In Taiwan, my landlord spoke Chinese, my teachers spoke Chinese, my friends spoke Chinese, the check-out guy at 7-11 spoke Chinese… I was completely IMMERSED in Chinese- 24/7! I don’t think I realized how incredibly important speech practice was until I got back home to the states. I like this.” and it’s easy to avoid actually getting out there and COMMUNICATING with people. (Nerd girls FTW, party girls PWNED!) But that being said, for many people being alone in your room can often equal, “I’m not getting judged in here. That’s not to say getting in enough reading and writing practice isn’t important! On the contrary, it’s essential! When I was living abroad in Taiwan, I spent a fair amount of time alone in my room with my head stuck in a book. It’s much easier to sit at your local cafe, sipping on a cappuccino, writing down characters and reading textbook dialogues at your own slow-and-steady-wins-the-race pace. I know from personal experience how embarrassing it can be to misspeak, or that acute feeling of dread (or semi-paralysis) that overcomes your entire being when a native speaker asks a question you simply don’t understand. Improving upon one’s listening and speaking ability is scary because it usually involves human interaction, and there’s a lot more room for error there. Of course learning characters is a good thing and helps students gain some insight into Chinese culture, but this can often be at the expense of one’s listening/speaking skills. (Only 5,000 more characters to go ’til literacy- YES!) It’s easy to freak out and get bogged down by radicals and stroke order memorization. So if anyone is intent on becoming a serious learner of Chinese, it’s fairly normal to go through an intense phase of reading/writing panic. Thus when faced with the daunting prospect of learning a language like Japanese, Hindi or Arabic languages that all have writing systems completely different from that of Germanic or Latin languages, people tend to get a little overwhelmed.Ĭhinese, however, takes this whole language learning thing to new heights of crazy… Even though the languages mentioned above have alphabets that look completely foreign to native English speakers, they are STILL alphabets nonetheless! Even when it comes to learning a foreign language in school, our choices are often limited to Spanish or French-two languages that essentially use the same alphabet as English. Learning a language can be brutal especially those that aren’t comprised of Latin letters, which are what native English speakers are most familiar with.
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