I've learned that I am a pretty fast learner when it comes to languages. I pride myself in being open-minded and mentally flexible and that played a huge role in learning a complete new language. I also realized that I love learning a new language; it surprisingly added excitement to my bland life. Similarly, I learned that I love exploring new cultures. Learning about cultures that I haven't really experienced made me become even more open-minded. I always question why things are the way they are or how things came to be the way they are. Culture is always at the center of these questions I ask myself everyday. For example, I would question why my Pakistani friends always ate with their right hand but not the left. I wondered why they didn't partake in consumption of alcohol even after reaching age of legality. Studying the language and the culture gave me an opportunity to absorb knowledge of the culture I never lived in and would have never imagined being in.
For the most part. difficulty came from getting started. It was extremely hard to get started on things because I just had no base knowledge and no sense of direction. In addition, Pakistani culture and Urdu is considered pretty obscure to the general public and often times, it is extremely hard to find information on them. If it were popular language like french or Chinese, millions of internet sources have valuable information available at all times. When it came to learning about Urdu and Pakistani culture, things were hard to find. Especially as the things I was searching for became more and more detailed specifics that only people native to the culture may be aware of, my sources of knowledge became extremely shallow. I could pretty much only trust my language partner and my Pakistani friends from Pakistan to provide me with reliable knowledge. Even then, because its not knowledge given to me by a professional or an educated man in Pakistani culture, I had to take everything with a grain of salt.
I really enjoyed the learning aspect of it all. There is something about learning the unknown that gets me going. I loved searching things about the Pakistani culture that I was always curious about and I loved seeing how despite the physical differences, Pakistani culture was not so different from my own, Korean culture. Both cultures were founded on the theme of filial piety and general respect for others. It was very joyful to see that all the evidences led towards a conclusion that people, no matter where they are from, are not that different from each other in their core. I also just enjoyed my pool of knowledge expanding and including wide variety of things that I would have never imagined learning and researching about.
Although I am unsure which readings I found most useful, I would have to say readings about the bilinguals being smarter and about language extinction were the most entertaining. I love reading about these types of things because once again, they add to my pool of knowledge. Readings about how to be a better language learner and those sorts were useful but a tad boring for me. I would actually like to learn more about the benefits of learning more language beyond the bilinguals being smarter article. Intelligence aside, I feel that there is so much more language learning can provide us. I have changed completely when I went from a Korean-only speaker to a Korean and English bilingual. The way I thought about things and the way I saw the world had gone through a major shift. I would like to learn more about why that may be the case because I have had my friends tell me similar things before.
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