Is English a Threat to Linguistic Traditions?

As a native speaker of English, I revel in a fantastic luxury when I travel. Wherever I go, I can assume that the language of business is English. No matter where I am or what I need, if I don't speak the local language, I can always use English. In fact, if the exchange goes poorly, the person I am speaking with will often apologize for his or her lack of ability in my language rather than scold me for my poor knowledge of the local tongue. I have met many people who berate themselves for their inability to progress in English. These people often lament the pressure they feel to learn it.

“Why should I have to learn their language? This is Italy; they should learn Italian,” my Italian friend might say (if I had any friends).

People like my non-existent Italian friend are living representatives of the mixed feelings many people feel when they think about the role of English in their lives. There are many reasons for embracing English as a global language. Likewise, there are many reasons for rejecting it. Today we ask the question: can the influence of a foreign language on a culture degrade that culture's linguistic traditions?

We know that living languages are constantly evolving. Speakers of English are rampant thieves; we've “borrowed” heaps of words from other languages. We say “borrowed” as though we intend to give them back, but if we're honest with ourselves we can admit we're not giving them back. While we know that living languages are always changing into something new, we also know that languages are dying out completely. As cultures come in contact with one another, sometimes one language becomes dominant, and eventually the “weaker” language can die out.

[caption id="attachment_3442" align="aligncenter" width="616"] An English speaker[/caption]

However, it might be possible for a culture to retain its language while simply picking up the new one instead of replacing it. If this is possible, it might mean that the influence of a second language could develop independently from the original language of the culture. Therefore, the original language would not be very much affected and the culture's linguistic traditions would not be threatened.

Generally, as language groups come into contact with one another, there is some exchange. Does this mean that one or both of the languages is being sullied or damaged in some way? Not necessarily; the richness of English comes from the fact that it has so very many borrowed words in the first place. Without exchange, we would not have this depth and richness.

From time to time in the United States, a debate arises surrounding whether or not help should be provided to residents in languages other than English. Usually, it is a question of whether or not important documents should be provided in Spanish. There are many people who are against this. “This is America; speak American!” has been part of the debate. Why should we not make things easier for people who are learning English? Opponents of this idea say that it would be too expensive to provide translations. Is that the real reason, or is it rooted in xenophobia?

[caption id="attachment_3465" align="aligncenter" width="630"] So welcoming. So smart.[/caption]

Throughout history, languages have been suppressed in one way or another. In the United States, Native American children were sometimes put into schools where they were punished for speaking their mother tongues and forced to assimilate to the cultures of their oppressors. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, Koreans were encouraged to take Japanese surnames and Korean-language newspapers were forced to quit publishing. During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Taiwanese were forbidden from learning Taiwanese Chinese in school. Today, radio stations throughout the world have quotas related to language. In both France and South Korea, 40% of all content must be broadcast in the official languages of those countries.

In order to decide whether or not suppressing language means that cultural traditions are threatened, it's important to think about the motivation for this suppression. Why have people decided to place a limit on how much content can be broadcasted in English or other languages? Maybe this means that other languages are a threat. If so, how? Why are populations often forced to learn the languages of their oppressors? Is it because stripping them of their language removes a part of their identity?

Is language so strongly linked to culture that one cannot survive without the other? What do you think?

Online but Not Connected: The Internet Does Not Equal Globalization

The year 2013 marked the twentieth that W3 Internet server technology has been freely available to the public. [1] Fittingly, I know that thanks to my Facebook news feed.

That this technology enables the efficient transmission of an increasingly rich web of information might be deemed nothing short of miraculous, but has our behavior caught up to its possibilities? Are we, as one meme so aptly expresses, using our ability to access the knowledge of humanity at our fingertips simply to argue with strangers and watch cat videos? We could be taking advantage of the Web to erect a marketplace of ideas on a scale that would make John Stuart Mill dance in his grave, but are we actually taking the time to avail ourselves of the gold inside this global treasure chest?

