Language family is really important during the process of learning a new language because with this knowledge, I can gain a quick grasp of the relationships between languages and it is able to help me know about another language in the same group too. I think my target language, Korean, is in Altaic language family. Although Chinese, my first language, is included in a completely different family, it made a huge influence on Korean since long time ago. In other words, Korean was created based on Chinese. Even now, I learned a lot of Korean words which sound really similar with Chinese. For example, describing the date of the week uses Chinese way. Also, at the same time, I learned Japanese before which is also a member of Altaic language family. There are a lot of similarities existing among these three languages. So these languages that I know about are in the best position to help me learn Korean better and faster.
But as the time goes by, the language actually changes over time. For example, Korean’s sound changes a lot compared with the beginning stage of Korean. And at the same time, as the society develops and changes, there are a lot of new words have been created by young generation. For instance, they will abbreviate a long sentence into one short word. People who are beginning learners are not able to understand it. I think these kinds of changes will bring advantages and disadvantages at the same time.
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