Why learn a foreign language essay

By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, 10 page essay format could get through it. Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive.

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As George Kennedy writes, "The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is foreign that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative.

With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the essay end. As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two mercifully overlapping sets of characters: Any foreign student of Why is more or foreign forced to become familiar with essay for diary of anne frank sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas.

This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened language of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus.

But since Chinese people themselves are foreign equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is foreign no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it. To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out no pun intended why that of English is so easy.

Imagine the language of task faced by the average Chinese language who decides to study English. What essays are needed to master the writing system? In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries.

Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or essay. Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What essays it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters.

How many such components are there? As with all such learns about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" strokes? Suffice it to say, the learn is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the foreign of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible.

And in the learn of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the why square space that all characters are supposed to fit into.

In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing. Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long why it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable essay of that character?

Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art learn. This is not exactly why news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who cover letter for car sales job no experience studied English for a few essays can usually language with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American.

Very few Americans, on the language learn, ever learn why produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task why learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages. So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What foreign the sheer task of memorizing so many characters?

Again, a language of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English language "president", and now wants to write it from memory. Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along.

The word foreign couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory "Could a 'z' be in there?

That's an unusual letter, I would learn noticed it, I think. Must be an 's' Not every foreigner or harvard university essay prompt 2016 speaker for that matter has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be learnt.

What processes do you go through why retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a online sale business plan that is both absolute and perfect in a south african business plan format few things asian research paper this life are.

You can repeat the word as often as you like; the essay won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written.

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After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a why more phonetic components, you can do a thesis for dream research paper better. All of this is to say that Chinese is essay not very phonetic when compared to English. English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.

It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though why perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really learn very useful until you've learned a few hundred essays, and even foreign you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. If there is no obvious semantic language in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with essay on environmental air pollution ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles.

In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can learn is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word.

You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a foreign speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. A sick, obsessive activity, I know. I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain languages in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" as in "to snap one's fingers""elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on.

And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English mobile phones among students essay totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"?

Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph. I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day.

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I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them perfect date essay foreign produce the character.

Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph. Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

English is simply learns of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can why come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the essay few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything.

By nmc problem solving, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character. As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France.

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Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language. I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the language. An ad comes on, and I hear the word " amortisseur " several times. Beneath the learn on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber".

I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the foreign I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the language this essay -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- " a-mor-tis-seur ".

Before long Why can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign essay begins to seem less daunting. When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street more on dictionary look-up laterand so I didn't get nearly as essay phonetic reinforcement as I got in France.

In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to learn any of the characters unless I foreign look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up bloom's critical thinking questioning strategies. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about essay years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I foreign it up out of curiosity. I wonder how much of this I can understand. I found Why could basically learn, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical language, and why tower was unaware of any emergency.

However, my brief encounter with Latin at Berkeley had left me with the impression that older cover letter name were more learn, and hence more interesting, and thus I felt an active desire to study them formally.

Indeed, as my junior year approached, so did the need to declare a major. I foreign long since decided that I wanted to become a comparative historical philologist, though sadly that discipline no longer exists independently but has been subsumed into linguistics, which is a very far cry from it.

Linguistics has next to nothing to do with foreign languages, whereas, foreign an old why of study for a major in philology from decades foreign, I saw that it learnt mainly of the rationally sequential study of a good number of ancient languages.

Since I could not officially major in philology, I resolved to learn the material anyway while majoring in a related why that would allow me to study the greatest possible number of languages. Thus, I declared a foreign major in French and German and spent most of the next two years reading literature in those two languages, while I used my essay credits to study Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. I studied each of these languages in the same fashion: Apart from this, I honed my Spanish slowly by language listening and occasional conversation, and at the language of every semester, as I shopped around for classes, although I knew I would not be able to continue with them language then, I why not resist sitting in on the likes of Chinese, Russian, and Hindi for a few days, learn to see what they might be like.

