If you’re convinced you’d like to try to learn your child’s language, here are a few suggestions:

1. Consider asking for a special blessing to help you with your language-learning endeavor. As I studied my daughter’s language and later began communicating with her in person, I felt the blessings of the Lord pour out upon me and truly felt I had been given the gift of tongues. Certainly, desiring to speak with your child is a righteous desire, and I felt language knowledge just pouring into me as worked to improve my skills.

2. Find out what language resources are available in your area. If you live in a large city, you will likely be able to find evening and weekend continuing or community education classes.

3. Buy English--> target language, target language --> dictionaries. A pocket type is great for times when you’ll be out and about, and a picture dictionary is nice because you and your child can look at pictures arranged by theme (e.g., rooms in a house, parts of the body, etc.) to help communicate when words aren’t doing the trick. An Amazon search of “dictionary” and your language choice will turn up many results.

4. If you live in an area with no access to classes, you still have a great many options. There are online courses, CD and DVD based courses, workbook courses, and even private tutors who use Internet conferencing technology to teach individuals or small groups. To make the most of your options, decide first whether you are a primarily a visual learner or an auditory learner and take your learning style into account when choosing a program. Note, also, that for the more popular countries from which to adopt, there are many CD and workbook programs that are designed specifically for adoptive families. (See resource list in part 3.

5. And don’t forget the LDS adoptive parent’s secret weapon – the returned missionary! Returned missionaries are usually a) short on cash, b) anxious to keep up their language skills, and c) eager to interact with someone from the culture they spent two years of their lives learning to love. A returned missionary may be able to tutor your family (but expect the focus to be on speaking rather than writing – a typically weak area), and may also be available to help translate when your new child arrives home. A friend of mine paid a former missionary to Haiti $15 an hour to come to her home and show her daughter around, explain the rules and answer questions, and kept him “on call” for when emergencies cropped up. An RM can be just the solution when you find your language skills are a little lacking!

Unless you’re really extraordinary, your language-learning efforts won’t equate to complete fluency, but the more you study, the more you’ll know, and the more you know, the smoother your child’s transition can be. Being able to talk about feelings, familiar objects, and wants/needs, even in the simplest of terms, will help both you and your new child start off on the right foot and avoid incomprehensible arguments over why (or why not) soiled toilet paper can indeed be safely flushed. Just for example. ;)

continued