Orlaith and Ophelia
You are never too young to learn a language as four-year-old Orlaith Eaton and her two-year-old sister Ophelia prove.
Their mother Jessie explains how much they have benefited from learning French at the VICI Language Academy in Newbury.
“I first heard about VICI from one of the other Mums, Anita Hatton. Both her son and daughter go and she said how wonderful it was and both her children absolutely adored it. She explained it ran during the summer holidays and we went and did a test run or sample run for one or two months and then we signed up and did the Masters programme.
“So Orlaith is four and started when she was three and Ophelia is two and started literally on her second birthday. The girls are loving it. Ophelia, wasn’t speaking any English when she first went and now she’s speaking in both French and English in the space of a couple of months, I genuinely believe that attending Vici has been the spark she needed to start talking. And Orlaith does her letters and colours and numbers in French and dreams in French.
“When they’re small, their brains are capable of absorbing so much and the more languages and the more sound that they’re exposed to, the greater their understanding of not only their native language but the capacity to adopt other languages as they get older. It is beneficial to the understanding of syntax and pronunciation in English and makes it far easier when they are older to adopt additional languages. With a second language, you can travel around the world and it affords you a different perspective, as you are not simply a tourist trying to understand a foreign environment, instead, you can be absorbed into that environment and experience a very different world to that of your own, something that many people do not have the opportunity to do. Also, it’s fantastic as learning a second language has the same qualities for a child’s brain as doing music.
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