Learning a language is a very messy and fragile process. Especially for adults who are electively learning a chosen language for the first time, it is easy to get discouraged and give up — and especially if there aren’t many resources out there to begin with.
For myself, I have found it helpful to do the following:
1) Expect progress to be slow. I tend to be, by nature, a very impatient person. Learning Korean for me is sometimes fun, but it is also very frustrating how little I can say (or be understood) after all the time that I have put into it thus far. If can manage to lower my expectations, then I can usually reduce the frustration, enjoy it more, and (ironically) make more progress. I’ve used the phrase “language journey” on this blog before, but more specifically, it’s like hiking the Appalachian Trail — not sitting back for a fast zip on the Concorde.
2) Stop looking for the magic bullet. This is related to the first point, in that it has to do with managing expectations. As I type this, I have behind me a whole shelf full of Korean language materials. For a while, each time a new textbook or audio tape came out, I bought it with the hope that it would enable me to achieve perfect fluency in record time. (Of course, this wasn’t helped by products with titles like “Korean in a Flash!” or that promised “You’ll be speaking Korean in 24 hours!”) The truth is, there is no magic bullet. There is no single solution. I have had much better luck in combining all of these books and products, and piecing together my own kind of textbook that is uniquely suited to my learning needs. Even still, this little home-made “textbook” is only one piece of my overall learning strategy.
3) Don’t lose the critical thinking skills. As with other areas of my life, when learning Korean I try to read/communicate widely, think critically about everything, and then decide what I want to believe and do. I think this is especially important when trying to decide what is the best way to learn something. It should be fairly obvious that we all learn in different ways and styles, and yet I frequently hear and read assessments of various learning methods that are couched as universal generalizations, rather than individual testimonies. If something worked (or didn’t work) for you, then fine, explain why it worked (or didn’t work) for you. But if it worked, don’t promise other people unrealistic results. If it didn’t work, please be considerate and leave the door open for someone else to give it a try.
Critical thinking is still important during the learning process itself — even when learning from native speakers of your chosen language. I regularly ask myself all sorts of questions about both the teacher and the content before I let something I’ve been told settle too deeply into my brain. There are many great resources out there, and include both teachers and other learners. But it’s always important to think not just about about people’s credentials and experience, but also their priorities, goals, potential biases, and — this is important — their limitations.
4) Seek out other learners and learning communities. This is probably the hardest thing on the list for me to do, for reasons both situational and personal. But I’m realizing how important it is when learning a language, especially speaking, and so am trying to figure out how I can do more of it. Online resources such as mailing lists, forums, social networking sites, chat software, video cams, Skype, etc. are breaking down some of the geographical barriers. Now I’m mostly working on the personal ones.
As I’ve mentioned before, my motivation and drive to study Korean tends to come and go. It has picked up again fairly recently, and so hopefully I’ll be blogging about it more in future posts. (Though as longtime readers will know, the act of writing that statement pretty much guarantees that I won’t say anything more about it for a very long time!)
열심히 공부하세요!
