Language is the fundamental step of communicating and influencing others, through the medium of reasoned discourse, to tell others what we believe or act. I enjoy earning a new language. Besides my home language, I learned English and Japanese. My experience learning these languages is fantastic. Getting new foreign friends, listening to the foreign song and watches their TV shows are approaches that I started language learning. During my learning experience, there are some points I like while others I dislike.
I enjoy learning language by myself because I always insist that interest is always my best teacher. Take my Japanese language learning experience as the example. I love a girl group named AKB48 and I listened to lots of their song. From listening to their song, I started to learn some Japanese vocab and tried to mimic the voice they are making. Moreover, I watched a lot of Japanese TV show. From this ‘active learning’, my Japanese vocabulary accumulated. I find out that the vocab I gained through the active learning can be memorized more deeply and I will use them during my talking practice with Japanese friends. However, this kind of studying process is time-consuming and the vocab gaining speed is really slow. Considering watching TVs and music are my interest and I love Korean group and K-pop music, I will definitely use this learning strategy when I am self-learning Korean this time.
Another good strategy that makes my Japanese language learning easier is that many Japanese words I learn have the same meaning in Chinese. This is called cognate, basically meaning you are finding common words. Asian language is similar at many points, both in vocab and grammar. In this case, because there are many common words between Japanese, Korean and Chinese, I will make a vocab list and try to record all these words down. I find this process really interesting and can help me learn the language efficiently.
Besides learning alone, I really enjoy talking with my friends. When I was studying Japanese, I hang out with my Japanese friends weekly. I never feel shame or awkward when I say Japanese wrong because I know it is too normal to make mistakes during learning a new language. Talking with others is always my favorite part of language learning. They shared their life stories with me and talked about their culture. I love social, so taking part in group discussions or discussing a topic one-to-one with my friends are my strength. I believe language is the tool to help me communicate. In all, my final goal of language learning is always communication.
I also learn from my Japanese language learning about my weakness which I am going to improve during my Korean learning. I don’t like making plans and strictly following the plan, which makes my studying less efficient. This time, I believe that I need to make some short-time goal and long-time objective to track my studying process. Moreover, after doing the learning style survey, I find out that I am a visual learner and I received lots of good advice from the website. I will use flashcard to learn new words and write down keywords, ideas or instructions. The most important advice is that I will definitely use during my Korean learning is that I will draw pictures to help explain new concepts and then explain the pictures. I think this will improve my understanding of the new concept.
Comments