Discussion Post #3

[Raymond Luo]

This paragraph talks mainly about how to divide languages into different "levels" in order for us to study them in an easier manner and to understand them better. Additionally, it presents how languages can be divided and where should we start to learn a language. I find it very persuasive since learning a language by learning as it is is very difficult. A good analogy will be familiarizing the inner structure of a grandiose palace by simply looking at it without entering it, which should be impossible since there are too many aspects and details that should be learned to master a language. The article mentions that the most common approach of dividing languages is by dividing them into four parts-- semantics, grammar, phonology, and phonetics. However, these cannot be comprehensive and cover all aspects of learning languages. Therefore, from my perspective, one must regard the language as a whole at the end to actually master it. It is like to know where the location of each room is in the palace, you have to take a step back and look at the palace. For my target language, it includes all these basic "levels" of languages. It has grammar, vowels and consonances, sounds and meanings. What's more, it also includes different structures for formal, informal and honorific language, which makes it more difficult for me to learn Korean. For me, I don't really have a preferred learning order. However, I would prefer not learning grammar first which bores me and burdens me since there will be so many to memorize about word structures, sentence structures and tense and so on. I learned how to speak English in this way by years of practice and memorizations which was compulsory and wasn't quite pleasant. From where I stand, everything that requires a huge amount of time to pursue needs to be interesting in the first place for people to persist pursuing it. Therefore, the most essential thing is to build interest by learning languages in an interesting and thus productive way by watching target language movies, drams or listening to music and so on.