top of page
Search

A Chronicle of My Experiences in Language Acquisition

  • fotaquest
  • May 29, 2024
  • 8 min read

Updated: Feb 4

A Chronicle of My Experiences in Language Acquisition:

By Lars Guo

Published: May 29, 2024


How did I get into learning languages?: When I was young, I took Chinese lessons. Though I wasn't too interested in the classes. It wasn't until my family exposed me to Spanish when my love for languages came into fruition. My brother taught me some Spanish. I was really good at it. I took Spanish until junior year of high school. Around junior year, my interest in Japanese started to grow and focused more on that. Later in 2019, I got into Spanish again and was focusing on Spanish and Japanese at the same time. In 2022, I also took an interest in German as well. I also lucked out that my brothers exposed me to songs in the foreign languages growing up so it also helped me develop a love for foreign languages in general as well.


What do I like about foreign language learning?: I like learning the language’s grammar, vocabulary, most writing systems, and speaking the language. It is also great that there are scientific benefits like it being good for your brain’s health which includes slowing down the dementia that one can get and delay the process for years. I like being able to communicate with more people which can lead to new friends and being able to interact with all kinds of people. Being monolingual doesn’t bridge the gap at all. It is also helpful when there is a language barrier to be able to communicate, especially at work where there is the difference between being able to do your job and not being able to do your job. It makes it more fun to travel as well since your opportunities will be greater than your monolingual companions. 


Least like parts about foreign languages: It can be challenging to learn the writing and reading especially with writing systems that use a different set of character systems/alphabets such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. Sometimes the things you are learning do not make sense. Sometimes it is hard to keep your studies interesting as well. Changing up how you study could make a difference in how much fun you have in learning the language as well. Also, there are times that certain phrases and grammar do not perfectly align translation wise to English or whatever your native tongue is.


Photo was taken by Wix


Spanish: I got into Spanish because my brothers were learning it and so I got some early exposure to the language before school taught me Spanish. I did some Spanish learning in 2nd grade as an unofficial before school program. I really started unofficially at the age of 7. It came pretty naturally to me as well. I had great teachers for my Spanish classes as well. Like I said, I took classes until junior year of high school. This is something I will regret later because I forgot a lot of it and it would be helpful later especially at my jobs that I had. It is a very useful skill to have in general as well because a lot of people speak the language as well. There are people who only speak Spanish, especially customers, but I have also had some coworkers that only knew Spanish and a very limited amount of English. In 2019, I wanted to pick up another language again and getting back into Spanish was the first thing I thought of. My friend and I were in Chicago and we were talking about Spanish. In 2022, I got very lucky that I had a friend that had a friend that spoke fluent Spanish, Portuguese, and English. I got to chat with them for a while and still do. I learned a lot of Spanish from them. My listening in Spanish has improved a lot and was/is arguably better than when I took Spanish in high school. A lot of the grammar and vocabulary are somethings that I remember the least. Speaking it isn’t that bad but all of the areas need a lot of improvement overall. I did take a Spanish class at Umass Amherst and I understood 95 percent of it overall and I did not struggle in understanding the content. I started journaling in Spanish ever since the Spring semester of Umass Amherst in my senior year of college. The goal is to be fluent in Spanish or if nothing else proficient in the language as I think it will be an important skill that I will need.


