12/10/2023 0 Comments Anki languageWhile 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.
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