Thinking in 3 languages
The biggest lesson I have learnt about language did not come from my Korean classroom. It came while reading an English essay written by my Korean student.
Until recently, I assumed learning a language was mostly about memorizing vocabulary and grammar. After all, that is what language classes often seem to revolve around. Now, after studying English, Chinese and Korean, I have realized I was completely wrong. The hardest part of learning a new language is not learning new words or grammar. It is learning a new way of thinking.
While marking my student's essay, I noticed a recurring pattern. He knew a lot of words and understood the grammar we had studied. Yet many of his sentences sounded awkward and unnatural. Every individual word was correct. Together, however, the sentences did not sound like English.
Then I noticed something even more interesting.
The mistakes were not random. They were predictable.
Around the same time, a chapter in my Korean course at Korea University introduced the concept of language typology and explained that English, Chinese and Korean belong to three very different structural types. Chinese relies heavily on word order and English combines word order with grammatical endings, while Korean relies heavily on particles. Suddenly, what I had observed in my student's writing began to make sense.
When my student wrote English sentences, he was instinctively applying Korean logic to English. Once I understood how Korean organizes information, his mistakes suddenly made perfect sense. He was not making careless errors. He was applying the logic of one language to another.
Looking back, I realized I had made exactly the same mistake when I first began learning Korean. The only difference was that I had been thinking in English.
Growing up speaking both English and Chinese has made this especially fascinating. Although the two languages belong to completely different language families, they both generally follow a subject-verb-object structure. Because English and Chinese organize sentences in similar ways, moving between those two languages always felt relatively natural. Korean, however, required me to rethink how sentences themselves were constructed. I was not earning new vocabulary. I was learning to organize information in an entirely different way.
This realization has also changed the way I teach. Before becoming an English tutor, I assumed language mistakes were mostly random. Now I often find myself predicting them before they happen. Understanding how Korean works allows me to understand why Korean learners naturally produce certain types of English sentences. Likewise, experienced Korean teachers can often predict the mistakes learners from different linguistic backgrounds will make. Native English speakers struggle with some aspects of Korean, while speakers of other languages encounter entirely different challenges. Our first language quietly influences how we learn every new one.
Now, having reached Level 6, the highest regular level in Korea University's Korean language program, I have realized that progress is no longer measured simply by how many new words I can memorize or how many grammar patterns I know. The real challenge is learning to think in Korean instead of translating from English.
In an age when artificial intelligence can translate between languages almost instantly, it is tempting to believe that language is simply a matter of replacing one word with another. My experience has taught me otherwise. Translation software can produce remarkably accurate translations, but it cannot reproduce the cognitive shift that comes from learning another language. That shift comes from understanding how another language organizes information and expresses relationships.
Knowing English, Chinese and Korean has given me something I never expected. It has shown me that every language solves the same communicative challenge in a different way.
Perhaps that is the greatest reward of learning another language. Fluency is not the moment you stop reaching for the dictionary. It is the moment you stop translating and begin thinking in another language. As classrooms and workplaces become increasingly multilingual, and as artificial intelligence makes translation easier than ever, understanding how people think across languages may become even more important than speaking them perfectly. Learning Korean has not only changed the way I communicate. More importantly, it has changed the way I understand how other people think.
Geoffrey Chen (gywchen@gmail.com) is a former corporate lawyer from Australia currently studying Korean at Korea University in Seoul.