Japanese: Japanese studies started my junior year when my friend and I were doing anime art together. She got me into Japanese and taught me some Japanese. It was a lot of fun to learn it. I used all kinds of apps and social media including Twitter also known as X now, Duolingo, and so forth. It was a great way to jump start my language skills. My high school did not offer Japanese so I had to self study the language by myself until 2016. I got the first Genki textbook which is for beginners around senior year of high school. It got a lot of good usage and it helped me out a great deal because my college classes required the textbook. Youtube also helped me learn some Japanese as well. A fun fact is that is how I learned about a website called italki.com and the Quartet textbooks which are an intermediate textbook set as well as the Genki textbooks. I chose those textbooks because they were best suited to my learning style. There were other ones like Minna no Nihongo, which doesn’t have any English in it and is a beginner textbook, and Tobira that also doesn’t have any text in English. In 2016, I went to Middlesex Community college and took Japanese classes that got me through the Genki I textbook. I learned a couple grammar points in the second Genki textbook but that was at the end and it was not part of the curriculum. In 2020, I went to Umass Amherst. They had a lot of Japanese courses that would take me very far into Japanese. There was a Japanese Conversation table which was for speaking in Japanese. I participated in this immediately and was quickly impressed about the high level of Japanese people were using. I was a little bit rusty from not taking Japanese classes. I took a gap year between Middlesex community college and Umass Amherst because I wanted a break and to travel. During my gap year, I got to go to Japan with my brother for the first time. It was fun speaking Japanese but I will say that I got more out of it on my second round in Japan in 2023. I have been journaling in Japanese since the spring semester of Umass Amherst during my senior year of college and watching anime in Japanese as well to help me learn the language. Fall semester Japanese was difficult but I learned a lot and now that I know Japanese, I really wanted to go back and apply the language skills I acquired over the years through hard work, studying, and dedication to the language. After my Japan 2023 trip, I played my first game in Japanese completely which was the Nintendo switch game Pokemon Scarlet. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. I am continuing to work on my Japanese and studying it to this day. The goal is to be proficient in it if not fluent in Japanese because it is fun.



German: I got interested in learning German after watching a movie called "Sophie Scholl Final Days". They are a resistance group that defied Adolf Hitler through peaceful means. I learned some German from the movie because they talk in German and have English subtitles. It really inspired me to go to Germany one day, especially Munich. I learned about this resistance group while doing my social studies project during my sophomore year of high school and to this day, it interests me to this day. It wasn’t my first pick initially in 2019 and waited until later to start learning the language. I used Duolingo to learn some German. I learned that German has some similarities to English and there are things that you can guess what it means based on your knowledge of English but that is not always a given. When I got back into learning German, it was as If I never took a break because I still understood it. Wein means wine for example. I listen to a couple of songs in German. That is awesome too. The hope is to be able to form sentences in German, speak German, and have a great vocabulary. I have a ways to go though.


All Languages: All of the languages I am interested in, I always write in the respective languages for traveling. I think it is a fun way to learn the language and talk about your experience in a different language. I find it helpful to use a pen name that you use for the respective language because it is helpful to stay in the zone. This was especially true when I was taking Japanese classes because I did not want to put my real name out there. For Japanese class at Umass, there were enough similarities to my name that I just want them to use my pen name that I used for learning Japanese and it helped me get into the zone and it helped me not get confused with the other names that sound just like my name.


Languages that I was learning but is not a current interest:


Korean: It is not a current interest but I did try to learn Korean at some point. It wasn’t interesting enough to keep to it but it was interesting to see how it is different from the other languages that I was learning. I thought about getting into it because I had an interest in Korean pop music but I did not find it to be worth it in the end. 


Chinese: As a Chinese American, it is important to know some Chinese. It is the very first foreign language that I was learning. It is a very difficult language and it never really made me all that interested in the language. I had a great teacher, but it didn’t interest me. Although it is a language I should know seeing how it is a big business language that is used seeing how we get a lot of our business deals and supplies from China. I went back to China and did not know enough Chinese to be able to speak with any of the natives. This did not interest me into learning Chinese but it was important to know something about it from a perspective of someone who is born from China. I remember a little bit of Chinese but none of it is good enough to hold a conversation to be really useful. It is true that I do have a Chinese middle name that I can use if I change my mind about learning the language.


End message: I hope you get to learn a foreign language. There are a lot of cognitive benefits and benefits for just communicating overall. It is also because I am learning languages that I made new friends. I hope you see it as an opportunity. Just because I like it doesn't mean it is for you. I recommend it. I hope you enjoy this blog!



 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page