What
differentiates a passionate language learner from an ordinary one? There can be
many personal aspects also included, but undoubtedly the fearless attitude to
practice the language via speaking and to learn through making mistakes is
among the main distinctions.
A
passionate language learner knows that starting to speak as early as possible
is extremely beneficial for the language process and can boost it a lot.
Firstly, speaking improves the fluency since the knowledge of grammar,
pronunciation and vocabulary becomes the “quickly-accessed” assets of the
brain. Secondly, communicating with a native speaker can be indeed an exciting
as well as motivating activity for a learner to keep up developing the language
skills. Meanwhile, this communication also supports the process of enlarging
vocabulary and improving grammar skills of a learner.
I
personally see learning languages as my hobby, and already from the age of six
I have been learning and developing my English, originally being a
Russian-speaker. Five years ago I moved to Finland, and from that moment I got
an idea of learning Finnish somewhere in the future. Time goes by, and I ended
up being a student of Lappeenranta University of Technology, where I finally
was able to set my mind right in terms of learning Finnish. I went to all the
Finnish courses, offered by the university’s Language Center, and enjoyed those
so much that decided to practice more in “real world” cases: in shops, cafeterias,
over the phone when ordering pizza or so on, and eventually never regretted
this idea of mine
I assume
you can image how tough and embarrassing it was at the beginning, because I
didn’t know a lot of words and could barely understand when an interlocutor was
responding to me and I was humbly trying to express some thoughts of mine in
Finnish. Sometimes people could understand me, sometimes they asked several
times so I would repeat my phrase or express it in other words, but eventually
this whole practice helped me a lot. And maybe it helped not only in the way of
practice speaking, but in terms of reducing the internal mental barrier to open
my mouth and speak it up.
Of course,
you can’t just start talking a language straight after opening a grammar book
on it. In order to proceed well with communication, it is essential to study
and to acquire new skills and knowledge on vocabulary and grammar. Talking to a
foreigner gives an opportunity to develop the communicating skills and to
obtain more confidence, and most probably it supports the learning of slang or
set expressions. However, to highlight – don’t give up on books or e-sources
when learning, they are necessary to get a starting point and gain general
understanding on the culture of the language.
To
conclude, living far from home for a long time and travelling a lot, I was able
to meet great number of interesting people – some of them were good at English,
some could barely say a word in the foreign language, but what is pleasantly
surprising is that the majority of them was not afraid of communicating not in
their native language. So I hope after reading this, you will also challenge
yourself a bit, and start practicing a new language by simply opening your
mouth and saying “hi” in Finnish, Italian, German or whatever language you are
learning now! Good luck and stay cool!
Text: Anastasiia Kisurina, a student of Independent Study in English course