[caption id="attachment_2535" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Grumpy Cat is angry because you could be teaching yourself solid state physics right now.[/caption]

Whatever we might be using the Internet for, a lot of us are using it, and we’re certainly using it a lot. According to statistics published by the International Telecommunications Union and Royal Pingdom.com, in the last year the world had 2.7 billion Internet users, or 750 million households (41% of the world) [2] looking at about 630 million web sites. The number of Tumblr blogs reached nearly 90 million, and our old friend Wordpress claimed almost 60 million sites worldwide. Reddit had 37 billion pageviews last year---that’s more than five pageviews per member of this planet---and Facebook supported about 5 petabytes---yeah, that’s a prefix we haven’t heard much of yet---of photo content a month and 2 billion “Likes” per day. This wealth of constantly updated information is hardly limited to the English-speaking world. The most active country on Facebook is reportedly Brazil, with more than 85,000 monthly posts-by-page, and Sina Weibo, mainland China’s Twitter mimic, saw a rate of more than 720,000 posts a minute during the transition from 2012 to 2013 [3].

With all that content and activity, we must certainly be learning from each other, right? Not necessarily. In fact, the Internet’s expansive educational landscape continues to be rent by linguistic, cultural, and political barriers that prevent the free flow of information in the directions we need it most. Even if we limit our discussion to the 35% of the world’s population estimated to use the Internet as of 2011 [4], a limitation that is itself admittedly problematic because a lot of culture---traditions, values, linguistic habits--is locked up in groups that may not have access to the Web, we can’t earnestly assert that the Internet is the orgy of promiscuously conjugating memes that we might hope it to be.

[caption id="attachment_2536" align="aligncenter" width="700"] We can't always expect the English we may be used to. (photo credit: kelleyswanberg.com)[/caption]

Not Everyone Speaks English (No, Really) 

For one thing, not everyone uses, or is able to use, the Internet in the same language. According to Web Technology Surveys, as of today (October 19, 2014), just over half of the content available online is in English, with the rest split up among infinitesimally small pockets of various other tongues, from the far second German (6.1%) to the last-place tie among Hebrew, Lithuanian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Bokmal, Serbian, Slovenian, and Catalan (0.1%), in addition to more than a hundred other languages that make up even less [5]. While English is widely hailed as the international language of business, science, and politics---as physicist Michio Kaku once put it, a step toward a “Level I civilization language,” [6]---and a mostly-English Internet might thus be a step in the right direction, two facts stand in the way of a truly global Web.

First, that only about half of the Internet is rendered in this international language means that the other half is sectioned among (largely) mutually unvisitable linguistic islands of information exchange within smaller cultural groups. Of course, if I really wanted to see what was happening on islands to which foreign language experiences offer no bridge I could just hop on a machine-translation plane, but the view from the window isn’t always so clear, and securing a ticket requires an extra decision and some time, activation energy that becomes even higher in spaces of continuous two-way exchange, as in forum discussions.

Second, the first fact would not be such a big problem if every user of the other languages could also freely browse English sites and exchange ideas there (even if English speakers were unable to hop over to the other linguistic islands, emissaries from them would be sufficient for two-way information exchange), but not everyone can understand the language to the degree required for efficient high-level information processing and expression. According to 2000 estimates from the British Council, in 2010 about 2 billion people were learning English as a foreign language in addition to the world’s 400 million or so native speakers [7] [8], but “learning English” is far from equivalent to “able to use educated high-level English to proficiently understand and express complex thoughts.” Indeed, according to a 2012 study in business English proficiency by English First, the average score among twenty-one countries with non-native English-speaking populations was only about 54/100 (though I, too, wonder what the United States might have scored). I don’t know about you, but in my family a 54% test grade was nothing to boast about in a public statistics database, so knowing that, for example, Egypt’s BEI index came out to 45.92 sort of puts its reported 80,000,000 strong “English-speaking population” in a new light in deciding how influential a website like NYTimes Online might be in fostering dialogue among its citizens [9].

[caption id="attachment_2537" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Look familiar? Maybe not so much.[/caption]

Birds of a Feather Flock Together...

In addition to the more obvious language difficulties, the Internet is also divided by social and cultural barriers that affect our proclivity for certain types of websites. The influences of these factors, which are still often drawn along linguistic, geographic, and/or ethnic lines, are perhaps most readily apparent in the social networks that we choose to use. While Facebook, the largest social networking site in the world, was poised to achieve a billion users in 2013, its international penetration rates are uneven, from 50% in its nation of origin the United States and 52% geographically and culturally proximate Canada [10]. Penetration statistics similarly hover around 50% for Anglophone and Northern Europe: England, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark. Australia and southern South America---Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile have also jumped onto the Facebook bandwagon with numbers similar to the country of its founder, and, as already mentioned, Brazil allegedly sees the most page posting activity.

