Language Learning Through Rote Memorization: The Goal Of Learning Is To Learn, Not To Have Fun

"The Korean", of the popular "Ask a Korean" blog, moved to the US from South Korea when he was 16 years old, and mastered the English language very well, very quickly, and a lot more systematically than our previous "test subject". How did he do it? He says, on his blog:

"The myth of 'fun, immersive language learning' usually takes on this narrative: 'Children learn their first language nearly effortlessly. They do this by being constantly surrounded by the new language. So when learning a second language, you must surround yourself with that second language, with emphasis on a lot of listening and speaking. (Because children do not pick up their first language from books.) Once you are immersed the second language, you will pick up that language as if through osmosis.'"

Why does The Korean reject the "learning is fun!" immersion model in favor of what he describes as rote memorization and repetition? He firmly believes, turning to an experiment described by linguist Steven Pinker, that adults simply don't learn in the same way as infants do. "Astonishingly, the 6-month-old infants reacted to the changes in sound that adults could not detect. English-learning infants could distinguish the finer sounds used in Czech, Hindi and Inslekampx (a Native American language) that English-speaking adults could not," The Korean says, adding:

"But when the same experiment was performed on 10-month-old infants, the infants lost their ability to distinguish those sounds that do not exist in English. In other words, the ability to learn which sound belongs to a language and which sound is a random white noise happens between the ages of 6 months and 10 months."

This, of course, is Elena's "shit/sheet" problem in action! Elena's English skills are good enough to make her a witty writer, but Russian simply doesn't include the "short i" vowel sound English has, and by the time she had her first English lesson at age five, it was too late for her to master it, something that might forever cause her grief.

READ What Does It Take To Successfully Learn A New Language In Adulthood?

The Korean, in short, has a point: adult language learners don't come to the table with the same abilities infants have.

How does he go about learning a new language, then? His tips, in condensed form, are:

1. Read and write simple sentences, later moving on to more complex ones.

2. Study grammar in order to be able to create more complex sentences from simple ones you learned.

3. Memorize every word you encounter. The Korean used flash cards to help him during this process.

4. Listen to, and speak, your target language every day.

5. Rinse and repeat until you achieve the desired results.

SteadyHealth spoke to The Korean to find out more about how he developed his personal language-learning system. "My appreciation of rote memorization has entirely to do with the Korean educational system. I certainly did not appreciate it while I was going through it, but its advantage was clear when I was standing next to people who did not go through it," he said when we enquired into the origins of his language-learning plan. Asked what others could learn from the Korean educational system, The Korean shared:

"The 'learning is fun' people can learn from Korea that no, a lot of learning is not fun at all, nor should fun ever be a goal in learning. The goal of learning is to learn. I do believe that when fun is emphasized over learning, it does learners a disservice."