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- Apr 14, 2006
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It is amazing how quickly young children can learn languages. Before she retired, the young wife taught child development and early childhood education. As part of the curriculum, she and her class of high school juniors ran a preschool for 3 and 4 year old children. It was a regular occurrence for her to get new preschoolers who did not speak English at all when they started. She would ask the parents of the new child to make her a cheat sheet in their language of common phrases, such as "please sit down", "listen to the teacher" "do you need to use the bathroom" etc. and teach her how to pronounce them properly, but aside from that, they did everything in the preschool in English. Within a few months, the children were chattering away quite happily in their new second language. Among others, I recall she had students who initially spoke only Urdu, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.
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