1.1 The Mentality of Learning a New Language: An Approach Recalled

In the early childhood, we were raised in the traditional ways bounded by the success of our parents and older siblings. When the methodology of teaching became a formulated treachery, there were little spaces for one innocent kid thinking out of the box to challenge the ambiguity of derated logic. As we started to speak in our mother tongue, we took whatever presented in front of us: understanding dialects and resonances while mimicking and mocking the phrases. That is the process of how we learn a new language, just like how we learn to walk, to sit, to listen, to speak, to express our emotion, and to be psychologically steady.

Unless there is an outlier in the field that we can rely on, the pathology of learning does not change in our early days. Whether it is science, sociology, liberal arts, or mathematics 101, the knowledge-based general education aid for children development towards their designated career path and scholarship. I agree having an anticipated learning path enables good social contributions and achievements in the field. Over the years, and I wish everyone would continue their goal-chasing dream to become successful. Don’t hide yourself in the underdog shelf, look it up to your passion and physicality that makes you a powerful mankind. There are clear-cuts about accuracy, proven theories, correct-or-the incorrect, and there are qualified judges. Particularly in nowadays’ internet world, everyone can be a judge with their sharp borderless opinions.

Should the learning curve of a new language be linear without meandering? I do not think so. Native languages are sometime referred as our mother tongue. The accessibility of learning a language depends on your living environment: your home, your family and friends, your teachers, your community. You may come across one argument with a stranger one day and swearing back with foul languages. Oh, now you learn to speak dirty! For your first learning language, the learning curve comes naturally with a functional brain and decent amount of memory storage. Communication should come instantly and spontaneously. Have you ever taken a moment thinking about the formation of words and phrases in your mother tongue, and wondering about the learning structure from a second language learners’ perspective? (Other people would come to you and ask about the vowel and character of words that you have no clue about). Things appear to be shocking to you.

Learning a new language should correspond to your mentality of bravery but not of the accuracy of usage in your educational toolkit. There displaced two sides of a flip coin: learning in your surroundings or learning from recognition. Let me take Chinese as an example. Many other Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese are embedded with some Chinese characterisation in their language system; however, they are systemically separated (segregated) between speaking and writing. As a second language learner, teachers and books are most likely to begin teaching the so-called fundamentals- the phonetic systems and tones composed that are characterised from English. Then you are taught to build up the vocabulary list by memorising that Chinese character as well as the pronunciation in a separate way. Make sure you would pronoun it right so that you can pass the proficiency exam!  Now there is a real-world problem: can we learn convertibly from the decomposition of the Chinese character (orthography) to the pronunciation of the word or phrase? The answer is no! There is no other way around. The only thing is to build up your toolkit when it comes to you. English inherited elements from the Indo-European Language family tree (German), and the same applies to some special characters in common usage while having grammar and conjugations at the other end. All you have to do is to step outside the box and feel the love of the language yourself.

From my experience, maintaining a high level of mentality might not be easy, and it could be easily defeated. Internet and the uprising Artificial Intelligence eases a lot of burden in learning a new language. Under the hook, the convenience is unbiase providing for your own interest, but there exists a lot of noise aggregator. When I talked about science previously, there is a clear cut to the correct-and-incorrect. But sorry, language in my opinion should have an innovative path within itself. When I started English as a subject, I was taught from the fundamentals: first the subject verbs object, basic vocabulary from the prolong memorisations, grammar, tenses, tone of voice etc. When I was first in elementary and then high school student in Asia, all the English exams were based on the knowledge of grammar and tense in ONE way, meaning there was no other usage determination in teachers’ mind, and had neither favour nor taste in the written essay. Not so by taking a free glide, reading an English Literatures was something that teachers could not stand for. You could almost take one out to argue with them, and they were ashamed to be “English Purist”. It was just a pure waste of time.

I got very lucky when I found out more about English in a correct way. In my undergraduate and later postgraduate years, I discovered different levels and categories of English usage. For example, there was a tyranny in vocabulary (the higher you go to definition applied would be narrower); words had its own form of composition (Prefixes, Suffixes, Base Words, and Root Words); sentence structure and grammar could be playful towards the author’s feeling of expression; punctuation played a critical role in creative writing such as poetry, novels and dramas. There are more but I cannot illustrate them all in this article.

Coming back to this article, mentality is what driving you through the learning process of a new language. Your discouragement and low self-esteem can easily drag you down when someone comes onto you proving that you are wrong in some technical ways. Indeed, you should ask yourself if they were relevant to the learning process or not. Were there any other good alternatives? I am confident that my readers will open it up to themselves. There is no right or wrong especially when it comes to learning a new language. I wish you all success in many ways.

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