Hello! Welcome to my blog where I document my language learning journey throughout the semester of the course "Introduction to Language Learning." Well this documentary is part of the project of the course, I hope that you will enjoy what I put out. And if you are reading this, I assume that you are somewhat enthusiastic in language learning, so why not follow along what a fellow aspiring language learner's journey! 

 1. My Journey Learning Foreign Language

-ENGLISH

    From what I notice growing up in Taiwan, English is a subject /skill that many parents hope that their kids are good at. And the same goes with my parents. So since I was 4, my parents sent me to Hess kindergarten, where I got my first ever English lesson. And it was also in this school that gradually I became decent and began to have a grasp at the language, which benefitted me greatly to this day. 

  And my decent understanding of the English language should very much be credited to an excellent teacher who is now a good friend of mine. So back at the kindergarten when I was very young, I met a teacher called Kimberly, a Canadian woman who was the teacher of my class. She was an amazing teacher who was always full of energy. And interacting and doing silly English activities with her has made me super into the foreign language. We would dance to English spelling songs, try to remember extra long English words and play some English spelling games. So after leaving kindergarten, I continued to take her classes, all the way up to when I was 14 years old. And the times I had in her class was some of my best memory. But despite the good times, the class was also difficult for me at the beginning, when we were really learning the structure of English, not just playing games all day. I struggled with vocabularies (ridiculously couldn't tell the difference between b and d for a long time) and grammars a lot. And the workload was very heavy as well. The teacher would have us memorize vocabularies of different categories and quiz us all the time. Sometime I would even consider skipping the class as I didn't want to face the fact that English was overwhelming me and my classmates were doing better than me. A lot of times I would have to stay after class or come take extra lessons to keep up with the homework. 

  But all the struggle paid off, after a few years, my English got a lot better. I was able to communicate with my teachers freely and able to have fun like I did in kindergarten but at a much deeper language level. We would tell jokes at each others and had loads of fun in board games. And the lessons became more diverse as well. We moved on from the basic grammar lessons to a lot more creative writing, where we explore different ideas and come up with whatever was on our little wild minds. There were also speeches which were very challenging but rewarding. All in all, after almost spending 10 years from the teacher, I am pretty confident in my English ability. And although she had went back to Canada, we would still connect frequently on FB. All till this day, English has been a subject that I'm good at and pretty proud of. And I can't wait where this language tool/ skill will take me. 

-OTHERS

  Aside from English, I always took some lessons of Taiwanese in elementary school and some Japanese lessons in high school. And although I'm not good at these two language in any ways, the lessons offered a great new experience than other class in school. 

Entry 1 10/1/2020