Fluency of Languages

By Grace Park

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Although I’m a fully bilingual person, I can’t recall learning one language before the other. As a Korean-American, I learned Korean from my parents prior to learning English, both of which occurred at very young ages. I believe that my quick absorbance to the additional language, English, was related to my age and its corresponding development stage in terms of cognitive learning. This most likely relates to why I feel like I have grown up knowing both languages to their fullest depths naturally.

For a span of two years, from 8th grade through 9th grade, I took Spanish classes at school. This is the only experience I remember in which I had to learn a foreign language from scratch. I quickly realized that each language had its own unique structure incorporated for the way it was spoken, read, or written. For example, “I like to read” in English would be organized as “I read like” if it was directly converted to Korean. For the most part, English was generally more similar to Spanish, and both English and Spanish vastly differed from Korean.

Overall, I can affirm that learning Spanish was an enjoyable experience that widened a sector of my brain which was not used very often. Nowadays, I am trying to gradually learn Spanish in my leisure time, hoping to reach fluency in the future.