How Languages Became a Part of My Life
From time to time I get asked the question, “Why study a foreign language?” I received my bachelor’s degree in Korean, so perhaps I’m going to be a bit biased, but let me try to explain.Actually, I might be really biased. I’m fluent in Korean (I should probably point out that I’m Caucasian, since apparently the general understanding is that most people who speak fluent Korean are… well, Korean.), but I also speak proficient Japanese, conversational French, and basic Mandarin and Cantonese. Oh, and English. And Pig Latin and Obish, if you count those. And a few simple languages I made up myself in high school and college. Languages have taken a large portion of my life, but I don’t regret it at all. Rather, the more I study other languages, the more I can learn about my own language, and that in turn helps me to learn even more about other languages.Korean was my third foreign language. My first was French, which I studied for all 4 years of high school. Although that should have been enough time for me to be able to speak it fluently now, I never took the classes seriously. I was shy as well, and didn’t want to practice my speaking in fear of making mistakes. Instead, I would focus and study extremely hard for ten minutes before taking a test, putting the vocabulary and grammar in my short term memory, then forget everything after class was over – at least this is what I thought I was doing. But I wasn’t forgetting the answers completely. I found that through studying hard this way I was pushing the information into my memory more permanently than I thought. Although I couldn’t immediately recall the English translations of the French vocabulary I had studied, I was able to easily identify them from a list, and still understand what many of the words meant even years later. This was the start of my interest in languages. “All I need to do to learn a foreign language is study hard!” I realized. It seems obvious reading it now, but it was like a revelation to me while finishing high school. And that’s when I started Japanese.
ว่าภาษาเป็น ส่วนหนึ่งของชีวิตFrom time to time I get asked the question, “Why study a foreign language?” I received my bachelor’s degree in Korean, so perhaps I’m going to be a bit biased, but let me try to explain.Actually, I might be really biased. I’m fluent in Korean (I should probably point out that I’m Caucasian, since apparently the general understanding is that most people who speak fluent Korean are… well, Korean.), but I also speak proficient Japanese, conversational French, and basic Mandarin and Cantonese. Oh, and English. And Pig Latin and Obish, if you count those. And a few simple languages I made up myself in high school and college. Languages have taken a large portion of my life, but I don’t regret it at all. Rather, the more I study other languages, the more I can learn about my own language, and that in turn helps me to learn even more about other languages.Korean was my third foreign language. My first was French, which I studied for all 4 years of high school. Although that should have been enough time for me to be able to speak it fluently now, I never took the classes seriously. I was shy as well, and didn’t want to practice my speaking in fear of making mistakes. Instead, I would focus and study extremely hard for ten minutes before taking a test, putting the vocabulary and grammar in my short term memory, then forget everything after class was over – at least this is what I thought I was doing. But I wasn’t forgetting the answers completely. I found that through studying hard this way I was pushing the information into my memory more permanently than I thought. Although I couldn’t immediately recall the English translations of the French vocabulary I had studied, I was able to easily identify them from a list, and still understand what many of the words meant even years later. This was the start of my interest in languages. “All I need to do to learn a foreign language is study hard!” I realized. It seems obvious reading it now, but it was like a revelation to me while finishing high school. And that’s when I started Japanese.
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