Many people believe that learning a foreign language is a very difficult task.
What are the most difficult things about learning a foreign language?
What is the best way to overcome them?
Explain and include your personal experience or knowledge of these problems.
Learning a new language is indeed a herculean task for many especially when it comes to adults. This essay will explore the factors which make learning a new language challenging and will also suggest some potent solutions to deal with the same.
To begin with, grown-ups particularly find it difficult to learn foreign vernaculars because as they grow, their brains lose that flexibility to adapt to any language and become hard-wired to specific languages that they speak or know since childhood. Moreover, the level of intelligence in an individual also matters as some people are blessed with superior cognition and hence are better equipped for learning an alien language. Also learning coherence and cohesion is the hardest part as one can learn vocabulary and rules of a language but putting them in order to make a grammatically correct sentence comes with a lot of struggle and practice. People also tend to apply their native tongue’s grammar and characteristics to make sense of an identically structured foreign language. Research conducted by Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the U.S.A. states that the brain affects one’s thoughts and perceptions and it alters the way one thinks, hence our mother tongue tends to dominate our neural system which makes adhering to other languages an ambitious task.
To cope with this, firstly, although people may feel silly when they make mistakes while learning and practising a language, they must not feel bad about it or pretend to be perfect as everyone learns by making mistakes. An excellent approach is to uptake some other activity or skill and take instructions in the language to be learnt. For instance, in California ‘apprentice’ programmes are run in which apprentices pair up with the speakers of native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instructions exclusively in the native language. After a certain time, learners become well-versed with that language. Furthermore, aspirants must also naturally try to get used to listening and understanding the language by watching foreign movies with descriptions in the form of subtitles in a known language through applications like Netflix as by doing so they come across various slangs, range of vocabulary and grammatical structures of sentences. It is an interesting way to grasp a language.
In summary, one needs to be motivated enough to get used to and memorize foreign languages. The advent of social media has eased this process as folks can converse with the native speakers and gain a lot of knowledge by making friends with them. Travelling overseas can also be of great help for becoming familiar with the international language.
Vocabulary:
Herculean task: very difficult
potent: very effective
vernacular: the form of speech spoken by a particular group of people
adapt: changing ideas or behaviour
hard-wired: behaving in a particular way
cognition: the way of using brain processes
coherence: the way in which two things go together
cohesion: the state of sticking together
perceptions: the way in which someone thinks and feels
adhere: stick
ambitious: having a strong wish
pretend: To claim or allege insincerely or falsely
apprentice: someone who is ready to work on less salary to acquire skill
well-versed: having a great amount of knowledge about something
aspirants: candidate
grasp: understanding
advent: discovery
converse: talk
