Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I am your host. Today is Friday and today, as we do every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate technology, we record a Friday Q&A show.

You can call in, ask about anything that you want, opine on anything of your choice. It's up to you, you guide the topics, you guide the show.

We have a lot of collars, we do a lot of questions, if we have a few collars, we do a few, you're welcome to call in and talk about anything that you would like.

If you would like to join me on one of these Friday Q&A shows, go to patreon.com slash Radical Personal Finance, patreon.com slash Radical Personal Finance.

Become a patron of the show there, and that will gain you access to one of these Friday Q&A shows. We begin with Jose Luis in North Carolina. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hello Joshua. The reason why I'm calling is we've been lately listening to your podcast of different shows on how you taught languages to your children.

And the question we have, or I have it, how would you modify your methods to teach a new language if you were not able to speak it in the first place yourself?

It's a good question. What language are you considering teaching?

We're considering French. We already speak Spanish and English at the house, and neither one of us knows French, but we would like to get them started in French, like you have.

And we're saying that if we had to wait until both of us or one of us is fluent, before we can teach it, we may waste time in that learning period for ourselves.

We don't really have a lot of time, so we thought there might be a modification that you would try to your method.

Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts that I think will be helpful. First of all, the difficulty of learning a language, a significant factor in the difficulty of learning a language is whether you are choosing a language for which language instruction materials are available or a language for which they are not available.

So the French language is a language for which many instructional materials are available, especially to speakers of Spanish and of English.

If you were to study, I don't know, Tweet or some other more minor local language, you would have a much harder time with that.

So you're making a good choice by choosing a language such as French. Now, if you don't speak the language, there are a couple of different options that you can choose.

First, in order for somebody to learn a language, the most important thing is that that person is exposed to comprehensible input in that language.

Comprehensible input simply means portions of language, portions of speech, that the learner is able to comprehend in some way.

That comprehension can occur in various forms. That comprehension could occur because there's a physical person, a teacher, they're handing someone a cookie and saying, would you like a cookie?

The comprehension could occur because there is a classroom environment, because there's a list of vocabulary.

The comprehension could occur because there's video on the screen explaining what is happening.

The comprehension could occur because there's simultaneous translation. There's somebody translating between French and English or French and Spanish, etc.

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