Jamie Hartford

C&T 598
Dr. Cho & GTA: Annette
5/25/17
Four Languages: Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean

Learning languages is a big part of my life. I love learning languages and I feel like it is

very important for a person to be able to speak more than one languages. Whether it is on the

job or travel in general, you have no idea when you might have to use it. I am very proud to say

I know at least three languages, other than my mother language, Chinese (L1). I believe that

languages can bring opportunities for a person, like more job opportunities, know more than just

ones own culture, and most importantly, foreigners appreciate it when you know their language.

While learning languages, I have also traveled to three different countries so it opens my eyes to

the world. A lot of people wonder how in the world I can speak that many languages, but as I

learn one language after another, it became a lot easier because many Asian languages are related

to each other. I am not finished with learning languages, I have plan to learn French, which is

another very popular language and Spanish as well. In this paper, I will examine how I learned

my first language, Chinese (L1); second language, English (L2); third language, Japanese (L3)

and fourth language, Korean (L4).

I was born and raised in China until I was thirteen years old. When I was a little girl,

about six years old, the orphanage had inside school, so everybody had to attend it. As a young

child, I was eager to learn and I always like to copy those Chinese characters over and over, I

tried to make them neat and pretty. But when I was in second grade, which was the year that the

orphanage chose two students from each grade levels to receive public school education, and I

was not chosen because I looked different than the others. Therefore, for the first 13 years of my

life I did not receive a proper education. While in the orphanage, they stopped schooling us after

second grade. Thus every day, we would either play or watch TV. There was one thing that I
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loved to do when I was little. Some of us would pretend we were in a shop and thats how we

learned how to read and communicate with each other. Also, I tried to learn words by reading

the public-school books of my friends. Later, while I was in college, I relearned Chinese mainly

for the reading and writing. I practiced writing journals in Chinese and our teachers would give

us books to read if we wanted to. Which I was very excited about.

Luckily, I was adopted by an American family when I was thirteen years old. Since, I did

not have the opportunity to go to school while I was in China, as soon as I arrived in the USA,

my mom let me go to a public school. I spent about six weeks in the 6th grade in the ELL

program. While in school, the teachers taught me some English words and gave me puzzle to

work on. My mom once told me, when I first arrived here I loved to talk, in fact she said I talked

24/7. I would talk to strangers or anybody that would let me talk. Furthermore, she said, every

time the school assigned a vocabulary list, I would copy those words over and over until I

memorized it. Besides all those, my mom also put vocabulary words all around the house.

Every time I saw them, I would read it and try to memorize them. My mom put a lot of effort

into my English learning. She told me, after three months in America I could communicate

pretty well. But there was a price I had to pay, I was not afraid to practice English, but I was

made fun of by American students and ELL students as well for not being able to pronounce

English correctly. Over the years, I became more scared whenever I made mistake. Even after I

graduate from high school, my English was still not very good. Therefore, I had to attend ESL

classes at Johnson County Community College (JCCC). The ESL teacher actually taught us

English grammar and how to write properly. English has so many rules that made it hard to

learn it. So, we would write journals every day in class for about 15 minutes. Reading has not
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been my forte, I always have to force myself to do it. Besides reading assignments, I do not ever

read out side of class. I am still learning English and hope to get better and better at it.

When I was in second year of college, because I hate history so much, the only way to

avoid taking history courses was to take three semester of language courses. Therefore, I chose

Japanese (L3) as my foreign language since JCCC did not have Korean. At the time, my friend

was taking it and I thought it would be fun to do it because of Kanji. I went into Japanese classes

without any knowledge about Japanese or the country for that matter. While I was studying

Japanese, I used some of the same methods that I had used to learn English. First, I would copy

the vocabulary over and over until I memorize it. When I was learning the grammar part, I

would copy the grammar points into a note book and over the course I had my own Japanese

grammar book. First year Japanese at JCCC was fairly easy for me. I did not have to stress a lot

and I did fine. Also, what helped me the most while learning Japanese was PowerPoint. I am a

visual learner, so I learn better when someone reads to me and during lecture, PowerPoint is my

best friend. Japanese 108, at KU was so hard for me, because my professor did not use any

visual aids. No matter what I did I would not get a good score on the test. Then I thought, I

must be really bad at learning languages. I tried to ask my Japanese teacher for help, but she

was not willing to help much. I also started watching Japanese drama, but it was too fast for me.

My biggest problem was the grammar part of it. Basic Japanese grammar follows SOV, so it

was very hard. I remembered I had to always remember to put verbs at the end of the sentence.

Verses to Chinese and English, they follow the same rule, SVO. Japanese is related to Chinese

in that Japanese also uses Kanji, therefore while other kids had to work hard on Kanji, I had an

easy time. My language teacher told me, that it would help if I go to Japan and be immerse in

the language. KU also offers the language table; but it did fit my schedule. So, I signed myself
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up to go to Japan that summer of 2015. While in Japan, I had many opportunities to

communicate with Japanese students and the local people. Also, the Japanese teachers were very

helpful, and would explain things over and over until we understood it. Japanese teachers used

white board visual aids to explain things, which helped me greatly. Also, every day I would try

to find one Japanese person to have conversation with, which helped with my listening. I

continue taking Japanese 204 and 208 at KU, the professor was amazing because of her I started

to fall in love with Japanese more and more. During her class, she used many grammar

examples and she had us practice in class. I had a much easier time in Japanese 204 and 208.

Then came the moment I have been waiting for all along. I transferred to KU in the

spring of 2015, and we cannot start a language at mid-year, I started learning Korean (L4) in the

fall of 2015. I was very excited because I had been waiting to study Korean for years. Korean

was fairly an easy for me because when I was in junior high I started watching Korean dramas,

and had already been exposed to listening to the language for a while. Japanese and Korean have

the same grammar structure, so all I had to do was, take what I had learned in Japanese and apply

it to Korean grammar. But last summer, I went to Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.

Sogang University focused more on communication and it helped me enormously with writing as

well. On the other hand, studying Korean at Sogang was a tremendously harder. The midterm

and final consisted of conversational writing and reading, which was my weakest area; I was

very good at grammar and listening. Since I am weakest at reading and writing. I practice

reading by going on Daum and reading about my favorite actress and actors news or drama

news. For writing, I try to write journals in Korean. I am getting better, but I still have a long

way to go.
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In Conclusion, even though I have studied three languages other than Chinese, I would

say I am trilingual in Chinese (L1), English (L2) and Korean (L4). I dropped classes in Japanese

because I started learning Chinese again in order to keep my mother language, and to be able to

read Chinese as well. Additionally, I want to learn Korean because I really love the language

and I hope to become a Korean professor in the future. I feel like if I want to learn another

language later, it will be an easy task because I have experienced learning different languages

and language study methods.