Third, sounding and looking more native. In the process of learning a language, native speakers, who perceive you as foreign, regardless of your ability with their language, will too often speak in English. To bypass this hurdle, study the people of the language and emulate them. The attempt alone can be a social experience that builds neural pathways in the brain, ones that help not only with word recognition and processing memory, but even spatial navigation, particularly when learning a language rapidly, in the time of less than two years.
Recently, I spent a year and a half living in South Korea and learning Korean. Being a native English speaker, this was no easy feat. The Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State considers Korean, among other East Asian languages, nearly the most difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. Since I’m not Korean, and had zero exposure to any Asian language before I set out on my mission, I can wholly testify to the legitimacy of that statement.
Engrossed in intensive language programs at Korea’s famed Yonsei and Sogang Universities, the first six months proved the most difficult. Learning Korean characters, pronunciation, and grammar pushed me to let go of English and the alphabet as a reference for expressing thought. Instead, symbols and an entirely counterintuitive manner of expression gradually developed in my mind. The East is the East, and the West is the West, with good reason. Just as these two languages belong to opposite poles of the Earth, their logistics follow suit. While English seeks to get to the point in the first three words, Korean seems to draw out the listener and the point of what they are saying, making sure we absorb the details.
My experience of learning a language was all well and good, but what of the psychological effects? In my time abroad, I purposefully refused to speak English or be in the company of English speakers. Being somewhat of an extremist, in that time, I also only enjoyed Korean entertainment and food. My adventure reached far beyond phonetics, into Korea’s deep cultural roots.
During my first month back in the United States, I had trouble speaking English, and could not remotely access my French, a language I’d spoken fluently since I was a child. I panicked, thinking my Korean had totally wiped out my former language skills, but when the clouds cleared with sufficient rest and time, everything became balanced and integrated. Most interestingly, I’d begun to abstractly create and understand my thoughts from Eastern and Western references combined.
The effort made in learning a new language encourages us to increase our listening skills, ingenuity, break through fear, and explore our emotional life.
A child first develops his or her ability with language through listening. They have a wealth of understanding before they learn to speak, and later to read. Babies have years to become skilled, but most intensive language programs aim to create proficiency in less than two years. Since institutional learning can be somewhat of a pressure cooker, “breaks” provide much needed processing time.
Strangely, many of the Korean students I learned from expressed their frustration with improving their English speaking skills. Through countless examples, I observed how much fear was held about making mistakes or being misunderstood in English. Yet, a baby is hardly self-conscious when it begins to speak, perhaps due to adequate positive enforcement from loved ones? They just speak, and we understand them. Learning a language actually pushes us to overcome a fear of people and their judgment of us.
Furthermore, in Korean, for example, there exist emotional expressions that don’t immediately translate, and the language, by virtue of how it communicates, seems to encourage a range of emotional expression that was “out of the box,” from my Canadian and Jamaican roots. Every language has the potential to bring us deeper into our feelings.
Needless to say, all these things increase our humanity, and if nothing else, pure self-enjoyment. If for no other reason, learning a new language is useful for staying young and relevant in an ever increasingly global economy. Beyond the practical, fluency lends itself to multiculturalism and cultural exchanges that can only help to facilitate communication among all tribes, and more intricately, the facets of our minds.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Spring 2015 issue.
