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Today, 1st October, sees the start of the National Day Golden Week in China – the longest public holiday in China besides the Spring Festival holiday – and a time of greatly increased travel and activity.  

On October 2nd, 1949, the new Chinese government passed the ‘Resolution on the National Day of the People’s Republic of China’ and declared October 1 to be the National Day.

Ever since 1950, every October 1st has been grandly celebrated by Chinese people with a military review & parade at Tiannamen Square, flag-raising ceremonies, dance and song shows, firework displays and painting and calligraphy exhibitions.

The Golden Week holiday was started by the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1999 to help expand the domestic tourism market and allow the Chinese people time to travel for long distance family visits.

It is definitely not the best time to be travellining in China due to the sea of people at all the tourist attraction sites and difficulty with travel options in short supply and at an increased cost.  Recent reports from the China Tourism Academy have predicted that “a total of 480 million trips are expected to be made by travellers during the upcoming National Day holiday from Oct. 1 to 7”!

If you are ever planning to travel in China during the “Golden Week”, this might be helpful.

It is well known and accepted that listening comprehension plays a key role in foreign language learning – especially with young learners – and is at the heart of successful language learning. It’s also arguably the most difficult language skill to acquire and is a key difference in the success, or failure, of language acquisition.

Studies have shown that input (listening to the language) that is comprehensible to the learner is critical to successful language acquisition as well as to comprehensible output (speaking).

Because speech is a series of sound units that are strung together and run into each other when spoken by a native speaker, the individual elements are difficult to distinguish with an untrained ear. The lack of clarity that is characteristic of spoken language can make word segmentation extremely difficult for the second language learner.

Especially when the velocity of the delivery is only slightly slower than the speed of light!

And the only way to train the ear to distinguish sounds in other languages is to listen, and listen, and listen.

There are any number of websites on the internet with great ideas, advice and resources to help kids (and adults) brush up on their listening comprehension, but here are 4 great strategies to develop your child’s listening comprehension skills:

An integral part of learning another language with Fun Languages for kids, is discovering and experiencing the different culture and traditions from the country of their target language.

Traditions such as when a child loses a tooth for example.  In France children receive a toy from La Petite Souris (the little mouse), instead of a coin from the Tooth Fairy.

At Christmas time, children in our fun french lessons are amazed to find out that if they lived in France, polishing their shoes would be an essential part of the preparations for “Noël”!

In France, Santa Claus does not come to fill stockings. Instead, children place their shoes in front of the fireplace for Père Noël to fill them with gifts. Père Noël will also hang sweets and toys on the Christmas tree. 

… don’t let your child be the one that’s left behind!

With the recent release of the ACARA REPORT on the shape of the Australian Curriculum: Languages, and with more than 1100 preschools applying for only 40 places for the Australian Government’s Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA) trial in 2015, it’s clear that there is a renewed focus and desire across Australia, to encourage students to learn a second language.

The experts have long been expounding a powerful argument for the benefits of learning another language and the draft ACARA report states that learning another language has been shown to extend students’ intellectual and analytical capabilities and strengthen their cognitive and general learning capabilities, such as creative and critical thinking.

The ELLA trial is part of a wider push by the government to promote languages in schools and to set kids on the path to languages and provide them with a head start towards language study at school. 

Research shows that learning languages develops children’s overall literacy, strengthening literacy-related capabilities that are transferable across many learning areas.

Learning a second language can improve student knowledge of concepts across the entire curriculum and enhances their employment and future career prospects.