Learning other language than Mother Tongue

Learning any  language is a long time process.  It requires many capabilities, listening, understanding, speaking, reading and writing.

Mother Tongue or Mother Language is  the language that a person learns naturally as a child at home usually from  parents and surrounding community.  This learning is  natural and involves actual experience and exposure to  vision and vocal sounds with implicated association patterns.

It is also referred to as native language which adds extra flavour of regional and ethnic and behavioural culture   Children growing up in bilingual homes can have more than one mother tongue or native language.

The first language of a child is part of the personal, social and cultural identity. Another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking.

Natural learning process involves association of vision and vocal sounds which help in grasping the meaning of words and sentences. This is possible only when persons are exposed to such environment. People living in area where the regional language is different, become conversant with that language and learn to understand and speak that language without conscious efforts. Of course it takes time. Still, they cannot read the written text in that language unless they study that language in traditional way.

Traditional way of learning has following steps

• Learn to read and write alphabets
• Learn to read and write words and understand their meaning
• Lead sentences. understand the meaning
• Learn to compose the sentences
• Learn to communicate with spoken words and sentences 
• Read textbooks and other literature
• Learn to compose text and write  articles.

Traditional study of other language for about two years is sufficient for achieving fluency in that language but to attain same working level as native speakers of that language it requires  five to seven years of actual stay in the community where that language is used for all communications. Still it is observed that non-native people generally choose word associations based on logical rather than phonetic preferences as adopted by native residents.