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Since English as my second language, I have been learning a foreign language for a long while. Yes, language learning is demanding. What attract me most in language learning is to compare words, sentences and grammar presentation in different languages. It is amazing to analyze how culture influences the formation of a language and how culture changes the words or sentences expression. This is the most important motif that I plan to study Korean. I really enjoy applying my learned vocabulary into oral communication. When I was in primary school, teacher just wrote some English vocabulary with their Chinese translations on a big blackboard. Then, she let us to copy them and memorize them. This was my terrible experience in my language learning life. I am happier to learn language or vocabulary in a specific context or to give me a detailed example to describe the words. It would be so much easier to memorize and learn a language.

According to the Learning Style Test, it suggests me to write out the words again and again, which is normally how I learn English vocabulary. Second, it recommends me to use dictionary and definitions. Third, it says I should organize diagrams into statements and use more list and heading in my lecture notes. Multiple Intelligence Test shows that I am a 80% logical and mathematical person, and both 65% intrapersonal and interpersonal.

In the reading 7 ways to develop good habits in language learning, it points out forming goals is crucial. I think when I start learning Korean, I should set my semester goal, monthly objective and weekly target. Knowing what you want to achieve helps you to check progress and stick on the right track. I believe self-directed language learning is not simply learning a foreign language, but also study to form an excellent learning habit. This is also a course of building up personal self-reflection, critical analysis, self-control and enthusiasm.

As a language learner, I have, accumulated from in and out-of-class, learned a total of four languages. As a child, I learned how to speak English, Mandarin, and Taiwanese dialect. Because I am an American-born Asian, it is difficult for me to maintain skill in Mandarin or Taiwanese, so it is unfortunate that I was not able to learn how to write. English, thankfully, was taught to me as my first language. I am thankful because English tends to be a difficult language to teach to foreigners and it is also a difficult language to learn for foreigners. Nevertheless, it is wonderful to be able to communicate with parents of my Chinese friends as well as my own relatives.

Entering middle school, I took on my first attempt at learning a secondary language in school. I learned Spanish from the time of seventh to eleventh grade. When I was a twelfth grader in high school, I took on the role as a teacher's aide and learned many more things, specifically the Spanish culture. Not only had I developed an ability to speak Spanish, but I could read Spanish articles and finally gain a stronger understanding of everything.

As a language learner, it was awesome learning about the culture after gaining a grasp of the language. I was fortunate enough to be fully immersed in Chinese and Taiwanese culture as a child. My understanding from one of my friends, who is a student of the Japanese language, is that there is a huge difference between being a tourist of Japan and being a full Japanese-speaking resident of Japan. With Spanish, I never had the opportunity to visit Spain; however, my Spanish teacher in high school was a native Spanish speaker and I believe gave me a good grasp on its culture. Overall, I enjoyed almost everything about being a language learner.

Insofar, I have only had a few minor things that I dislike about being a language learner. For two years in college, I took Mandarin Chinese as a language. I had the ability to speak because I grew up with the language, but I was no where close to fluent and I did not know how to write. I had the will to learn; unfortunately, some classmates around me clearly had much less motivation, and as a result, made learning the language with other peers more difficult.

According to the FIRE model, I am a Factual learner. I learn best by starting with the concrete and then moving towards the abstract in a step-by-step progression. I prefer everything to be objective with worksheets and drills that teach me how to specifically use certain words and grammar. I am uncomfortable with open-ended questions, but this may be only the case when I am new to the language. As I grow as a learner and speaker of Korean, I become more evaluative. If I am to grow, I seek personal attention and evaluation of my progression. I cannot work in a competitive environment as I feel too much anxiety. I prefer concrete teachings, but I also like to make sure I can eventually apply what I learn to a practical scenario in real life.

According to my personal experience, the Learning Styles, and Multiple Intelligences Survey, I am a visual learner. I prefer things to be laid out in nice tables, charts, or diagrams. Fill-in-the-blank and repetition exercises are my preference as it tends to be more visual. I believe I can expand my learning activities by being more verbal and talk with my tutor once I meet him/her. Most people I know are able to read and write their language of choice; however, when it comes to speaking, it is easy to tell that they do not speak often and are weaker in this area.