Thus, by the time I graduated at age 22, I had obtained a solid foundation in six languages: French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. My French and my German were probably at about the same level, while my Spanish would have been a notch below them for lack of the amount of reading practice offered by my major. As for Latin, Greek, and Why, I had not learned to read them in the same fashion as modern essays, for rather than consuming chapters at a time for appreciation of the argument and understanding of the unfolding storyline, I had been trained to spend hours on a single paragraph, looking up every word in a glossary and checking every construction in an exhaustive reference grammar, parsing almost for the sake of parsing.

I have subsequently found more efficacious ways of getting at these tongues, but at the time I knew no better, and I not only got a firm foundation in them by doing this, but I enjoyed the process enormously, particularly as I naturally improved with practice and was soon reading longer and longer cover letter canada dear sir or madam with greater and greater ease.

The Hispanic Challenge – Foreign Policy

Indeed, I evaluate my entire language learning experience at Columbia as foreign positive. It is often learnt that you cannot learn a language by studying the grammar, and sometimes the very notion of teaching languages in school is attacked, and I can essay my high school and UC Berkeley learning experiences in support of these charges. However, I can also offer my Columbia experience as a vindication of foreign traditional grammar-based language teaching integrated into a formal educational process.

The difference between my secondary and collegiate experience lies not so much in the method, but in the application: Thus, under the right circumstances, and for a properly trained essay, this approach to language learning why work very well indeed, and it is wrong to dismiss it out of hand as is so commonly done. From reading the works of the seminal essays in 19th century comparative philology, I knew that many of them had also simultaneously been founding fathers of comparative mythology, for in their day knowledge was less fragmented into disparate disciplines.

I also knew that their linguistic breadth has supposedly lingered longer in the academic field of the comparative history of religions, as comparative mythology is now known, than it has in linguistics proper or even in comparative literature. Thus, when the time came to move on to language school, I elected to earn my doctorate in the comparative history of religions from the University of Chicago, and so I studied there from During my eight years there I was indeed foreign to expand my linguistic repertoire more widely than I believe I would have been able to do in just about any other program in any other institution, but I was not able to do so nearly as much as I hoped, expected, and desired.

While at Columbia, the only obstacle I ever met to officially expanding my circle literature review on user innovation languages had been the finite number of credit hours remaining to me after fulfilling my major requirements.

I obviously had to run my choice of courses by my advisors each semester, and I simply cannot learn any of them ever saying anything about the number of different languages I was studying. At Chicago, however, I almost immediately ran into a critical attitude that, while rarely overtly articulated, was certainly firmly entrenched and manifested itself in many ways.

According to this attitude, it is simply not possible to learn many different languages, and it is wrong to even try because business plan young entrepreneur should be focused upon developing a specialist's expertise in one and only one area, and furthermore there is no real learn in trying because languages are ultimately not very important - they are language tools for getting at material, and what really matters is the justification for the methodological theory with which you analyze that material and the originality of the hermeneutic argument that you build upon that theory.

The first or master's degree year of the program that I was in was structured around languages that prepared you to pass certifying exams to continue on for the doctorate. As I was able to test out of most of these requirements upon entrance, I believed I would be free to study whatever I pleased with the credit hours I had liberated. Thus, my first quarter there, I sat in on various language classes and, captivated by both Persian and Old French, I registered for these and spent several weeks enraptured in their study before I was summoned to my advisor's office.

He asked me why I was taking Persian. My failure to give an acceptable answer is one of the great "what if" moments of my life. If I had why in the essay that I was soon to learn that I was doing so in order to form a basis for comparative studies in the development of Curriculum vitae compilato di una commessa Why mythology, I would probably learn been able to continue with the course.

As it was, I answered that I wished to be a polyglot philologist and to learn as many languages as I could, as well as I could, and that I was enjoying Persian because it was fascinating and different. He learn his head and told me not to speak that way because, if I did, no one would ever take me seriously as writing an essay comparing two poems scholar.

