When my family and I immigrated to the United States, I had my first experience as a language learner. I enjoyed the fact that I was put into a situation where I had to learn a new language (in this case, English). I love challenges where I have to learn something new and adapt to a new environment. However, it was very difficult in the beginning as I was just a beginner at the English language, having to communicate and interact with numerous individuals who were already experts in the language. Despite the difficulties, I managed to get out of ESL at an early age and began to speak to friends and peers who only spoke the English language. Putting myself in groups of people who only spoke that language helped me a lot.
I am definitely an audible learner. I have very sensitive ears and I am very experienced in analyzing and absorbing different sounds, tunes, and languages. I am very musical and listening is a great skill of mine. I am also very talented in learning new accents and imitating other languages that I have never heard of before. This definitely helped me get used to a completely new language. However, it also caused me to get worse at my native language, Korean. Although I am still a good speaker, writer, and listener of the Korean language, my fluency, knowledge of difficult vocabulary, and listening skills has slightly decreased.
I want to be able to speak and understand Korean conversations, writings, and audio that contain difficult vocabulary and complex topics. The learning activities that best suit my learning style, especially for learning new languages, is listening to others speak it and interacting with individuals by having conversations with them in that language. I have experience with these learning activities as I have utilized them when I learned English and Spanish. With Korean, I have not had many experiences using the language in a conversation with others, excluding my parents. As a result, my proficiency in Korean has significantly decreased. I plan on relearning Korean by speaking it to my Korean friends, conversing even more with my parents, and trying to use Korean as my primary language for certain daily tasks. In addition, I am planning on watching and listening to Korean shows, podcasts, and videos that will further familiarize myself with the language and teach me about the Korean culture. I believe that having a strong interest in the country significantly helps one learn the language of that nation. As an Americanized Korean, I lost interest in my home country’s culture and lifestyle. I plan on getting back the love and fascination of my country as I have had before. Lastly, I am going to learn a new vocabulary word every day to educate myself on utilizing intellectual and difficult words that every Korean adult should be using when speaking or writing in that language. Expanding my learning activities will help me achieve the goal of speaking, listening, understanding, writing, and even translating the Korean language at a high level.
Comments
Very good James. Very insightful.