Our ability to form a limitless number of thoughts into a spoken word is what distinguishes the human species from our less evolved cousins but, while we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens around 30 000 to 100 000 years ago, we still don’t know all the secrets of exactly HOW language evolved, or how the thousands of languages we have today have developed.

When you hear somebody speaking Polish and another person speaking Persian, they sound like totally different languages, don’t they? But listen more closely and you’ll hear similarities, like how one of the Persian words for mother is mada, and in Polish, it’s matka.

That’s because both languages belong to a large family known as the Indo-European languages. A group that contains over 400 languages and dialects: Polish, Persian, English, French, German, Russian, Icelandic. The list goes on.

But if you trace all those languages to their roots, exactly where and when did they come from? It’s a 200-year-old question and a topic of controversy.

According to linguists (those who undertake the scientific study of human language) there is an important distinction between language acquisition and language learning.

So what is the difference?

The distinction is made based on an individual’s internal cognitive process and the degree of conscious thought brought to the learning task.

Children acquire language through a subconscious process during which they are unaware of grammatical rules. This is similar to the way they acquire their first language. The emphasis is on the text of the communication and not on the form.

In a second-language acquisition situation, the language is spoken in the immediate environment of the learner, who has good opportunities to use the language by participating in natural communication situations.

Language learning, on the other hand, is not communicative. It is the result of direct instruction in the rules of language and is not an age-appropriate activity for young learners. In foreign language learning, the language is not spoken in the learner’s immediate environments and the student has little or no opportunity to use the language in natural communication.

Although the past 40 years have seen numerous studies documenting the superior language skills of girls, excelling in both their native tongue and foreign language learning, the biological mechanism behind this ability has puzzled scientists.

However, more recent research may have provided the answer and suggests that girls’ linguistic adeptness is the result of greater activity in girls of the brain areas used specifically for language encoding. These are the so called language areas which are involved in word meanings, the sounds of words, the spelling of words and their visual identification.

Boys on the other hand showed a lot of brain activity in those areas that are tied to more visual and auditory functions and are more sensory – their brain activity appeared to be confined to the left side of the brain.

This reliance on different brain areas for accurate language performance suggests that boys and girls are processing language information differently and the superior language ability of girls lies in the way they process words.

The media is rampant with reports of either the dwindling popularity of after-school clubs (e.g. art or music) on offer to primary school kids, and/or the sharp decrease in students taking part in after-school clubs.

The statistics highlight the importance of third-party after-school clubs such as those offered by Fun Languages.

We are strong advocates of after-school activities for a number of reasons, and we’ve had a number of years’ experience in organising and running after-school language clubs in both Australia and New zealand.

So, what makes us different from school-organised clubs, and why do we feel that the service we offer is more important now than ever before?

How a child at age 4 draws a picture of a child, is an indicator of intelligence at age 14 according to findings from a study undertaken by The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, and published in Psychological Science.

“In 1926, a young woman struggled to come up with a reliable way to measure the intelligence of young children. Florence Goodenough (1886-1959) conceived the idea of asking the children to draw a human figure. Her ability test was remarkable … and crucially, it worked”

Using the Draw-A-Person test, which has been around for almost 90 years, researchers reported their findings from “the first genetically informative study of individual differences in children’s figure drawings and their relation to intelligence measured a decade later.”

After studying over 15 000 children, (approximately 50% of them twins), the researchers found a “moderate correlation” between how children score on the test at age 4 and their intelligence levels at age 14 and indicatons of a genetic component behind intelligence.