Hey y'all I'm Justin! I was born in Georgia (USA) and both my parents moved to the States from Korea. As a child, they would always encourage me to use Korean at home. Unfortunately for them, I would almost always respond in mostly English. They’ve sent me to multiple Korean schools throughout my life but sadly they would not help much. So, here I am now attempting to learn at my own pace, which hopefully will help now.
I’ve also learned Spanish throughout middle and high school. Learning a new language however helped not only in Spanish but surprisingly English as well. I don’t know about most people, but I grew up without learning much of the grammatical rules and whatnot. So speaking was no problem, but writing (especially on standardized tests) were an issue. Learning Spanish however gave a fresh start to a language, and a lot of the rules from there applied over to English as well. Yes, things such as the adjective placement are different but other rules, such as the structure of a “complete sentence” are the same. So although English was my first language, my third language was the one that surprisingly helped the most!
During my past 3 years in college, I’ve taken two Spanish courses as well. Both of which had a “drill”, which was essentially an oral practice class. These also seemed to help a lot in learning a new language. First of all they were fun since we would talk about almost anything but in Spanish. There was really no forced rule or way of learning, other than having to speak Spanish.
Over the years I’ve found myself to be much of a visual and tactile learner. Actually doing activities and practicing them helped me grasp the content much, much easier not just in learning new languages but in basically every subject. Visually, using diagrams, graphs, and charts helped probably because they help me make connections, similarities, and differences between the material that was learned. The tactile aspect also ties in well with the visual style. Drawing these diagrams and graphs along with doing practice problems help a lot. An example would be the drills for Spanish. Actually attempting to speak and use the language outside of just writing helps me learn it.
Hopefully, I can learn from the past and use those experiences that both failed and worked and apply them to this semester. I’m mostly hoping to learn to actually speak and write Korean well enough so that I can actually have some dialogue between my family. It may take a while, and it could be very ambitious. But practicing speaking and writing slowly will surely help me improve!
Comments