Not only thanks to R, but also the experience of learning several languages maybe gives me a language teaching guidance.
My experience has begun when I and my family went to West-Germany in 1976 because of my father's business. So that my parents let me go to a local kindergarten from the very first entrance, I could communicate fluently with my kindergarten/ infant school friends. It means, first we all learned German together from the first step, and second, so that I was a member of their community, I didn't have to shrink with fear to talk away. Japanese had been brushed up concurrently by my mother. Fortunately she was an ex-teacher of an elementary school.
After coming back to Japan in 1981, I went to a Japanese local primary school, then to a Japanese junior high school. At that time children learned English in the junior high for the first time, so I learned also my second foreign language at the first grade in the junior high. 英語は他の勉強と同じでとにかくおぼえるものだった。
From the multilingual experience, I've got the recognition that a language is just a system of symbols. It was obvious to me that a word must be replaced if the recipient does not understand.
Everybody knows the fact that words are just substitutes as a knowledge, though I often see moms who are just repeating a word to their very small child even without replacing. For them, a word is the world; the meaning of the word is inseparatable from the idea she has in her mind. 責めている訳ではない。これは私もおぼえがある。翻訳できない。
