Throughout my time learning a language, I’ve heard people say things such as “Oh, I just can’t learn this. It’s too hard” or “I wasn’t built for learning a language.” But is there any truth to these claims? Some languages are definitely more harder to learn than others. Whether it be learning to speak, read, or write some aspects are certainly more difficult than others to learn.
Take Korean for example: from my experience speaking and reading are fairly easy to learn. However, writing is a completely different story. Reading, especially, in Korean is fairly easy as once you learn the characters, the pronunciation of the characters never change. All you have to do is read the characters and words as they are shown. Writing, however… You would think that writing would also be easy. Afterall, reading is read as it is seen therefore writing should also be written as it is read/seen. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Take ㅐand ㅔfor example. Both are pronounced exactly the same (ae) but its usage is still one of the most complicated things in the language. Even native speakers have trouble differentiating between when to use which. There is no pattern either, they just need to be memorized.
So what was the point of all this? To show that there are certainly difficulties when learning languages. But, despite that it’s never impossible. Let’s look into the human brain for a brief moment. For a right-handed person, it was studied that the left hemisphere of the brain was dominant in learning a new language. The left also helps with activities involving analytical tasks, logical organization, info sequencing, and complex motor functions. The right hemisphere on the other hand is involved in the perception of patterns, creativive sensibility, and emotional expression/recognition (Crystal, D. 2005 How language works). Now someone, might read this and think “Oh, my left side must not be developed as much as someone who is good with languages”. But I’d like the challenge this belief. Yes, the left side seems to help more with learning a language. But the right side also most certainly plays a part as well. As said before, the right is involved with pattern recognition and to say there are no patterns in languages is false. Everything from prefixes, roots, sentence structure, etc. all form patterns. If someone can recognize this, then learning a language, especially reading and writing would be easier.
Keeping these in mind, what can I do over the next couple of months? Well I’ve had past knowledge in learning Korean. So I could build upon that by understanding that there are patterns when it comes to reading and writing. Speaking can also apply this concept, but speaking is probably mostly improved by actually speaking the language. Not by worrying if what I’m saying is correct, but rather just speaking the language and whatever comes to mind. The concept of collocations were introduced in How we mean (Crystal, D. 2005). Collocations, along with context, can be brought into the picture when talking about speaking. Even if I may not understand the full sentence word for word, with context I can assume what the general meaning of the sentence is if I know a handful of words.
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