2008/05/22

Thoughts on entering the advanced stage of a language (source):

The first two years of language learning is like walking down a hallway with doors every so often. You come to a door, open it, learn the stuff, and continue down the hallway, learning whatever is behind the doors. However, once you reach the end of the hallway, you open the door and you have a huge, vast wasteland. From there on out you wander the linguistic wasteland learning stuff with no direction and wondering when it's all gonna end.


This pretty much describes my own feelings about my continuing study of Korean. I've learned enough to know how many gaps there are in my current understanding of the language. And it's hard to know which gap to try to fill first.

Still, the challenge remains compelling. With French and Latin, when I reached a fairly decent level of reading proficiency, I basically stopped studying. But with Korean, I want to press forward and continue until I feel I've done just about all I can do with the language. Sometimes this journey feels like a easy lap around the pool, other times like a do-or-die swim across the English channel.

Encouragement is as always welcome!