I Studied Ten Languages, So You Don′t Have To

Over the years, I have studied ten languages. My first language is English, and my foreign language study, started with a German class when I was six years old. I studied two languages during each of my three years in high school, adding Latin, Italian and French to the German. This study introduced me to the root languages of English. 

Years later, I spent more than three years in East Asia and acquired basic familiarity with Chinese, Japanese and Korean. More recently, I studied Portuguese and become fluent in Spanish during eleven years living in Peru. My familiarity with languages gave me a valuable tool as an English teacher and it gave me intimate knowledge of the challenges faced by anyone learning a new language.

For speakers of some languages, words can be confusingly similar, whether or not they are equivalent in meaning. A very common example is a word with the same number of syllables, but the stress in English is on a different syllable compared to the student′s first language. This can be complicated when the number of syllables is different. This is particularly true for speakers of Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

Knowing a number of languages gave me a roadmap in designing pronunciation exercises, especially for vowels and consonants. Starting in Korea, I have helped tens of thousands of students with my techniques.

Another type of error, made by nearly all students, is to read a sentence, encounter a word that is not understood, and either ignore it as a misunderstood word or not even realize that the word is misunderstood. The responsible student will recognize that he or she doesn′t understand the word and get help from their teacher or from a dictionary.

Today we have online resources that aid in the process of reading and understanding. But they depend on the alert and responsible use. All too often, the definition is inadequate, offering A definition but not THE definition that applies. This is particularly true when using Google translate as a tool. The poor student is usually not in a position to know whether the translation returned by Google translate is accurate.

Beyond pronunciation and meaning, there is usage. The nuances of words are not easily mastered by self study, thus the essential role of a dedicated, competent teacher.

If you like my philosophy of language learning and think it could work for you, please feel free to send me a message.

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About the author: Eric Anderson has lived on four continents (soon to be five). He got his first taste of information technology at the University of California at Berkeley, worked in the field in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, started teaching English in South Korea in 1994. Later he added Marketing, Public Relations and visual communication to his skillset. He is a published essayist and poet, and a Business English and Communication coach.