introduction to language learning 1

 

Dear Erik,

        I recently take a course called ‘introduction to language learning’, and one of the tasks of this course is to create a blog to record my experiences and thoughts during this class. I am going to start my blog by sharing my own journey of learning a foreign language. My mother tongue is Chinese and my second language is English. My mother is the first person who introduces English to me. When I was a toddler, my mom would read me some English stories to tuck me in; even though I did not understand the meaning of those stories, I was always amused by my mother’s vivid intonation. I also watched a lot of cartoons in English such as Mr. Bean and The Smurfs. Those stories and cartoons were quite important to my childhood memories as well as my journey as an English learner. Later on, I started to learn English at school at the age of 9; teachers in school taught English in a traditional way, starting from the alphabets and then moved on to grammar and vocabulary. Most of the learning in school was about writing and reading English, there was little chance for me to practice my speaking and listening. However, I managed to practice both speaking and listening at home by talking to my mom in English and watch a lot of English movies. To me, watching movies was a great way to learn English. Movies are much more interesting than the boring lectures given in school, which gave me more zeal in learning English. Moreover, there are a lot of different accents in different movies such as American accent, British accent, and Indian accents, etc. I was able to pick up those accents in a short time by watching movies. When I watch movies, I love to memorize the lines of my favorite characters and imitate them; I would try my best to sound just like them, and this is how I practice my speaking. Many people say that you can’t practice listening by watching movies if you turn the subtitle on. Well, I have to say that’s partially true. For me, I like to turn on both English and Chinese subtitles so that I know what word has been spoken and what the meaning of that word is. This method is very useful for me; I can not only practice listening but also learn some new words. Apart from movies, I also watch a lot of YouTube videos that talk about slang and some fun facts of English, this helps me know more about this language and therefore I have more interest in learning it. Attached are some interesting YouTube videos I really recommend people to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvDvESEXcgE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kDzdJ07Vho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aXmNle560k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTslqcXsFd4

Above are my experiences in learning English. There are still a lot of ways to learn a language and those ways differ from person to person; there is no absolute right way; the most important thing is to find the way that is most suitable for us.