But the story changes when we step a bit outside of the Anglo-American culture zone. Russia, for example, has a Facebook use rate of only 5%, while 78% of Russians have profiles on local SNS Vkontakte [11]. But how many Kenyans, Canadians, or French people have even heard of Vkontakte, let alone use it to engage in cultural exchange with Russians? Similarly, Korean and Japanese users still seem to prefer Cyworld (30%) [12] and Mixi (21 million active users or about 16% in 2011) [13], respectively, to Facebook (17.06% in Korea, 11% in Japan), two closed systems traditionally difficult for non-residents of those countries to access. And even nations where English is an official language, like South Africa (11%) and India (5%), factors other than language differences are presumably keeping people from connecting with others through the most international SNS currently available to us.

Even though these figures seem to be spiraling in the right direction as the growth of Facebook in countries like Japan is finally starting to engender user numbers surpassing home-grown giants like Mixi and formerly closed local social networks services like Cyworld have started to offering global services in a desperate effort to stave off the looming Facebook storm [14], the fact remains that even when language might not be an issue---Facebook offers interfaces in thirty-seven different languages---we still tend to separate ourselves online into different social groups along lines that seem to have some degree of correlation with culture.

Of course, there do exist some exceptions to this rule, thanks to a few online communities built by enterprising individuals working hard to purposefully increase inter-cultural virtual contact across the world. For example, CultureMesh.com seeks to establish geographically diffuse social networks based explicitly around particular linguistic and cultural interests, but unlike those grown organically around local platforms like Vkontake or Cyworld, these networks are open and accessible to anyone interested in joining. And our own website, of course, is a growing hodgepodge of discussions on cultural issues addressed by people displaced all over the world. We can only hope that more online communities shy away from strictly local comfort zones and join this trend of explicit cultural mixing.

[caption id="attachment_2538" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Thank you Mario! But our princess is in a firewalled server network![/caption]

...And Tend to Peck at Strangers

Finally, not only are we continuing to naturally divide our online communities along linguistic and cultural lines, but we are also even actively erecting our own geographic and political barriers around them. Politically based firewalls cutting down the content available to people in China, Iran, and North Korea notwithstanding, even countries in the so-called free world erect firewalls justified by copyright laws that prevent the international dissemination of certain multimedia content. I can’t sit down to enjoy a free streaming of The Big Bang Theory on a number of websites unless the servers think I’m in America; similarly, in order to watch a Mandarin-dubbed Korean drama or download music from locations indexed in Baidu I need to first log onto a mainland Chinese proxy server. Of course, I’m not suggesting that we turn the Internet into an intellectual property free-for-all, but for the sake of argument (and evidentiary triads of data), it’s interesting to note how these actions suggest our greater valuation of economic and political gain than, perhaps, free exchange and intellectual advancement as a species. As also argued by economist Pankaj Ghemawhat for slightly different reasons than those which I have presented here [15], the world is not quite as flat as book titles by Thomas Friedman may suggest, and an Internet sectioned across geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers is part and parcel of this phenomenon.

So maybe we’re not using the Internet to pick each other’s brains as freely as we should be. But maybe that’s because we don’t need to. We’re already saturated with too much data, right? Why should we add novel ideas from and experiences with other cultures to the mix, especially given that they’re very probably even harder to relate to and assimilate than the homegrown information deluge in which we’re already drowning? Stay tuned for Part II, on why we should be even be worried that we're not engaging in as much cultural exchange as we could be.

English Trouble for Native Koreans Abroad

“Condoms, please,” he whispered. What the hell are condoms, I thought.
The line was long and people were waiting to pay for their merchandise, while I stood behind the register, trying to get through the midday rush.
“What?” I asked him.
“Umm… condoms,” he repeated. I could see the other customers sniggering and trying to hold in their laughter. His face turned red, but I still had no idea what he wanted.
It was my first week on the job and the only thing that was going through my head was Is he asking for cigarettes? After all, this was Canada and unlike Korea, there were many different brands and sizes for cigarettes. That’s right, he’s probably asking for a pack of smokes!
And so I asked him with my broken English, “Mmm… Haoou BIG ij eet?”
Everyone in the line broke out laughing, and the guy asking for condoms suddenly flushed red all over. I didn’t understand. Why are they laughing? I was just asking what size cigarettes he wanted.

