I am what Thomas Frank might call "the well-graduated" - a Stanford undergrad and a one-time Harvard PhD student. As I have argued on TechCrunch, primacy is key in education and certainly for language learners, but almost no adults have the time to make language training their sole focus.īeyond schedules though, I found one of the main blocks to learning languages has been my complete inhibition to making mistakes. Memorizing a language is nearly impossible when you also have to remember the inordinate amount of details required in any knowledge economy job. Adults are simply busier, and often have jobs. However, I can assess other difficulties.
It's hard for me to assess the truth of that (and frankly, they can take their pessimism and go f*** themselves). Child psychologists will tell you that the plasticity of the human brain declines by around 12 years old, making it significantly harder to learn a language later in life. Learning a language in your 20s is not like learning a language as a young kid. Given all of my previous years of language training, I came into learning Korean with a lot of self-awareness about my learning style. Over the years, I have studied French, Arabic, and Chinese, but eventually ended up spending significant time with Korean due to my life overseas.
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Like many, I love learning languages regardless of their specific utility - languages are windows into cultures that I can (usually) only enjoy from afar. Since then, I have spent hundreds of hours studying Anki flash cards, reading books and articles, taking classes, getting tutored, watching movies, and more to try to improve my skill. government that I was actually going - call it youthful confidence). (technically, I started studying months before hearing back from the U.S. I began in 2010 as I was preparing to be a Fulbright Researcher in South Korea. Backgroundįor the past five years or so, I have been studying the Korean language. I don't have answers, although I certainly have ideas. This is my journey trying to learn Korean, and slowly coming to the realization that our current learning tools are simply not adequate for the job.
It sort of sucks for kids, but it certainly sucks for adults.