Having Fun Learning New Languages Anne Lascano I am Anne. I studied art because I thought it was “my thing”. Even though art is a great part of who I am, what is truly my thing has everything to do with literature and languages; but somehow, I was never aware of that, until I made the mistake of studying art. When I was a child, I liked to create stories -write them- and illustrate them, I also liked to play “to think in other languages”, particularly English, because I grew up in the border with the United States, and in French, because my mother is French. I always enjoyed the different sounds languages have to offer, and since I had the required abilities to comfortably read subtitles, I preferred to watch movies in their original language, whatever it was. When I met the love of my life -at 15-, I started writing (to him) poetry. Thanks to him I discovered that writing is the most satisfactory way my soul expresses itself. But I studied art. Why? I think I had literature and languages in me in such a natural way that I wasn’t aware of how important they were for me. And that’s the reason I spent quite some time looking for something to study, I even went to a vocational psychologist who suggested greatly that I became an actress (ha, ha!). But the day came in which I realized that, I had taught myself English and French. This is what I did to self-learn two languages:
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Teachers Making a Difference | Issue 1, August 2022
1. WATCH MOVIES The first step was to watch movies that I GREATLY enjoyed, in their original language and with Spanish subtitles (my native language). But I didn’t watch them just once, I watched them enough times to perfectly understand what was going on in every scene and understand the dialogues between the characters. As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy very much the sounds each language has, then focusing in the actors speaking made me, unconsciously, familiarize with the language’s phonics. And it was especially good for me because, by watching the movies several times, I secured the necessary repetitions for learning. Afterwards I started watching the same movies in their original language with subtitles in the same language; this way I could listen and read what was being said, and at the same time I knew what was happening because I was familiar with every