[caption id="attachment_2242" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Hmm... I see no "condom" cigarettes...[/caption]

“Well, uhhh… it’s not too big, but it’s uhhh… not too small,” he replied.
“Cooud you pleaj explain the product?” I asked him, still confused.
I didn’t think his face could get any redder, but it did.
“It’s uhh… used umm… when… uhhh a boy and a girl… uhh… share… a bed…” he stammered. Ah, I finally understood what he wanted.
“OH! Okay! You want COHN DOME! Okay, you cohn dome okay,” I answered relieved in comprehending his request. I handed him the condoms and he briskly paid and left the store in a hurry, while everyone else laughed merrily.

[caption id="attachment_2244" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Cohn domes![/caption]

That was one experience my friend MJ encountered during his year abroad. I’m sure there are many other stories for non-native English speakers who were caught in funny situations because of their trouble with the English language.
We often hear of many situations when English speaking foreigners go to a non-English speaking country and run into difficult situations revolved around language. However, the opposite is true for non-English travelers as well.
Here are some things to know about Koreans staying abroad in English speaking countries.

1. They learn non-practical English in Korea
   English is huge in Korea. People learn English from an early age, and a lot of people believe the language is absolutely necessary in obtaining a prestigious job. Many companies look for TOEIC (Test Of English for International Communication) scores when they recruit new blood. It’s no wonder the Korean education system puts so much pressure on learning English. The kids learn English in school, private cram schools, and private tutors. However, the system teaches English for testing purposes.
   Thus, when Koreans study English, they focus on the parts that would get them the highest scores, which are heavily concentrated on grammar, reading, and listening. However, the education system in Korea does not focus as much on practical English.
   This is why Koreans abroad have trouble understanding what other people are saying. They definitely understand some words here and there, and they even get a gist of what the person is trying to say. But because they never had much practice with conversational English, it’s hard for them to catch every piece of detail when speaking with native English speakers.
   Another thing to note is that in Korea, American English is taught. That means accents from England, Australia, and any other country that has a distinct accent are hardly understood.
   [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF7qw6TSP8g]


2. They tend to flock among their own kind
   This probably proves true with any other foreign community in a different country, but it’s more blatant among Koreans. I have seen Korean students immigrate to America during middle school and watched them grow and go to high school. During those seven years, some of them barely improved their English. The reason? They would stick with other Korean immigrants, and because speaking Korean among each other was much more comfortable, they didn’t have many opportunities to mix with native English speakers.
   I’m not saying Koreans don’t associate with anyone that isn’t from their native country, but given the chance, they will almost always choose to hang out with one another.
   
   [caption id="attachment_2248" align="aligncenter" width="365"] "So where are you from? Korea? OMG! We must hang out!"[/caption]


3. They still crave rice
   My parents have lived in America for over twenty years, and there is not a day that goes by without rice for at least one meal. As I talked about in my “5 Things to Know About Koreans” article http://idigculture.com/5-things-to-know-about-koreans, Koreans bleed rice.
   Sure there are some that don’t need to eat it every day, but most Koreans can’t help but think about having rice for their next meal. This proves a bit truer with Koreans who have recently traveled abroad.
   When traveling, you can’t help but want to try the local cuisine and dishes. But after a while, you get sick of it and begin thinking of food from your native country. For Koreans, that would be rice. Many Koreans I have personally known that have lived abroad always told me that Western food was too greasy, salty, and overabundant. That’s why Koreans can never give up rice for good.
   
   [caption id="attachment_2250" align="aligncenter" width="468"] The secret to being Korean is in the bowl of rice[/caption]

Traveling is important. Going out to see the world helps people to find a story they have never read before. Everyone should go abroad and experience new encounters. However, sometimes language can be a big barrier in enjoying the world out there. Just as you hope you will be accepted and treated with respect, do the same for foreign travelers and dwellers in your native country.

