used to a new life than young children. They seem to adapt more quickly.
Chris: Yes. Another part of the answer, I'd like to point out, is that children are not, as older people sometimes are, fixed in their ways of living. When they are taken from one country to another, they change easily from one language to another, from one bed to another, from one food to another. Older people are more fixed in their ways. They have been hearing and talking one language for a long time. Their ways of hearing and making sounds and of putting words together are like the rails a train goes on. They have been up and down their lines of talk and thought too many times to change them easily.
Susan: I quite agree with you. A child is freer in his ways. He is more like a bird; he is free to go in any direction he wants. He is free to hear sounds as they are and make them as he hears them. He is free to put new words together in new ways in speaking a new language.
Chris: I think that is why they learn things so fast. The more languages you hear and get to know, the more you will see how any language is made up of a small number of sounds put together in different ways. For example, in English, light and right are different words with only one sound in them different. The same is true of long and wrong. If a learner does not hear these different sounds as different, he may get the wrong meaning.
Susan: That's true. I have had this kind of problem. Six months ago I was asking the way to the station. The man told me to turn to the right, but what I thought he said was to turn at the light so I tried to find the light. It took me hours to get to the station.
Chris: I'm sorry to hear that. You know, most people learn their mother language without being able to give any account at all of how it works. They learn to talk as they learn to walk, without any idea of how they do it. People who learn to use a language well do so through talking with others who use it well, through reading good writers and through watching the effects on others of what they say and how they say it.
Susan: I will try all these. The world needs more people who can use languages well. Language is as necessary to our minds as the air we breathe is to our bodies.