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Learning a New Language: Trust Your Brain and Let It Go
Learning by osmosis
One of the perks of living in a small country is that almost everyone lives near the border; thus, many of us are bilingual. My cousins live close to Italy, while I’m right next to Croatia. When we spent time together as children, I was amazed by their fluency in the Italian language. Did they go on a course, or did their parents tutor them?
“We just watch cartoons,” they said.
How much can you learn just by watching TV, and does that cover language in total, or is it just about common phrases from the bizarre cartoony situations? Does it beat the scholarly approach with verb tables and grammar drills?
The answer was correct in the center of my blind spot because that is exactly how I learned Croatian.
Croatian TV was always turned on in our house (they had way better cartoons, movies & music than our networks); we always listened to Croatian songs, had vacationed on their coast, friends across the border, shopping sprees in their towns, etc. Anyone who lives near the border knows that cultures tend to blend on both sides and people mix a lot. That was in the times of Yugoslavia when we all belonged to the same federal country, which encouraged such mixing. After the war, that trend reversed for a while and is back…
