Recently I had a business trip to Korea and I started to learn Korean, because if not speaking Korean, it’s quite hard to survive in Korea.
It reminds me of my past journey of learning English. The English proficiency improved a lot when I learned it intentionally and also when I read and watched a lot of English TV shows and books.
I communicated with Korean colleagues and other colleagues who don’t speak Chinese in English and what I find is that my strength is only computer science and things I have repeated a lot in my mind, but not in the topics that I have never learned or experienced.
Thinking of this, I realize that context is really important for learning a new language. Because I live in China most of the time, I don’t have much time to practice so the limited occassions for such practices are like wacthing TV series and reading books. So I decide to read more books and watch more TV shows on Netflix in English, and possibly in Korean as well.
Learning new languages are fun and meaningful and I believe that I will feel accomplished if one day I visit Korea again and speak even just a little Korea and know how to read their menus.
Maybe writing is also one of the ways to improve, so I will trying to write blogs in English as well. And it might also be a good practice for me to do vlogs in English.