The way I learned English in Korean public schools was not sophisticated and holistic in the sense that learning a language involves not only vocabulary, syntax, and reading but also writing, speaking, and even culture. Furthermore, according to Aitchison’s passage, there is even more to examine language. While reading, I realized that two of the disciplinary approaches of linguistics caught my attention: computational linguistics and stylistics. During my military days, I was trying to read classic English literature to prepare for my upcoming college years. I found several words that I don’t know at that time, repeatedly used in the books, so I came up with idea that it would be more efficient if I can analyze how frequently words are used to make a list of them so that I can memorize important words first. However, it turns out to be not quite easy because I had to lemmatize and stem the target words. These are the process of grouping words of the same root (ex: change, changes, changed, changing are all based on the lemma ‘change’). I made the program only for Korean, but it would be extremely interesting and also helpful for deeper understanding if I try this also for Korean. Also, stylistics is one of the big parts of language learning in my opinion. This is because acquiring a high level of proficiency is not only about delivering information but also emotional interaction with the language speakers, which requires one to know the cultural backgrounds of the language. Such knowledge can be obtained in literature, popular media content, and mass media. In this sense, reading Korean classic literature can be not only entertaining but also in line with my goal.
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