Language Learning

You know, I'm kind of in the mood to write, so I'm just going to make a short blog post about some experiences I've had with learning language. I've...packed a lot of language experience into the last seventh months, so I think I have a pretty broad view of it. My opinion is of course flawed, but I thought the perspective might be interesting.

One thing that I've really come to understand when learning a language, is the power of persistence and the grace to accept that you need to give up.

This is a very contradictory statement, and I'm aware of it. However it's true, and I'll explain why.

To learn a language, you need to be persistent; there is no substitute for an unrelenting drive. You can try to learn a language for years and years and never get a step farther if you don't practice. I remember when I was a kid, I used to go online and try and teach myself Russian or some other language, but I always got discouraged and gave up before I even tried. If I'd just pushed myself harder and practiced every day, instead of expecting to immediately be awesome at it, maybe by now I'd know two or even three languages.

However, on the other hand, you also need to know when to give up. I'm not saying give up on a language, or something silly like that. I'm just saying, there are somethings you're not going to understand at first, no matter how much you try at it. When I first started Japanese, there were some phrases that I would see and then spend hours looking up. I asked my Japanese friends, I asked my friends who were also learning Japanese. I looked it up in the dictionary, and online, where the results of my inquiries were mostly useless.

At a certain point in time, you need to accept that some expressions just aren't going to come to you until you have experience. I spend about a month looking up the phrase 'otoite', and then eventually learned that it doesn't really have an English equivalent, and there are just a lot of random things it relates to. It honestly still confuses me, but it's better than it was a month ago.

And that brings me round to my final point in language learning: there just isn't a substitute for complete language immersion. There just isn't. I've had a bit of an odd experience with learning Japanese; I would say that the first three months of my exchange I wasn't really immersed. My first host father was Canadian, so I spoke a lot of English at home, and because there were three Aussie exchange students at the school, I was pretty close with them and didn't have many Japanese friends. I was still speaking Japanese, but I would place the level of intensity right around a difficult college class, and not actually being in another country.

After I changed host families, and after the Australians returned--that's when my Japanese started to get really good. Which brings me around to the point that: if you are attempting to learn another language, I highly recommend that you watch movies in your chosen language. Read books. Get as much actual language exposure as you can, and if possible, travel to a country that speaks the language you're trying to learn. I know if you've tried to learn a language before, you've heard that about six billion times, but it's the truth.