Entry 5

Last week, I was offered an opportunity to listen to a talk. The speaker of that talk was Terry Hsieh and the topic was "Language Acquisition and East Asia Culture Sphere". During the talk, Mr. Hsieh introduced several events and their represented ideas. For examples, polyglot conference, polyglot cafe and flying to other countries for a few days or more for the purpose of polyglot-immersion. Most of the events were new to me and I was really interested in trying some of them.

  Through the events, learners can understand that learning language was a lifelong pursuit which was also mentioned by Mr. Hsieh. People cannot just take an examination regarding the language and declare themselves as knowing every details of the language. This was different from what I had known since elementary school. I once considered taking some standard language proficiency tests as a proof of I using the language fluently. After listening to what Mr. Hsieh said, I realized that having high standards was not as important as practically using the language I learned to communicate with others. 

  Other than knowing the methods of learning language, Mr. Hsieh told us two truths behind acquiring a new language. They were quite the contrary of what I heard in the past so they impressed me most. The first one was that, quoted, "there is no such thing as language genius. Everyone is equally gifted when it comes to learning language,". This meant that the saying of some people being good at learning language while some being good at Mathematics was wrong for all this time. Back in high school, people might said that they were not good at acquiring a new language. It turns out to be because of their lack of interest in such activity. The second one was that adults can learn a whole new language as well. There was no upper limit for adults in the learning process. Whenever the topic of language acquisition was brought up among adults, the adults always ended up talking about how much they envied children's ability of learning language. Some might said that the ability of learning a new language started to deteriorate since the age of twenty. Adults cannot help but always assumed themselves to do a bad job or look bad if they started learning new things at their age. Yet, with this secret revealed, it proved that adults can do just as well as kids do in learning langauge. The reason for the limitations which adults thought they had was based on things like having too much self-consciousness. Therefore, once adults let go of their most famous fear, meaning having a negative self-image or not being liked by others, they can start learning a whole new language and become a polyglot too. It was never too late. 

  All in all, this talk was a valuable lesson to me. It enabled me to know more about language acquisition, including ways to do it and the hidden facts of it. I am really thankful for having the chance to listen to this talk.