This week's reading was interesting because it gave me a stronger understanding for the difficulty a language may be to learn. There are so many layers in a language to learn, and this week, rather than learning the physical parts of a language -- the grammar and vocabulary -- I learned about how the brain is involved.

In "How the Brain Handles Language," I learned about different parts of the brain and its role in helping the individual learn a language. I do not completely agree with the idea of localization, as I think learning something involves the entire brain as a whole. From a biological standpoint, the human body is not a simple prokaryote with simple structures and simple function. The human body is a eukaryote with complex structures that all work together to make a complete functioning being. So my opinion is that there is a whole range of factors that affect our speech and language learning. I agree when the article talks about how three parts working together: 1) for speech production, thought is generated in the Wenicke's area and sent to the Broca's area for encoding, 2) for speech comprehension, the signals arrive in the auditory cortex from the ear and the signal is transferred to the Wernicke's area, and 3) for reading aloud, the written form is received by the visual cortex and sent to the Wernicke's area. If the brain worked with the theory of localization, then anyone who is handicapped at the slightest would not be able to learn a language. However, this is not true.

"In "How We Mean," the concept of "collocation" was interesting. Collocation is the consistent juxtaposition of one word with another word. Sayings we have in our own language can be seen as lexemes and will differ from language to language. Because of lexemes, it may often be difficult to learn a language, as not everything should be taken literally. One single word such as "mean" in the English language can be used in so many different ways. In addition, a single sentence can pack in so much information that, to a learner, it may feel impossible to dissect a sentence. In order to mitigate some confusion, the article "How to investigate language structure" was helpful in introducing a four-level model of language: phonetics, phonology, grammar, and semantics. With a division of language into organized gameplans, it may be easier to learn Korean, my target language. I know that many languages love to use metaphors to describe feelings and situations encountered, so hopefully with a gameplan of dividing everything into simpler parts will help me grasp the Korean language with less difficulty.

This chapter on  sociocultural factors was very interesting. I believe that I found the section on 'Second Culture Acquisition' the most interesting. I had learned about enculturation in my anthropology class, but I had not heard of acculturation before. I found it to be a really interesting aspect because it is almost like resocialization, but from a purely cultural aspect. Also, we had, of course, touched on the topic of culture shock after watching the culture shock film. I enjoyed, though, how this section laid out a definition with all possible meanings and emotional effects it can have on a person. My favorite part of this section, and chapter, though, was when they broke down culture acquisition into steps. Sometimes it is hard to puts thing into steps or a series of events, because you run the risk of generalizing or oversimplifying the situation. However, I thought that this summed up the process of second culture acquisition admirably and quite succinctly. I had also never thought of it in such a way, or process, before. I had of course heard and learned about culture shock, but I had never though of it as part of a process of culture acquisition, and I never would have guessed it to be the second step. The word shock seems to imply something that happens instantly, so you would think that culture shock would be something experienced upon arrival in a new culture, but in fact, culture shock sets in after one as become disillusioned of the idea, that this new culture os mostly similar to their own.  I definitely found this section to be the most interesting and informative.

In the chapter on communicative competence, I found the section on Functional Approaches to Language Teaching to be very interesting because of the seven function laid out as belonging in an advanced-beginner's language learning textbook. These seven functions are important to master in order to be culturally competent, but as we talked about, there are many other aspects that play into communicative and cultural competence, as well. I believe that person who understands these seven factors, and how they can change in various situations is competent. I also believe, that competence implies minor flaws, and that understanding, implementing, and accomplishing, are very different aspects. A person is likely to commit faux pas in their own culture, so it would be even harder to avoid committing one in another culture. A person can understand the rules and norms of a culture and a language, but implementing may even be able to implement them, but accomplishing that in perfection in very hard. the difference etween understanding and implementing what will make one communicatively and culturally competent, is understanding the difference between the mentality and physicality of an action. It is one thing to know what to do or say, and another thing to actually say or do it.