My experience of learning second language By Candy

Second language learning is becoming a more wide discussed issue in the world since the world is being globalize. You may think that having to know you own language is more than enough, but is this really? How about when you are going for travel somewhere that your mother language is not being spoken? Because of globalization, second language acquisition is in demand than ever before. It seems to be obvious that being bilingual are more beneficial than people who are monolingual (people who can only speak their mother language), but in what ways is that being true? In this entry, I would like to tell you all about the advantages of being bilingual and hopefully reading after all my blog entries, you can convinced by me that learning a second language is a great thing.

Instead of saying that obvious benefits which you can just search on internet and everyone already knows, I am going to illustrate some of the benefits by giving my own experience. My mother language is Cantonese, which I learned once I was born. I started learning my first and second "second language" was when I was in kindergarten, which is Mandarin and English. Learning English and Mandarin are basically the "must learn" languages in Hong Kong. Having the basic skills of both English and Mandarin leaded me to enter a good primary and also secondary school. I transferred to Australia for my high school and because of the English skills I have, it wasn't that difficult for me to communicate with others, having classes in English and it had made my life so much easier. When I was in high school, I started my third "second language" and that is Japanese. It is a very difficult language for me, as the pronunciation and characters are very different from what I used to know. However, compared to other local Australians, I realized it is a little bit easier for us Asians to learn. I think one of the reasons of this is because we have the experience of how to learn second language, while the Australians have only been learning their own mother language English throughout their lives.

While I am learning languages other than my own mother language, I realized I am becoming more open-minded and my horizon has been broaden. I am not only learning the language itself, but also understanding the culture and things about the language's country. I become more interested to know more about what is happening in the world. I also understand more about different cultures in different countries. For example, Japanese people are very polite when they speak and act, they always use 敬語 (polite wording) and bow, which I did not know before I started learning Japanese.

This might be just some of a few of the benefits that are being raised most of the time, but they are the benefits that I actually realized by myself. You and I might find more advantages while continue discovering our second language. I hope in the future of all of us lives, we will discover many more great things of learning a second language.