The five natural ways of learning a language

• Listening
• Understanding
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing

How do we learn our mother-tongue?
We learn it through natural ways. Usually a Child learns his/her mother-tongue by listening to the parents, who in their excitement and anxiety always tell the child to say ‘amma/appa” (mummy and daddy). The baby blinks, but soon learns to associate the lady as his/her mother and the gentleman as his/her father and tries to say amma/appa. The understanding starts here. Soon the child is successful and begins to call his/her parents amma and appa. When the child goes to school at the age of 5, he/she learns to read and then to write. Since we learn our mother-tongue in this natural way, we are able to speak our mother-tongue fluently without making any mistakes. But this process is reversed when we learn a foreign language. We become familiar to the language when we go to school. We learn to:

• Read
• Write
• Speak
• Understand
• Listen
  

Exactly in the reverse process. That is why it is difficult for us to speak the language fluently as ‘Listening” does not take place either at home or in school. So, whenever you attend any coaching classes for spoken English, please always find out whether they are stressing on the natural way of learning and give enough exercises to improve your Listening, understanding and speaking abilities in English.