So I decided I needed to have some kind of way to keep myself disciplined in my language learning, and an idea I read on the interwebs is to blog about your language learning. Making it public puts my feet to the fire. I'm currently living in Qingdao, China, and I've been trying to hack the Chinese language for about the last 7-8 months. I take Korean classes twice a week, and I'm going to be in Japan for a full month in July, so I need to improve that as well. While I've definitely improved, I really want my improvement to go faster. I really want to push.
First off, my bad habits I'm going to vow to get rid of. I don't do these all the times, but the last 8 months have been pretty telling as far as to my personality.
Here are things I will stop doing:
1. Avoiding using Chinese because I look foreign. Sometimes I do this. It's half a lack of knowing what to say to kick off conversation and sometimes it's just laziness. Chinese people assume I don't speak, so sometimes I just don't bother talking. I'm missing good learning opportunities.
2. Avoiding being social. I'm usually rewarded for being social, and I can do it, it's just not my natural inclination. Here's an example: When I was in South Korea a few weeks ago I was hanging out at a bar with some new friends. There were some drunk Korean businessmen playing darts, and boy did they suck. My buddy and I both had this idea, hey, why don't we challenge them to a game? While we were discussing how much we would bet, the Korean guys came over to us and challenged us first! We had a blast. The Korean guys got better at darts the more drunk they got. We were toast. However, they treated us to several beers even though we lost, because Korean hospitality. The main point though: I got to speak a ton of Korean and practice, and also got to get more native speaker input.
3. Just thinking watching a movie or a show is studying. Sometimes you have to crack open a book and do some grammar, vocab work, or something. I skip out on doing the boring work, thinking I can just watch TV dramas and get it. It's not quite working out that way.
I plan on writing about what I do to help me build my language ability and how I approach learning. Now I don't want this post to be totally negative. There are some great things I've learned that are my strengths and why I am so good at foreign languages:
My strengths are...
1. Figuring out what words mean on the fly, in context. I think people have an inflated sense of where my language skill is at because I can figure out words REALLY fast if there is context. The stronger my language ability, the better this skill gets, obviously. For example, when I was watching "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" in German, there were entire parts of the episode with brand new words. I instantly figured out what stuff was as long as I had 2-3 words of the sentence down.
2. Using limited vocabulary to get a point across: This skill is saving me with my limited Chinese vocabulary. I was able to talk about a wide range of topics, from gay marriage to gun control, in Chinese, because I could take the words I did know and arrange them in a good enough way to get my idea across.
3. Memory. I know this will shock some people, but I have a damned good memory. I have the vocabulary of 7 languages floating up in this brain. I remember conversations I had with people from years ago. I remember stuff even if I REALLY don't want to. It helps a ton with languages. I go through a process of first being familiar with a word, understanding it when spoken to me, fumbling with it in a sentence, then finally being able to grasp it.
4. Creativity. I try to constantly stretch what I know. You don't stretch what you know if you do the same thing over and over again. For example, in Korean class, whenever we do homework sentences, I always write the most off the wall stuff, like "I invited my alien friend to dinner last night. He doesn't like human food." The other students in the class think I'm crazy, but when I do that, I learn more advanced grammar and more vocab from the teacher when she corrects me. The Mistake-Correction process is really important for learning anything.
Next time I'll update with how I'm studying, once my regimen begins on Monday.
