As part of my continued journey to explore what life has to offer, I have embarked on an adventure to see the world. Working in international business, it is important that I know about different people and cultures. One of the best ways to learn about a culture is to learn the language because so much of a people’s beliefs, traditions, and outlook on life is encoded in their language.
For example, the Korean language does not use pronouns (not in the English sense). In English, you would say “I love you.” In Korean, you would say 사랑해요 (saranghaeyo), which literally means “love doing”. This defocusing of the self in the language is helpful in understanding the difference from an American “I, My, Me, Mine” culture focused on the individual to an Asian “We, Us, Ours” culture focused on the community.
So I’ve started learning a few languages and I am loving it. I would definitely recommend it for anyone interested in other cultures even in the slightest.
One side effect I have noticed is that I am much better at knowing when someone speaking in a foreign language/accent is faking it. I can’t tell you how many times TV shows and movies use actors with the worst fake accents. For instance, when I see a supposedly Japanese person speaking bad English and pronounce their Rs hard (ex: enGRish vs ENGrISH), I know they’re fake. The Japanese language doesn’t have hard Rs. Also, a lot of people seem to think that Slavic and Germanic accents (ex: German, Russian, and Serbian) all sound the same as do Asian accents (ex: Korean, Japanese, and Chinese). At least its better then the clicking language they always use for Africans.
Just for fun, when people suddenly and unnecessarily start talking in a different language to speak in private (ex: calling plays in soccer or while on the phone), I like to greet them in that language just so they know I know everything they said.
English is my second language. Swahili is my first, but I started going to school in the United States when I was 5. The first time I had an actual English grammar was in my high school French class despite taking every advanced course in every subject available. Let me say that again. The first time I learned about English grammar was during a high school foreign language class despite taking every advanced course in every subject available.
My senior year English teacher was appalled when she realized most of our honors IB class couldn’t properly construct or punctuate sentences so she threw out her syllabus and we started learning grammar the right way. Learning other languages, I find I am a lot better at my own languages because I learn so much about grammar in the process.
When I tell people I am learning more than one language at once, they look at me like I am crazy. The innovation I am trying with language learning comes from the understanding that languages are similar. That is, certain languages have the same origin, belong to the same family of languages and have similar constructs and rules. This means that while learning one language, you are already learning parts of another language, making that other language much easier to learn.
So I have a constructed a language learning roadmap to prioritize what languages I learn. For example, I am learning Korean as a step to learning Japanese and Japanese as a step to learning Chinese.
Korean is the most accessible of the major East-Asian languages for an English speaker. It uses a 24-character alphabet like English. Japanese primarily uses about 150 phonograms (symbols that represent a consonant-vowel pairing like an extended alphabet) along with thousands of ideograms (symbols that represent an idea like a car). Chinese does not have any sort of alphabet, uses thousands of ideograms, and on top of that is a tonal language (ex: calling someone 媽 [mā, first tone] = “mother” is very different than calling someone 馬 [mǎ, third tone] = “horse”).
Having studied Korean, Japanese came to me much easier because it was so similar and I was used to learning characters which I had never done with any Romance language. The jump from Japanese to Chinese was not that bad either.
Of course, this way of learning works only in families of languages. Learning French after Spanish is incredible easy, but learning French after Chinese is not any easier because they are from different families. If you don’t ever plan to use Korean or Japanese, it may not make sense to learn them before you learn Chinese, but I ensure you it will still be enriching if you choose to.
Also, I’m taking a breadth-first (learn the basics of a set of languages, then become more advanced with each in unison) rather than a depth-first (become fluent in one, move to the next). I’m doing this because it can takes a long time to fluent in a language and I’d rather be able to gradually communicate in many different languages than be fluent in just one in the same span of time.
For those learning languages, I found a few tricks to make it easy.
1. Find someone to speak/learn with. Like everything else, learning a language is much better when you have someone to go through the process with together. An expert (native speaker) can be great teacher.
2. Think in that language. A lot of times, we think to ourselves or say things. After you think or say something, ask yourself, “Can I say this in [language]?” This gets you used to using the language in everyday settings and reinforces it in your mind.
3. Listen to music in that language. Learning is all about exposure and repetition so surrounding yourself with that language, especially with such an enjoyable medium like music, is very helpful because you get used to hearing the language. Soon, those sentences will stop sounding like a jumbled mess and start making sense.
4. Watch media in that language. Get used to seeing and hearing the language in a natural setting. WWiTV has almost 3000 television channels of from over 100 countries around the world including news, sports, shopping, movies, cartoons and much more. Instead of turning on the local news, trying turning on one of their streams.
5. Make it part of your life. If you don’t regularly use a language in your life, you will use it. It can’t just be something you do one hour a week. Not if you want to use the language anytime soon. So use #1-4 to keep it a part of your life.
Have you ever wanted to or are you studying any language and why?
