My target language is Korean. The first step would be to go to Korea, assuming that my grant is enough. Learning while living in the culture and being engulfed by the language is, according to me, the best way to start studying a language. Then, I’d start looking into the language by following the diagram in Aitchison’s linguistics (given below) going from the inner most circle to the outer most circle.
So, in order, I would look into the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the Korean language, and then I’d look into the language from different perspectives by approaching it from various disciplines. In class we've looked into phonetics, phonology, morphology, and a bit of syntax, so all I need is a grant and I can start the research (I'm joking of course, but I am extremely glad that we delved deeper into some of the fundamental structural components of a language in class).
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