In class today, we went over second language acquisitions and I thought that it was an insightful presentation on learning languages. One thing that really intrigued me was the four components of language learning, which are speaking, writing, reading, and listening. What caught my attention was that people learn their primary language and secondary language in different orders in terms of the four components. Most people start off by learning their primary language by speaking and listening and then learn to read and write. However, for secondary languages, most people learn first by reading and writing then speaking and listening. So essentially, the order of learning is reversed.
I had never realized this before when learning Spanish, but coming to think about it, this is in fact true. However, this was definitely not the case when I learned Korean. See, technically speaking, Korean isn’t my second language because I started learning Korean before English or maybe roughly around the same time. For English, the order which I learned was speaking, listening, reading, then writing. However, for Korean, I started off with speaking and listening, but I learned how to write first before reading. Now that I think about it, that is very fascinating since most people would consider writing in a new language to be more difficult than reading. This concept of the order in which we learn languages is something I’ve never really thought off, but it very interesting to see “partial” truth behind it.
Replies