Loving Abroad #2: Overcoming the Language Barrier

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gp8euVvINw]

I ventured onto another blind date with another woman from China. And once more, the date was held on Google Hangouts on Air. For those that haven’t seen our first show (Loving Abroad #1: Korean American guy meets a Chinese girl), the objective of our show is to explore the diversity of cultural dating (and perhaps to find myself a soul-mate?).
For this show, we decided to speak in our native languages. I spoke English and she spoke Chinese throughout the date, and we barely understood each other. Watch us try to overcome language barriers with drawings and hand gestures.

Verbal Communication
I spoke English and half the time she understood what I was trying to say. However, during the other half, I had to resort to hand gestures and drawings to get my point across. As you can probably guess, I understood nothing when she spoke Chinese. The only two words that I understood were: bu and sheur (no and yes).
I had difficulty trying to get my point across with words alone. Though we eventually understood what the other was trying to say, it took a lot of time.
COMMUNICATION: 50%


[caption id="attachment_2195" align="aligncenter" width="429"] Not sure if she's smiling because she understood me or if she's just feigning it.[/caption]




Gestures
Everything I said was accompanied with my hands. I felt like I was trying to communicate with the students at my 학원; hagwon; cram school.
My hands waved around the screen pointing at her, me, and some imaginary people. I can’t tell whether or not she understood all of my gestures, but accompanied with my quizzical facial expressions, she seemed to comprehend the nature of my questions.
Mengshen didn’t use many gestures, and this may be due to cultural differences.
In America, many people use their hands to express their words and meaning across, but in Korea or China, not many people make hand gestures.
COMMUNICATION: 35%

[caption id="attachment_2190" align="aligncenter" width="439"] Thumbs up: universal gesture for "good"[/caption]

Visuals
When nothing else worked, we both used pictures to get our messages across.
This worked surprisingly well. When she was trying to tell me what she thought of Korean men, she drew a handsome looking character. At which point I thought she believed all Korean men to be as dashingly good-looking as me. However, upon further interrogation, she drew for me a chart.
For some odd reason, she thought I didn’t belong to the 75 percentile range, where the Korean men are handsome. Instead, she thought I was “okay.”
Despite the differences in our opinions about my physical appearance, we communicated well through visual mediums.
COMMUNICATION: 90%


[caption id="attachment_2184" align="aligncenter" width="441"] Visual mediums: helpful in showing where I stand among men[/caption]




Despite the language barrier, Mengshen and I had a good time on our online date. Regardless of language, culture, or nationality, it’s important to try to communicate with people around the world.
Don’t give yourself excuses like, “Oh, we don’t speak the same language.”
If you try, the other recipient will eventually understand your thoughts and messages. Let’s get out there and communicate with one another. After all, in this day and age, communication is key when it comes to understanding those around us – near or far.

Menghen Hu is a 21-year-old Chinese national from the Anhui Province. She is in Korea studying film at Konkuk University, hoping to be a successful actress someday.

What I Learned from the Amish

Whilst waiting in a long line to board onto the Chicago AmTrak train one afternoon, I couldn’t help but to study and enjoy the presence of a large Amish family nearby. The bearded man wearing suspenders was accompanied by three adult women and four absolutely adorable small children.  They had suitcases of various vibrant colors and sipped from just-purchased plastic water containers. The line of travelers started to descend as everyone was loaded onto the train. To my surprise, I would be surrounded by the Amish family on the seats to the left and front of mine.

The little children would stare at me, and we would have smiling contests. I did not have much to share with the children or show them. Trying to respect the culture’s preference of a non-technological lifestyle and the choice to avoid excessive dress and style, I was somewhat nervous to show them things I had with me. My worries of what the children could be exposed to could somehow affect the rest of their lives. They were so innocent and sweet. I instead wanted them to show me their things, and learn more about their way of life.

They spoke in a language I could not decipher, but could only assume it to be of Dutch origin. They also spoke in English, but not as often. The women would read to the little children in their preferred language rather than in English, although the books were written in the latter. The books appeared to be youth primers for their religion, and they included songs, poems, stories, pictures, and coloring pages. One adult sat in a separate section and allowed the children to walk back and forth to the different seats and would all sit on the adults' laps. I wondered if the family practiced polygamy because the man had so many adult women with him and all of the children were clinging to each adult, especially the man. However, the Amish do not practice polygamy, and these families were just working together like a small community.

