learning a second language

I woke up at 7:30 to do a half hour English lesson with Alyssa, my 3rd grade-ish student from Korea. It's great seeing her English level improve. I've been teaching her pretty consistently for over a year now.

In the spirit of improving foreign language skills, I added Korean diary to the 30 day challenges.

Language acquisition is a tough thing to stay motivated about. My problem is that my goals are hazy at best and improvements are hard to measure.

And you can't learn much of any language in 30 days, despite what those annoying Pimsleur ads proclaim. And if you get discouraged and take some time off, you go backwards!

I was a mid/high achieving high school student, but Spanish was my worst subject. And that was by a HUGE margin. It was only by the mercy of the teacher that I didn't get straight Ds or Fs.

I used to think that I was just "bad at other languages," but I am now convinced that it was because I just never figured out how to learn a second language.

I'd like to go on for a really long time about my various theories on language acquisition (and by "my theories" I mostly mean ideas that other people have had that I read at some time), and I will. But I want to keep this post relatively short so that I can actually have something to say every day this month.

What I was trying to say before I got on a tangent is this: there are ways to break down the gargantuan goal of learning a language into bite-sized pieces.

Some ideas I have for future goals: watch a Korean drama or movie every day for 30 days, read X pages of a Korean novel every day for 30 days (so that I finish the novel by the end of the period), or "No English" for 30 days (I'm kind of terrified and excited about that one).