How Years Of Language Learning Affects Your Brain

@fransmith3255 says:

LOL! The “What does the bilingual cat say?” joke completely cracked me up! 🤣🤣

All this makes complete sense with what is happening inside my head with learning my second language (Korean). I find that the best way to learn any word is to connect it with a situation, not a meaning. If I connect it with a situation, I’m also connecting with the emotions of that situation, I’m connecting it with how and when that word might be used and I’m connecting it with a powerful memory that acts as a hook. Of course, I record their meanings in English (usually with a number of phrases rather than words to trigger my memory) but I don’t connect them with a ‘meaning’. For example, Korean “망했다” (munghedda) means basically, “I screwed it up!”, but it’s connected in my head with a thing I actually did screw up, not with any English words, so that whenever I hear that word, that situation immediately flashes into my head and I feel the meaning. THESE are the words I just don’t really forget, unlike when I first started I simply remembered meanings of words directly connected to my native language, which just doesn’t work. All that does is connect the new language to the old one in it’s pathway so that you have to follow that path back through your old language – painstakingly translate everything through your old language – a pathway that never improves. Perhaps THIS is why school textbook learning just doesn’t really work – it teaches intellectually, like remembering a phone number – that’s a different kind of memory entirely. This is why story learning does work much better – particularly if you’re not living in the culture your language is spoken in – you can at least situate that word with the situation in the story while your brain slowly embeds that word in memory connected together with various usages over time. I often do this too with new words, not with Olly’s course, but with stories I listen to on YouTube. But those words inevitably end up being connected to my own life in some way eventually anyway. I suspect that the success one has in integrating a language into their own life is pretty essential to obtaining various levels of fluency. And I always try to use them if I can as soon as a situation presents itself. I’m constantly trying them out on my Korean friends, lol! 😂

In fact, this might be the only advantage for language beginners to living in the country that your new language is spoken. Living in my adopted country where I can actually hear the language everyday, in my experience, hasn’t really helped me learn the language faster at all. What it HAS done is enable me to make those situational connections (connections with emotions and situations and memories) within the culture that I’m living. All my hooks and memories of my words and connections are situated in my new culture. Had I learned my new language in my native culture I would have had to make connections with my memories and situations in THAT culture, which wouldn’t have worked near as well. As a beginner, living in the culture doesn’t help you much with becoming fluent faster at ALL, because you can’t have conversations or understand anything because you simply don’t know enough anyway. It’s only when you reach intermediate level that living in the culture that you are learning the language helps because you can start to have conversations and understand. What it DOES help you with is learning words and connecting them to the situations within that culture. The other thing is that a lot of words ONLY make sense in their own culture (as in Korean compared to English speaking cultures in general), so not knowing the culture would make it a lot more difficult to understand what many words mean if there is no real usage or existing word in your own culture.