Their dress is plain and simple, and they sew their own fashions. How do they acquire the dark blue, black, and brown materials? Rural markets and dry goods stores. The women do not cut their hair, and the men, once married, do not cut their beards. Bonnets cover the heads of the baptized women and little girls, while males sport a traditional hair cut fashion and are forbidden to have mustaches. Men are not allowed to wear mustaches in Amish communities because it is thought to resemble men in the military. The Amish do not partake in violence and therefore are not forced to join the military.

The woman sitting to my upper left seemed to be much more confident with the children. She looked to the man often to tell him a feeling or thought with her eyes, and also using their unique dialect. The woman sitting to my left, however, sparked my curiosity even more. She was quieter, younger, and wore glasses. She would cuddle the visiting children and would read to them.  When she wasn't taking care of the children, she would look at her surroundings and seemed to be philosophizing about what and why things were. She would stare out of the train window and take in all of the urban outside life. Was she wondering what life was like for the "modern folk"? Did she want to walk in the old abandoned buildings to investigate and dream up a place for the family’s sofa? Did she want to experience driving a car? Or was her faith so deeply rooted that none of things crossed her mind as they would mine? Perhaps she just loved and enjoyed the life she was blessed with and was content with what she already had. Either way, it somehow felt really special to witness that Amish woman looking out of her window.

A funnier experience was when one of the Amish women accidentally walked in on me using the train's restroom. As the door opened and our eyes met, she looked almost horrified and said, “Oh! Sorry!” I really could only laugh about the situation.

The sweetest experience was noticing two sleeping children sprawled all over their father figure. I had just gotten up to leave as the train had reached its destination. I looked at the man and he gave me a smile and nod as I whispered, “They are so sweet."

Since my experiences among the Amish family, I have become much more interested about the Amish and even Mennonite culture. What a beautiful and simplistic way to live.

Five Techniques that Make Learning A Foreign Language Significantly Less Impressive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up6VuAbykos

“What did you eat for breakfast as a child?” asked a wide-eyed woman from across the conference table.

My friend had just introduced me to her clinical research group as “Kelley from Korea who speaks Chinese, Korean, and French” because she loves nothing more than to engineer awkward moments with strangers just to watch me sweat. The scientists, whom I had expected to react to the unnecessary boast with polite but detached smiles and nods, instead seemed to be more impressed by my various language experiences than by the admission that a white girl named Kelley was a friend “from Korea.”

While this anecdote admittedly tiptoes into dangerous humblebrag territory, it also illustrates what I think is a sorrowfully inaccurate popular perspective that learning a language is a harrowing undertaking reserved for people with oddly wired brains fortified with supervitamins. I certainly won’t knock the necessity of nutrition for proper cognitive function, but I will stress that this cognitive function is something that the grand majority of us possess. Developing proficiency in a foreign tongue, even at a relatively mature age, should not be intimidating for either the learner or those who might praise her: Critical periods of pronunciation development aside, we are “wired” from the start to learn language—which is, after all, a creation entirely of the human brain, and one that most of us have mastered in at least one form already.

While I have been immersed for over a decade and a half in developing and maintaining proficiency in three foreign languages that I began learning relatively late in life—French at eleven, Chinese at seventeen, and Korean at twenty-four—I am not a teacher and thus have no authority to claim any well developed theories on what language-learning strategies might work for most or even many people. I can only look back with limited retrospection and report on what I think has been effective for me, in the hope that my advice might enable or embolden some others to succeed at their own linguistic pursuits.

 

• Fabricate need: Like any pursuit, learning a language is a lot easier given the proper motivation. Unfortuately, unless you have an immediate need to develop spoken and written proficiency in another tongue, it’s difficult to justify putting in not just the time but also the consistent energy and attention it requires. Spend some time in a country where that language is spoken, even if just a semester or a short vacation. Set a deadline to take—and pass—a proficency test. Join a weekend discussion group or set up regular meetings with a language partner for some stimulating social pressure. In short, find out what motivates you and establish a study system that takes advantage of those tendencies.

