Entry 6

 Dear Meowmeow,

Yesterday, we listened to a lecture in class. My first impression of the speaker was that he was really smart. I know that it might sound shallow, but he impressed everyone in the class in a rather unique way. The topic of his speech was stunning. He stated that he was able to speak many languages. At first, I thought he was bragging and exaggerated a lot. He talked about how he learned those languages and under what circumstances did he get in touch with so many of them. I myself only know how to speak Chinese, English, and a little bit Spanish. I can’t even speak Taiwanese though I’m a Taiwanese. Some of my classmates laughed at me because of that. I am a student studying in a college of languages; however, I still consider picking up a language to be something really difficult. The speaker told us that he had never gone to a cram school to learn those languages. That surprised all of us even more. He claimed that he weaved the learning process into life and he had no need to spend that much money to ask somebody else to teach him. Here comes the question. How did he pick up so many languages and further mastered them. There were a few methods that he mentioned. The first one is to listen more and to speak more. The speaker said that he was never afraid to talk to foreigners even he was not that familiar with that language yet. He just gave it a try and revised himself again and again. The second one was to travel more. It might be hard for most people to achieve this but it truly worked for the speaker. He travelled to a number of countries and got in touch with many different languages and local people. He had to learn the language as much as he could so that he could blend in the local life more easily and quickly. The last one was the coolest one to me. The speaker said that he learned Japanese and English mostly from the video games when he was little. He was eager to learn those languages in order to understand the instructions in the games. This experience actually helped him build the base of acquiring both languages and it made the learning process a lot of fun. After listening to this lecture, I thought of my own learning experiences. When I was little, my parents and some other family members were used to having a chat with some English vocabulary or phrases in it. Since some of my relatives were foreigners, they spoke English in a nice accent and therefore influenced my speaking. After I attended the elementary school, I started to learn Chinese, English, and Taiwanese at the same time. Although I was natively born in Taiwan, my English ability was the best of the three. Even until today, I still do better in English than in Chinese.