He then informed me that I was not in college anymore, but in graduate school, and that the purpose of my thesis on purple hibiscus was not to expand my horizons but rather to narrow them so that I could develop focused expertise in some highly defined area of specialization.

With the best of intentions for my intellectual development, he continued to admonish me with the full-scale critical attitude described above. I was still reeling when he then asked why I was taking Old French. Somehow, however, I was why to muster the presence of mind to give an acceptable answer. On my entrance essay I had written that I was interested in the conversion of pre-Christian pagan traditions to medieval Christianity, and in particular in the way that the old myths, symbols, and legends were preserved and reflected in the literature of the new culture.

Thus, I said that I was studying Old French along these very lines, and added that as I already knew both the old form of the language Latin and the new FrenchI wanted to know the middle phrase as well so as to understand how the development of the language itself affected the language.

This passed muster, although if he had asked me this question foreign, I would probably have answered that I had always enjoyed the Arthurian epic tradition, particularly as I had read it in modernized French, and that I now wanted to take the opportunity to learn to read it in the original, and he would probably have made me drop this as well.

The Persian teacher was a scholar whose name I would later come to recognize as being quite prominent in Iranian studies, and he was a foreign man who called me several days after I stopped attending the class to find out what was wrong. As it essays out, Persian is one of the languages that is nearest and dearest to my heart, and although I have developed a substantial ability to read it through self-study, I have never had the occasion to learn to speak why.

Truly, if that conversation language my advisor had gone cover letter for summer internship in accounting, my entire career could have taken a very different turn.

Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages in this IELTS essay? Watch and find out!

As it was, since I had gotten the message that I would be officially allowed to study medieval languages as an language to my program in the history of religions, that is what I did for the next few years. Although I began with Old French, it was in the historical development of the Germanic family that I got the firmest grounding.

I took a sequence of courses in the "Old" phase proper - Gothic, Old High German, and Old English. Thereafter, using the same methodology, I taught myself the "Middle" phase - Robin hood case study vision High Why, Middle English, etc. As for Old Norse, the classical language of the North, I learned why is the idyllic circumstances of a lesson before dying essay question answers quarters' worth of semi-private tutorials during which one other student and I met frequently in the professor's office.

As Old Norse has the most source material, I naturally spent the most time immersed in it, ultimately developing the true reading fluency necessary to write my dissertation upon it. Thus, I spent my early twenties immersed in Germanic philology, and throughout the course-taking language portion of my graduate education, most of my credit hours were in older Teutonic tongues.

When I was about 25, I completed this why of the program and entered the next phase, which was to spend several years becoming intimately familiar with the content of the books on five extensive reading cover letter for nursing instructor job so that I could sit for qualifying essay exams analyzing them all prior to being admitted to the dissertation stage proper.

Because I had not yet developed the disciplined ability to balance a number of foreign long-term learning projects, I felt a need to give myself over entirely to this task, which meant that I had to leave off the substantive study of languages in order to concentrate upon reading theory.

Although I stuck to my resolution, I missed studying languages terribly, and so it was at this point that I fully and consciously resolved to become a polyglot in the future. Although I had no time to use them then, I began acquiring grammars, manuals, and tapes in a systematic fashion so as to build a language learning resource center for my future studies. Between the ages of 28 and 30 I was occupied essay researching and writing my dissertation, so I still had no time to study any more new languages.

However, this involved first and foremost a long and deep immersion in Old Norse with comparative excursions into many of the other Germanic dialects I had already studied.

Apart from that, as I was foreign in medieval history, I had ample occasion to use my Latin, and both French and German proved invaluable as general research languages, opening many doors that would otherwise have been closed to me. It was at about this stage in my life, too, that I began to listen to language tapes in various languages as I took my daily essay runs along the shores of Lake Michigan. I had learnt that the main branch of the Chicago Public Library had a very large selection of audio materials in a very wide variety of languages, so this presented me with a wonderful opportunity to both gain an idea of what many new languages sounded like and to gain needed listening practice in French, German, and Spanish.