 

• Prepare to feel stupid: Learning a language requires assimilating a lot of new information—countless vocabulary words composed of phonemes you may never have heard before, various arbitrary rules about how they can and cannot be combined, cultural context behind the potentially strange new concepts they might be used to express. And it’s often difficult to appreciate the subtleties of foreign diction and logic of syntax until you’ve blindly learned, botched, corrected, and re-learned multiple instances of it. So if you’re doing your learning job right and processing your rich inputs with a sizeable number of corresponding outputs, you’re going to make mistakes.And if you spend any part of your language-learning experiences interacting with native speakers (as you should!), your powers of understanding and expression will also inevitably be both over-and underestimated at awkward turns. Be prepared to swallow your pride, both to ask questions when you don’t understand something that your interlocutor assumed you did, as well as to avoid distracting frustration when they repeat or water down a concept that you grasped sufficiently from the start.

 

• Have fun: Have fun, that is, while feeling stupid (see our previous article on drinking in Korea for some ways to practice this art). Deciding to devote the resources needed to master a new language requires passion, and passion is not distilled from punishing goals and strict schedules. Developing passion for a subject means not taking yourself too seriously and not feeling guilty about turning studying into a game. It means spending hours playing classic game ROMs in your target language and staying up later than you should binging on dubbed Pixar movies and foreign dramas. It means reading cheap fiction and comics that you might not normally allow yourself to waste an afternoon on were they in your mother tongue. Because the point is maximizing exposure, and isn’t being able to effortlessly integrate your desired language into the activities you love one of the ultimate goals of learning it in the first place?

 

• Be patient: According to one widely cited but unfortunately apocryphal statistic, “research shows” that mastery of foreign pronunciation alone---one tiny and sometimes even slightly disposable aspect of the multifaceted undertaking of language learning---depends in part on the purely physical development of tiny orofacial muscles that can take months of daily practice to reshape themselves. Even in the event that this particular factoid is just an Internet rumor, it stands to reason that going from mute to conversational, conversational to proficient, proficient to eloquent, and unlettered to literate doesn’t happen overnight. Indeed, the more you begin to parse and understand, the more poignantly you become aware of how far you have to go, making the uphill climb toward a satisfactory skill level a painfully Sisyphean process. Be patient.

 

• But also… don’t wait: Don’t wait to “learn” the language before you start forcing yourself to “use” it; the best way to learn is to use, and developing proficiency only promotes rather than deprecates the learning process.

It’s a little-applied fact that one does not need a large vocabulary to speak a new language with confidence; you just have to learn to creatively apply what you have. Focusing from the start on the most commonly used words is also important for developing efficiency, and one of the best ways to determine what words you need the most is to force yourself to speak and listen to only your target language for an extended period. It wasn’t until I moved to Beijing after two years of college-level Mandarin study that I realized how absurd it was that I could expound with some confidence on the advantages brought by China’s socialist history for the status of women in society but didn’t know the word for “hairbrush.”

You should dive into listening with the same confidence, as you’ll find that the human brain can understand quite a bit even with weak knowledge of verbal components and structure. In the words of social psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, “Fake it until you make it”—don’t write off a conversation as incomprehensible simply because it’s in a language you just started to learn or even haven’t learned at all; throw yourself into it with full attention and take note of every scrap of recognizable data—tone, expression, hand signals, loan words—that might be useful to you. At the very least, you’ll find yourself passively absorbing information on intonation and accent that could be useful for later adventures in proper expression.

I decided to take a short vacation in Tokyo following college graduation and use the opportunity to practice Japanese. This was a slightly problematic decision because I did not know Japanese, and even after a few halfhearted glances through survival language books between final exams, I had a paltry vocabulary of fewer than twenty words. I assumed (naturally) that I was just setting myself up for failure.

And yet, feeling the full brunt of Point 2 above, I pressed on anyway, finding to my pleasant surprise that when I challenged myself to use my scant knowledge to ask passerby for directions or order from a menu, I could generally pick up on the interlocutors’ responses: By focusing on gestures and the very few words that I knew (mostly verb particles and place or food names), I could fake a conversation in Japanese—without knowing Japanese.

 

So manipulate yourself into desperation, have fun feeling stupid, and be patient about the inevitably unsatisfactory results of precipitously challenging yourself to use the language you wish to learn. It might sound like a tall order, but just remember that what you’re seeking to master is something that’s already known by countless others, something that the brain is primed to acquire–indeed, something that has been suggested to be important, if not necessary, for some forms of thought itself. So eat whatever you want for breakfast. What's the big deal?