How Hard Is It to Learn a New Language?
Tags:foreign_languages 
I don’t know about the rest of you, but learning a new language has always been something that I have contemplated. So as you can probably tell, I finally pulled the trigger! But what exactly made me do it and what language did I decide to learn? Read on to find out 😉.
Contents:
The Right Motivation
Before going any further, I should probably mention that the language that I have been learning is French (la langue française). In fact, I have been learning it for nearly 4 months now.
Now, there are actually a couple of reasons why I went out of my way to learn a language that I barely even have the chance to use where I am right now! If it didn’t come as a surprise that I’m attempting to learn the French language, then what I am about to reveal next definitely will. My dad speaks French, he taught himself how to do it when he was in his 20s. Why? According to him he did it completely for the fun of it! When I was first heard of that, I was pretty taken aback, it is difficult enough to learn a new language, but the fact that nearly no one speaks this language in Malaysia just makes matters a lot more difficult. Furthermore, back then the Internet wasn’t a thing, imagine how difficult it is to be unable to look something up on Google. But all that aside, in a way I too am doing it for the same reasons that my dad it. I am truly enjoying this journey and I relish every single new word and expression that I learn.
How did I go about it?
The Old Fashioned Way
Well I am sure most of us would love to be able to speak a foreign language, the biggest problem is just how in the world should we approach this daunting challenge? The way I started things off itself was rather interesting, my dad told me of this book Teach Yourself French by Norman Scarlyn Wilson that he relied on greatly when he started his journey of learning French. I told myself that if it was good enough for him, it would be good enough for me to! And it was with that book that I embarked on what appeared to be the slightly intimidating challenge of learning a new language.
Learning from a book the ‘formal’ way no doubt has its benefits. It was through this book that I learned the grammatical and syntactical rules of the French language. A book as such will also introduce you to words that are commonly used in daily life. Of course, you might argue that this is slightly different from how an infant learns a language, in which he just learns from experience and trial & error. However, for someone who is already familiar with the constructs of a language, this manner of learning simply accelerates things. Furthermore, the French language has syntactic similarities with the English language, making the learning process a tad simpler! The English language also has plenty of loan words, most of which had French origins. This overlap in vocabulary that is introduced in such books once again, accelerates the learning process.
The Fun Stuff
Admittedly, learning solely from a book will eventually bore you. But hey we are living in the age where we can consume all sorts of content on the Internet! During my daily commute to and from work, I tend to watch videos and podcasts in French. There are two kinds of videos that I watch on YouTube. Firstly, I watch videos that are intended to help people who are new to the language. These videos are suitable for me because there would more often that not only be one person speaking at any point in time. Also, they tend to speak a little slower than they usually would and they are careful to not use slang words. This is a perfect way to practice and make use of the vocabulary that I have learned through the book.
Secondly, I also watch normal videos, i.e. they are not tailor-made for learners of the language. Of course, people tend to speak incredibly quickly in these videos and that can be a problem sometimes. I do watch the videos with subtitles of course, and it also helps to accept the fact that you will never be able to understand a 100% of what they are saying. What’s truly is important is the bits that you are capable of understanding, and over time you would realise that you are capable of understanding more and more of what they say.
Podcasts have been an incredibly helpful resource too. They allow you to focus solely on what you hear, without any assistance from visual cues. It allows you to really focus on your listening skills. Not only do you have to be able to catch what people are saying, you would also need to piece together the context of the conversation without being able to see what’s happening (as opposed to watching a video). Of course, once again there is no shame whatsoever in referring to a transcription of a podcast, in fact I believe that it is what makes this a worthwhile exercise! Here’s a series of podcasts that I cannot recommend highly enough.
Don’t Be Shy!
Obviously one of the best ways to actually get better at a language is to really utilise it! But then again, you might ask me how exactly would one pull this off in a country like Malaysia where literally no one speaks French. I might sound like a broken record by now, but there’s literally nothing that the Internet cannot help you with. There’s a mobile app that I would really love to recommend to language learners, called HelloTalk. Upon entering the application, you will be prompted to tell it which language are you currently trying to learn now, after which you will be prompted to tell it which language is your mother tongue. With that out of the way, you are all set! You will be able to meet other individuals that seek to learn your mother tongue, of which their own mother tongue is precisely the language that you wish to learn, how cool is that?
It shouldn’t take you too long to realise that you are among kindred-souls, everyone on that platform is seeking to learn a foreign language，be it for their own amusement, to find a job in a foreign country, to further their studies in a different country or simply just to better understand a culture. On this application, you get to have conversations with as many native speakers as you can handle. It can be through text or through audio, depending on the preference of yourself and the individual on the other end. Since this applications is meant for learners of a language, there’s also a built-in translation feature, you would inevitably come across something that you do not understand when you chat with a native speaker! The application also facilitates the proposal of corrections. Beginners like myself tend to make grammatical mistakes quite often, occasionally we also commit the error of making a poor choice of words. The correction feature of the app makes it incredibly easy for the person on the end of the conversation to propose an alternative way or rather the correct way to phrase something that you just said. I am personally always incredibly grateful when someone goes to such lengths to point out mistakes that I make.
What Have I Gotten Out of This?
Since I’ve been at this for several months, I am probably in a good enough spot to share some of the interesting aspects of learning a new language! Here’s a preposition, language is a huge part of our lives and cultures, the more different is the language that another individual speaks, the more likely it is that there exists a big difference in between their culture and ours. What I am getting to is this, whenever you watch a video in a foreign language you inevitably get the opportunity to be exposed to their way of life, the way they perceive things, their habits and whatnot. Whenever someone speaks their mother tongue, they are in their element, and it is pre0cvcisely when they are in their comfort zone that they discuss and share things that are indeed unique to their culture.
You know what else learning a foreign language does for you? Now this one varies greatly from individual to individual, but for me, it gave me a desire to travel. It gives me the desire to travel to the land where this language is natively spoken, it gives me the desire to experience the things that they talk about in videos. Learning a new language opens one’s eyes to the fact that there is so much more to the world than what we have already experienced, it gives you the courage to explore the world.
Was It All Worth it?
I admit that in the beginning, I did this merely to satisfy my curiosity. I mean my dad must have did it for some reason, right? But along the way I truly got inspired, I am sure most of you would have heard of the actor Bradley Cooper. He did an interview in France to promote his fantastic movie A Star is Born. He did that entire interview without speaking a single word of English (look it up online if you want to be blown away like I was), and he needed absolutely no help with translating his thoughts into French. It was incredibly inspiring to see an Anglophone successfully learn a foreign language to the extent that he could convey his thoughts flawlessly to a crowd of native speakers without any issue whatsoever! It was really really cool to see him do that, and you know what? I hope that I will be able to do the same one day as well.