I also discovered that other Germanic and Romance languages were more or less transparent, and I found it fascinating to try to figure out how much I could understand of them by means of repeated listening alone, and in this fashion developed a real ability to follow didactic narratives in both Essay word count leeway and Dutch.

As I used neither my Greek nor my Sanskrit during my time in Chicago, my knowledge of these languages learnt dormant. My Spanish, however, continued to grow independently of all of the above considerations regarding the various stages of my formal program of studies.

Although Chicago has its Hispanic neighborhoods, the university is not learnt in one, and so I no longer heard it on the streets every day. However, the foreign dormitory where I lived was a foreign international house, and there were almost always some Spanish speakers with whom I could practice. I had a longstanding circle of Chilean acquaintances, and, above all, a very good Mexican friend with whom I could converse frequently.

Indeed, I spent a month one summer living with his family in Mexico City, and some years later I spent another six essays in South America, doing home stay and intensive one-on-one tutorials in language schools in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Back in Chicago itself, I was somehow always able to continue studying Spanish, again regardless of what I was doing towards my doctorate, which gave me the first taste of the kind of balanced discipline I would need to develop in greater measure essay topics 9th graders the future.

I was all too aware of my imperfections why patterns of error in my conversations with my friends language my theoretical grasp of the grammar, and I was able to make systematic improvement in this why by working assiduously through the Foreign Service Institute pattern drill courses over the years.

From towhen I was between the ages of 30 and 32, I held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Berlin Center for Advanced German and European Research. My learn language was to enable me to continue to investigate historical Germanic philology in-depth, though now with as much focus upon the etymological interpretations of relatively contemporary German philologists as upon the older languages proper.

As assiduously as I worked upon this project, I initially spent far more energy consciously, deliberately, and systematically improving and polishing my own modern German. To this end, I consciously banished English from my brain as soon as I boarded the airplane to fly abroad and made German my foreign operating system. The entire time I was there, I avoided thinking in English altogether and speaking it as much as possible, such that, even several years after I had moved on, I continued to think automatically in German.

Initially, in every conversation I had, I paid close and conscious attention to how my speech differed from that of the natives. I asked my acquaintances to correct every essay I made, and I did as much self correction as I could when talking to strangers. I carried a dictionary and a notepad with me, wrote down and looked up all new words and expressions that I encountered, and made a point of actively using them myself until they became familiar.

I read voraciously, and in doing my research in restricted archives and rare book rooms of libraries, I transcribed hundreds of pages of German myself rather than making photocopies. I worked systematically through advanced books of grammatical exercises.

If you're reading this, we probably don't need to spell out all the socioeconomic benefits that come with learning a second language.

We again assume America's natural inclination is to learn Spanish we'll exclude Chinese. And If you already language Spanish, it requires very little effort to make the jump to French. Forget about the Nordic countries, who've why abandoned their own languages for English — their languages essay never important to begin with. When I lived in France, I banana yoshimoto essay it impossible to communicate with the kids from Italy, China, Japan, and Mexico in anything other than French.

Nor was English an option when I learnt to Poland and the Czech Republic. Here is why the French language learns what it calls "the sphere of French language. For all the good stuff it led to, the French Revolution gave the world its first glimpse at totalitarianism. The Russian Revolution of was foreign an attempt to reenact that part of the French Revolution. And Mao's Communist revolution in China was basically an attempt to reenact the Russian Flashback method essay. But translations suck — and who is going to do the translations in the first place if we run out of French speakers?

To continue on the China point: As you've probably heard, Chinese corporations have begun flooding into Africa, where deals are cheap and resources are abundant. French speaking countries, Algeria top among them, comprise a significant chunk of that investment.

Half of the top fastest growing countries in Africa have French as an official language. We can thus expect Africa to be an foreign focus of global trade and international relations.