Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life has never been easy for me when I first came here in Korea. I remember the very first day that I could just hear “swala-la-la” sounds from all of the people around me. I wonder what do they talk about and how do they make these sounds. I, for one, have been raised bilingual by my parents and have at least known somehow how I learned my other language, but when it comes to learning a third language it may mean different. The first two years had been quite such a mess and a frustration day by day but it lessened year after year of careful thinking and experience.
A whole day stint
Before coming to Korea, I knew how to read and write Hangeul. I learned these skills when a former student in my previous workplace volunteered to teach us (teachers) the Korean characters. Korean characters are easy to write unlike the Chinese character so it took me only a week to master the characters and to read basic Korean characters.
Problems encountered
I came to Korea with high hopes that I would learn the language faster because of the fact that I know how to read and write the characters. I was completely wrong--- the confidence that I had before coming to Korea wasn’t enough. I know how to read and write the characters but the big problem was I don’t know the meaning of these characters themselves. Just looking at the complicated Hangeul frightened me! The worse came when people around me were trying to explain the grammar by giving its Chinese character roots. Knowing nothing of both languages, I felt helpless.
I can’t get by my everyday life using English to get around the town. I was getting frustrated day by day and getting pressured to speak the language out of necessity. Broken Korean? Body language? You name it… I did it all. If I won’t get it right this time, I won’t and I’ll never be they say.
Information Access
I need to put my spirits up so I began to look around for Korean starter books with some explanations and beginner content in a local book store. I tried to look for books that have simple grammar content and those which are easy to follow. Luckily, I found one functional book that stresses on communicative situations for basic Korean survival skills written in English. I read the book once but I never thought of memorizing the whole conversation stuff. I used the book as a reference from time-to-time whenever I encounter or hear phrases, especially the Korean sentence-endings, which are difficult to understand.
Furthermore, I surf the web and found several sites that offer free Korean lessons for foreigners. Most of these websites are sponsored by different Korean universities and government organizations. I registered to three of them and tried to visit the site as often as I could. Through a friend’s recommendation, I also enjoyed watching the program “Let’s Speak Korean” on Arirang TV and eventually enjoyed watching light Korean dramas, too.
Thirst for knowledge
The more I learn Korean, the greedier I get at times to push myself to the limit. I tried reading different grammar books, and tried to memorize 20~50 words per day. I copied how Koreans memorize words by writing them. After a week of doing this routine, I found it all too unrealistic setting myself to that kind of goal since I never really get to remember all those words at all. Moreover, I felt that my dependency on books never take me anywhere so at those moments that I’d really like to try a new way of learning Korean. After careful thoughts, I resolved to volunteer as a correspondent in a multi-cultural organization in Busan.
A whole New World
A year had passed and I continued learning Korean by creating relationships to the Korean people. I got to get a job in an English academy, meet new friends and do the things that I like. Honestly I would say that I have learned much from meeting people and talking to them more than studying alone, memorizing words or phrases alone. At first I was hesitant to talk with my broken Korean but they have been so considerate understanding my speech and helping me to get the words out from my mouth. By way of talking to them, I get to imitate their speech utterance and use phrases that I implicitly learned from their speech. Modesty aside, my Korean friends usually tell me that I have a flair for language since I can use the words or expressions right after I hear them. I even have taken Korean Proficiency test (TOPIK) once and the result was satisfactory. Still, I feel the need to improve my Korean fluency and I hope to strive for more developments on my seventh year.
Afterthoughts...
On Noticing
Although in the beginning I doubt whether I could get something out from reading grammar books and conversational phrases, I believe that reading books had helped me more to be aware of my target language. While studying alone, I’ve never thought that certain Korean endings like 입니다(be), ~입니까(question marker), and ~이다(sentence marker)] exist in real conversation but when I start to engage into real conversation, I suddenly became aware these word-endings and eventually became conscious of them.
“Once a learner’s consciousness of target feature has been raised through formal instruction or through continued communicative exposure, the learner often tends to notice the feature in subsequent input” (Ellis, 1996; Schmidt, 1990, 1993)
On Interaction
As I’ve mentioned in the above essay. I have learned Korean from talking and associating with Korean speakers. I would have argued that this theory might have been somehow connected with my personality yet I would agree with Long (1983) that modified interaction is necessary for language acquisition for the reasons that whenever I talk to these native Koreans, they tend to use basic vocabularies and elaborate more their speech (foreigner speech). Through speaking with them, I feel I understand them and they feel that they are also understood.
On Output
When I started to speak Korean to Koreans I would practically say that it was more of a test whether my Korean is good enough to be understood. If the party answers or supplies the necessary information I need, I am an instant success but if the other party hasn’t understood me, I reckon that there must be something wrong with my speech. This creates that I need to exert more effort to produce a language that can increase my interaction with the native Koreans. In this view, I agree with Swain’s Comprehensible Output Hypothesis (1985) that says that “successful second language learning depends on leaner’s producing the language”
On Private Speech
Private speech in Vgotskyan theory, I believe, is an important part of learning a language. I usually do this until now (in English and Korean) and I still feel that by doing this I am learning to think more of the language and then using this internalized language later in speech. I usually do this whenever I’m memorizing certain texts, if I’m confused with some answers or just not knowing what to answer at all. On the other hand, I don’t do this much in my first language, Filipino, which is very surprising.
Conclusion
Learning a language could be a very messy and frustrating task at first but with careful thinking, getting the right attitude, and by practicing the target language, nothing is going to be impossible whatever theory one believes in.
REFERENCES
Ellis, R., The study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996
Swain, R., Input and Second Language Acquisition,. 1985
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