I am preparing to take my 1st level exam for Chinese next week. It has been never so frustrating. It just doesn’t get into you.
I think it is probably because, it is not related to either my social or professional work. I am unable to relate it to anything which is happening around me on daily basis.
I am also taking to complete my Black Belt training and Lean expert certification..........I am very confident I will make it. But Chinese learning is really getting into my nerves. Like always I went into internet to find answers. I found below link giving really really realistic reasons why it is hard to learn new language.
http://www.helium.com/items/1505424-why-learning-languages-is-so-hard
Than I wanted to understand if it is about any language or just about Chinese. Almost every article recognizes Chinese as one of the most difficult language to learn.
http://www.wisegeek.com/which-are-the-most-difficult-languages-to-learn.htm
Age ( ia m 39 years) certinly is not helping me either. I am already so biased and so much pre defined perceptions have taken over my brains. It is getteing tough to push something completely new
But I was proved wrong with very scientific argument in one of the article Please read this if you are really interested in leaerning new language. I should have read this 10 months back.(http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html)
Why do children learn languages well, when even adults who want to learn them have trouble with them? Innate abilities aside, children have a number of powerful advantages:
They can devote almost their full time to it. Adults consider half an hour's study a day to be onerous.
Their motivation is intense. Adults rarely have to spend much of their time in the company of people they need to talk to but can't; children can get very little of what they want without learning language(s).
Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind, but it was most memorably expressed by David Berlinski (in Black Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny.
And...
One reserch article proclaims (http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/87-9dig.htm) :
Can older adults successfully learn foreign languages? Recent research is providing increasingly positive answers to this question. The research shows that:
there is no decline in the ability to learn as people get older;
except for minor considerations such as hearing and vision loss, the age of the adult learner is not a major factor in language acquisition;
the context in which adults learn is the major influence on their ability to acquire the new language.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, older adults can be good foreign language learners. The difficulties older adults often experience in the language classroom can be overcome through adjustments in the learning environment, attention to affective factors, and use of effective teaching methods.
Advice for language learners ( I will start doing it now!!!) .(http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html)
Read books in the target language.
Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.)
Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things.
Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it.
Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself.
Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it.
Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends.
Seek out opportunities to work using the language.
Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language.
Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language.
Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.)
I am bit more relived now............as I have reasons to tell myself why I am struggling....more importantly how I can really improve on language learning skill. Though I can not use much of this for next week test. I will implement this for my next level.
I am going to do it. I will ensure I will learn Chinese good enough to read news paper by June 2010. It is a promise to myself.
I know it is tough.....but definitely possible.
