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In time some people discovered how to represent the sounds in words by marks.

In any language there are only small number of different sounds.

By writing down marks to represent sounds, not ideas,

people can spell any of the words in a language with only a small number of marks.

Every written language today has its spelling system.

The hardest languages to spell are those in which-as with English-many of the letters may represent more than one sound.

Here is the complete Roman alphabet in which English and many other languages are written.

Something written in English has a meaning only if it is read as English,

because the letters in English represent English sounds.

What is written in Italian must be read as Italian.

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Here is the name of the book English Through Pictures written in a number of different languages.

The names of the languages are given in English.

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Here are the twenty-six letters used in english with the English names for them spelled out after them.

Some of these letters are used not for one sound only,

but for any of two of three or more different sounds.

The letter a may have the sound of a in bag, part, again,say,was, any, or fall.

The letter e may have the sound of e in bell,week,older,earth,or hear,

or may have no sound but only an effect upon other sounds which come before it.

The a and the g in bag have different sounds from the a and the g in age, for example.

Reading English is not as hard as reading chinese,

but is harder than reading a language in which each letter has only one sound.

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Are some of the sounds used in one language very unlike any of those used in another?

Yes. You may have felt in learning English that some of the sounds it uses are strange.

But if you do not have a well-trained ear,

you will not hear English words as they are heard by an Englishman or an American.

You will hear the nearest sounds in your mother language.

A good way of learning to make sounds of a new language is to use recordings

which have spaces after each sentence giving you time to say what you have head before the next sentence comes.

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There are machines which will play back to you again and again,

one after the other, the sounds you have made and the sounds you were attempting to make.

When you hear what you are doing wrong you can try to do better next time.

For most children,new sounds are easy to make when they hear them,

and children seem to hear new sounds better and more easily than grownups do.

If a family goes to China, or France or Finland(to take three countries whose languages are very unlike one another)

the children will learn to talk Chinese or French or Finnish much more quickly than their parents will.

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Why is this?

Why is it easy for young children to learn languages?

Part of the answer is that children have so many needs.

They need to be helped by grownups at every turn.

They have to make their needs known and they are always watching the effect of what they say and trying new ways of getting what they want.

Children are learning new things all the time.

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Another part of the answer is that children are not, as older people sometimes are, fixed in their ways of living.

When they taken from one country to another

they changes easily from one language to another,

from one bed to another,from one food to another.

Older people are more fixed in their ways.

They have been hearing and talking one language for a long time.

Their ways of hearing and making sounds and putting words together are like the rails a train goes on.

They have been up and down their lines of talk and thought too many times to change them easily.

Children are free in their ways.

They are more like an airplane or, better,like a bird;

they are free to go any direction they want.

They are free to hear sounds as they are and make them as they hear them.

They are free to put new words together in new ways in talking a new language.

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The more languages you hear and get to know,

the more you will see how any language is made up of a small number of sounds put together in different ways.

For example, in English, light and right are different words with only one sound in them different.

The same is true of long and wrong.

If a learner does not hear these different sounds as different,

he may not get the meaning of what is said to him.

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There are many ways of helping learner into a language, but not enough people know them.

Most people learn their mother language without being able to give any account at all of how it works.

They learn to talk as they learn to walk, without any idea of how they do it.

people who learn to use a language well do so through talking with others who use it well,

through reading good writers and through watching the effects on others of what they say and how they say it.

The world needs more people who can use language well.

Language is as necessary to our minds as the air we breathe is to our bodies.

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Everybody needs air; we breathe in air from outside our bodies in every breath.

When you put your face under water you cannot keep it there long.

Swimmers can't swim under water very long.

They need air.

Good swimmers may swim with their faces in the water;

if so,they keep turning their heads to take a breath through their mouths.

Swimmers do not take in air through their noses under the water because water would get in through the nose with the air and go to the lungs.

With water in the lungs a person can't go on living.