Learning a New Language as an SLP

Author: Brett McCardel, MS, CCC-SLP

Hereโ€™s something Iโ€™ve personally been reminded of lately: Language is complicated! ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿผโ€โ™‚๏ธ ๐Ÿง  ๐Ÿ—ฃโฃ
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In some of my free time this summer, Iโ€™ve recently started learning Japanese ๐Ÿ‡ฏ๐Ÿ‡ต โฃ
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And as much fun as it is to learn a new language and geek out over the syntactic structures and morphology of the Japanese language, it has also been really HARD for me at times ๐Ÿ˜“โฃ
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(Really wishing right now that I still had those extra neurons from my pre-synaptic pruning days ๐Ÿ˜…)โฃ
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It has been such a good experience for me as an SLP to have a personal reminder on how complex language is though, because I feel like I am better able to sympathize with my clients who are working so hard to recover their language skills after a stroke or brain injury ๐Ÿง  ๐Ÿ’ฅ โฃ
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Clinically, there have been times in the past where I have been working on confrontation naming with a client, and have been puzzled as to why they have trouble retrieving the name of a family member 15 seconds after we just spent time training and saying the name ๐Ÿค” โฃ
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But lo and behold, there are times when I learn a new word on my @pimsleur app and 15 seconds later have no idea what the word is anymore ๐Ÿ˜ถโฃ
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The whole experience has really made me think about how large the target word set should be for my clients in naming treatment, and ways that I can reinforce these words throughout all my treatment tasks ๐Ÿ‘Š๐Ÿผโฃ
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It has also made me even more aware now of how I can make sure that the words we work on in treatment are able to be used functionally throughout the day ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿผโฃ
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Because let me tell you, ever since Iโ€™ve started saying โ€œohayo gozaimasuโ€ to greet my dog every morning, I now have that word down SOLID. I canโ€™t say the same for words Iโ€™m not using in some sort of functional way every single day, though ๐Ÿ˜…โฃ
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All this being said, language is cool and complicated and FUN! Iโ€™m finding that I learn Japanese best when I tie it to enjoyable activities for me, like cooking food and playing video games with friends ๐Ÿฅ˜ ๐ŸŽฎ โฃ
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What are some ways that you make your SLP sessions functional and enjoyable for your clients?โฃ
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#aphasiaawareness #SLP #SpeechLanguagePathology #MedSLP #slpsofinstagram #japaneselanguage