My New Language & A New Series
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My New Language & A New Series

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In one of my previous posts I asked you to tell me how you choose a language to learn. And after receiving helpful advice, I did. Besides, my indecisiveness became unbearable. In the end, I decided on Korean.

If you are not interested in my story, please skip ahead. I have a tiny question for you :)

My background:

Like for many of you, my language learning journey started with my first Englishlesson in the second grade. And I absolutely hatedit. After a few years of misery, I found an amazing tutor made me fall in love with languages. At that time, learning English to a conversational level immensely boosted my confidence. It was the first thing I truly succeeded in outside of academics. And this one thing serves me well to this day.

Level: Upper-intermediate-ish. I can understand all types of media, rarely encountering new words. I also read scientific papers on the topics of my interest without an issue (biology, linguistics, psychology, education, AI). I speak quickly and freely as if English was my mother tongue. It does not mean that I don't make mistakes, it just feels that natural. There is still a lot of room for improvement.

Then came Hebrew. As I mentioned before, I started learning the language to connect with my heritage. My studying process was really intense: I found a tutor that taught me completely in Hebrew for 3-4 hours a day for a year. It amounted to almost 20 hours a week. I thought I would move to Israel, but plans changed. :(

Level: Lower-intermediate-ish. I can understand most of the media except for the news. I usually encounter 10-30 new words every day. Reading books of my favorite genres is still quite challenging. Still, I'm conversationally fluent and can get by just fine (as far as traveling for a few weeks showed). But I make a lot more mistakes compared to English, and I can't correctly inflect new verbs on the fly. I would like to someday level up my Hebrew to my English.

Why am I telling your this? Well, partially just for fun. And also, so you could see two important things: those languages are vastly different from one another, and I learned them under the guidance of a teacher.

Now, let me provide you with my reasons for learning Korean and future plans regarding Journaly.

The Why's:

  • The Challenge. Sorry, the first two points are not directly connected to Korean. In general, I want to try and learn a language on my own to feel powerful again. I want to experience this unique confidence that English brought me. This challenge would be a big step of my current comfort zone.
  • The Skills. The Skills. Language learning is a life-long process that requires many different skills and traits. Among them: time management, prioritizing, strategizing, memorization of huge amounts of data, communication, imagination and so on. In addition, I would have to become braver, embrace ambiguity, come to terms with imperfection, learn how to enjoy the process and be more independent in my learning. (Can you continue the list?..)
  • The New World. Finally, something is about Korean. It's a very different from any language I speak or have ever dabbled in before. And how cool would it be to speak three non-related languages?
  • The Novelty. I have very limited knowledge about Korean culture. Apart from mythology and folk music, I'm clueless.
  • The Sounds. My thing is to listen to music in the languages I don't understand. It inspires me to write stories. But at some point, I want to enjoy the lyrics too. And Korean intonation and phonetics is pleasant to listen to.
  • The Buzz. I've watched as Korean culture got more and more popular over the years, mostly due to K-pop and K-dramas. I didn't get it back then. I guess it's time to check it out.
  • The Personal. I've always been into efficiency and productivity. I would say that it's a type of self-care for me to pursue something that sparked my interest but is not the most useful thing in the world. :)

The End and the Beginning:

I got this idea after reading the "What are your greatest challenges in learning a foreign language?" post. (Sidenote: read the comments. It's an incredible discussion).

Basically, I want to write daily posts sharing my language learning struggles. I imagine it would be a few sentences about what I want to do, what I did and how I'm feeling language learning-wise. Usually, these greatest challenges are compressed into a 15-minute YouTube video or a single Instagram post. You might feel encouraged at first, but after a few days you slip back into thinking that you're the laziest, slowest language learner this world has ever seen. Then you are back searching fot the next biggest tip that would make up for all the "missed" days. Rinse and repeat.

So, I want to be everybody's study buddy. I already planned to reflect on my learning process or make some kind of meaningful log.

The question is: Will you be interested if I make my reflections public?

P.S. A question to a native English speaker: what is the difference between "a log" and "a diary"? I'm not satisfied with the explanations I found.

Headline image by les_photos_de_raph on Unsplash

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