How to Make Language Learning a More Joyful Experience

Here's what it sounds like when Spanish starts to take hold at home:

Your child is in the back of the car, or in the bath, or standing on the couch they've been told twice not to stand on, belting out a Spanish song. Most of the words are wrong. One of them isn't a word. They are absolutely certain of every syllable.

That's the thing you're building toward. Not fluency — that's down the road and it isn't the point yet. Just a kid who thinks this language is theirs to shout.

And everybody hands you the same five ways to get there.:

Put on the music. 

Switch the shows. 

Talk to them. 

Play games. 

Read libros. 

All five work. All five belong in a house where Spanish is happening. But each one has a joyful version and a potentially joyless version, and the joyless version is almost always someone doing it too carefully.

Sing it wrong

Here's a surprise worth knowing: songs turn out to be pretty bad at teaching words. When anyone's put songs and stories side by side — same kids, same words — the stories win, and it isn't close. Which is a relief, because it means you can stop working during them. 

No pausing to explain the chorus. No what does pájaro mean? from the front seat. Nobody has to learn anything.

What songs carry is the sound — the roll of an rr, the place a Spanish sentence lifts and lands, the fact that mariposa has a bounce in it that "butterfly" doesn't. And that gets built by a kid who is having a great time, not by one being tested at a red light.

So sing it badly. Get the words back to front. Do the voice. Your child will correct you, which is its own kind of learning and a lot more fun for both of you.

Heckle the show

Screens get the loudest opinions in both directions, and the truth is more fun than either camp.

Kids in homes where the TV runs in the background tend to have smaller vocabularies — not because of what's on, but because a show nobody's watching soaks up the room and the talking stops.

Kids who watch alongside someone who chats about it land slightly ahead.

So the show isn't doing the teaching. You reacting to it is.

Which means the good version of screen time is also the loud one. Say ¡mira! when the thing falls over. Ask what the dog is up to. Gasp. Laugh at the same part for the ninth time, the way you were going to anyway.

You're not supervising the show. You're watching it with your favorite person and being a little obnoxious about it.

Four words, said constantly

Vamos. Más. Ya voy. Whatever you say about the shoes every morning.

There's a reason that's enough. Picture books hold about three times as many unusual words as the way we actually talk to small children — because talking to a three-year-old means simplifying. We orbit the same couple hundred words, we stay concrete, we narrate whatever's in arm's reach. That's exactly right, and it's why they understand us.

So let the books carry the enormous vocabulary. Your four words are doing something different and better. Said every single day, in the same moments, they turn into the private language of your house — the thing your kid says to you and nobody else, in the doorway, about the shoes.

That's not a beginner's version of Spanish. That's an inside joke you're building for years.

Let them run the game

Lotería at the kitchen table. I-spy in Spanish on the walk to the park. Naming everything in the produce aisle until somebody gets bored (usually you).

Games are the most interactive thing on the list — the one place your child is making language instead of receiving it. And the joyful version has a tell: at some point your kid takes over.

They start inventing the rules. They decide they get two turns and you get none.  Or, they decide the game is now about something else entirely and you are losing. 😂

Let it go there. A game your child has hijacked is a game they're going to ask for again, and the whole point of a game is that somebody wants to play it. The version where you hold the rules steady and keep it on task is the version that quietly dies in three weeks.

Say yes to the same book

Libros carry more unusual words than anything else your kid will run into. They also work when you're running on nothing, because the book brings the Spanish and you only have to bring your voice.

But here's the thing books do that nothing else on this list does. Your child won't just ask for a book. They'll ask for that book. The one with the bird. The one you have now read forty times and could recite in the shower.

A kid has to bump into a word something like a dozen times before it's really theirs. Which sounds like a lot until you remember that a child who loves one book will get you there by Thursday, and neither of you will have noticed.

So when they hand you the same one again, that's not a stall.

That's the thing working.

Say yes. Do the voice again.

None of this has to be done well. It has to be done often, and the only way to get often is to enjoy it.