I left for Korea in August of 2011, and spent the next year in the country. These books by and large didn't work, since the topics were just incredibly uninteresting (no, I don't give a flying rat's f*** what the word for apple is - I don't eat them in America and I'm certainly not eating them in Korea). I knew by then that I was going to be living there, so I bought a few books, most notably Elementary Korean. While working on Google+ Search during the summer of 2011, I was simultaneously trying to maintain and increase my Korean skill. After the class, I probably had about 500 words in my vocabulary, two dozen grammar patterns, and a limited ability to listen and speak the language. I made quite a bit of progress in the language, albeit at the speed of a university education studying part-time. This class provided the bedrock for further study, and was taught by one of the best teachers I have had in almost any subject in my entire education. Back in 2010, I took a one-year introductory Korean language class at Stanford. In short, it's really hard to learn languages as an adult, although the problems are much more solvable than your idiot psychologist might suggest. Why are all materials geared to eating food in restaurants or checking a book out at a library? Why not political debates, or economic debates, or something more substantial and sophisticated? More on this below. While kids may be able to pick up idiom and words faster than I can (maybe), I also have intelligence and a cosmopolitan perspective. Most materials are terrible, and are not targeted at adults. The third challenge is one I blame on the language learning industry. I live my life in many ways by the motto, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." That is 100x in a foreign language, where asking to go to the bathroom can elicit sniggers from young kids due to a lack of proper idiom. 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.
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.