As a Spanish learner during my high school years, I really enjoyed being able to communicate with native Spanish speakers who were not able to speak English. During college, I was able to visit my sister, who was studying abroad in the Dominican Republic, and have basic conversations with the residents. Of course I was not able to speak fluently and understand the speakers completely, but I was able to go by without an issue.
What I disliked about learning another language was having to make sense of the sentence structures and learning to conjugate verbs. To this day, it still confuses me and I feel like I know many words, but do not know how to piece them together.
Overall, I am a tactile learner who wants to obtain information with facts. I have known this by what I disliked and liked about my past classes and what I did to study for the classes. I disliked all of my classes that had to do with applying different theories instead of working with straight up facts. The best way for me to study for my classes was by making index cards, repeating things over and over out loud, and writing on whiteboards. I was able to memorize information a lot better when I was physically doing something.
To expand my learning activities, I feel like I have to work with people and go over information to see whether what I thought is wrong or right. I also think that watching videos of people speaking in different languages would really help me understand how to speak the language.
Comments
Great post, Jessica. The issue of familiarizing yourself with the grammar of a new language is often the hardest part of self-directed study. For instance, English is a Subject-Verb-Object (S-V-O) language, but other languages follow their own conventions. Communication is an act that involves the nearly simultaneous production and reception of speech. The goal is to be able to listen, and then instantaneously produce your own response. It's important to build up a foundation of formulaic knowledge that allows you to manipulate set morphological and syntactic structures toward the development of increasingly complex ideas. As you progress in your study of Korean, this primary foundation will help you to switch between one language and the next. Also, I think you would improve this quality by completing interactive listening exercises. As you listen to a speaker in your target language, try to focus on models, words, and phrases that you can repeat and manipulate to fit a given context.
Kinesthetic or tactile learners often have better retention compared to students who prefer visual or auditory methods. I would encourage you to write out dialogues, texts, and exercises, and to see if you can find some interpersonal method for realizing the associated prompts with your other senses. Communicative contexts and interpersonal interactions are key. Sometimes linguistic information is not 'wrong' or 'right', as they are often presented in the classroom, since the nuances of meaning can be interpreted in multiple ways. In independent work, and consultations with your language partner, you should explore questions of usage, and discuss the often subtle differences between units of speech, taking into consideration various elements of pronunciation, prosody, morphology, syntax, register, and social context.
Regarding the emphasis on facts, you should consider labelling items around your dorm room as they would be referred to in your target language. Learning the vocabulary of a new language is a bit like a paint by numbers kind of activity, where you are the artist. The more words that you know, the more detail and vividness you can use to describe the world around you. These labels also contribute to a faster cognitive processing time. Instead of looking at a 'telephone', and translating mentally from "telephone" to "전화" or 'jeonhwa', your brain will begin to associate the meaning of the Korean word to its physical manifestation.