by Chu Chin Kwok

Created on: May 18, 2009

The question of why learning languages is so hard (or is it?) must be answered in the context of the languages to be learned, because nobody will contend that learning your own mother tongue is that hard: do the Americans ever say learning American English is hard? Or do the Chinese ever lament that learning Chinese is hard? Of course not. It is only when one has to learn a new language or a language that is not one's mother tongue that language learning 'suddenly' becomes hard.

We don't have to discuss at length why we all 'learned' our mother tongue with relative ease; we all had been taught our first language - our mother tongue - since we were babies and our knowledge and competency in this language grew and developed over the years with age and also with its frequent use, in the cultural and social environment we lived in. So a Frenchman has no problem learning French, since he had been babbling in French from infancy and he also was schooled using French as the medium of instruction in French schools. Additionally he grew up and immersed himself in French culture and since language and culture are two inseparable entities it comes as no surprise that he would be able to communicate verbally and in writing in this language - French. It would be a surprise otherwise.

The learning of languages becomes harder - that is, more difficult than learning one's own mother tongue - when one begins to learn a new language different from one's original tongue. The reasons are not difficult to discover - for even if one is studying a language regarded by many as easy e.g. Malay - one will find it hard simply because it is a new language. So it will be 'hard' for an Englishman to learn Italian, or German and it would be an uneasy task for native Chinese speaker to learn English, and so on.

The Chinese who has lived in China all his years simply does not possess a social milieu that is conducive to the learning of a new language say English, Spanish, German, Malay or any other language. Living in China where virtually everybody speaks and thinks in Chinese, trying to pick up a foreign language - any language - will present challenges and difficulties. The same is true (perhaps more so) of a Japanese or Korean who is trying to learn a European language in his or her homeland. This may be due to the fact that China is now opening up to the world at a frantic rate whereas Japan and Korea are relatively insular linguistically and culturally: both these two countries

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