Today, I want to talk about how interesting it is to speak another language that is not your mother tongue language and see young children acquire language so quickly. I was born in California but raised most of my time in Korea. Since my first language was Korean, I consider English my second language and therefore, I had to “learn” English when I was about 7 years old. Human language is extremely interesting in the fact that when you are young, you learn it naturally without a great deal of effort or challenges. I learned proper English when I went to school in Seattle back in 2001. I entered school only knowing alphabets but gradually became quite fluent in English. I used appropriate sentences with reasonable level of lexicons. For example,
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less, me vs. I, irregular verbs, and singular vs. plural. According to An Introduction to Language by Fromkin et al, children make grammatical errors when they use English because regular rules apply to all forms. This is why children say things such as mans instead of men and goed instead of went. I also often said “My tooths hurt” or “My foots hurt” in young age since I did not obtain irregular rules yet. The language acquisition model found by Noam Chomsky supports the reason for children’s aforementioned mistakes. Chomsky believes that children do not aquire a language through imitating alone but are inherently born with some basic knowledge of language that does not have to be necessarily learned. If they obtained language only through imitating, then they will never make errors such as I goed from the first place. Learning a language is always linguistically interesting. Knowing a language itself is a miracle because it means one understands the morphemes of that language. As a college student, I cannot say I am completely fluent in English because it is not my first language. But I will say I “know” English since I understand the internal structure of words, morphemes for …show more content…
Thus, the lack of semantic and pragmatic information exists. For example, to know a word “brother,” one needs to know that it has a meaning of “a boy sibling.” When one learns the word “brother,” one needs to know how to use the word in certain contexts. Nonetheless, I make fewer mistakes when writing or speaking in English because I fear making errors in front of native speaker students. I always study grammars or spellings that are confusing and try my best to reduce same errors. The native speakers, even though they fully understand the rules and forms, still make speech errors. This type of challenge is called The Model of Linguistic Performance. According to Chomsky, we sometimes unintentionally make errors even though we already understand correct forms of a language. For example, “Me and John went to the gym” is grammatically wrong; however, we cannot ignore the fact that quite a lot of people unconsciously make this type of error due to the “real situation performance.” What I learned through several past classes is that children all make grammatical mistakes before they learn irregular rules. However, children acquire those rules as soon as they understand how to apply forms into irregular
less, me vs. I, irregular verbs, and singular vs. plural. According to An Introduction to Language by Fromkin et al, children make grammatical errors when they use English because regular rules apply to all forms. This is why children say things such as mans instead of men and goed instead of went. I also often said “My tooths hurt” or “My foots hurt” in young age since I did not obtain irregular rules yet. The language acquisition model found by Noam Chomsky supports the reason for children’s aforementioned mistakes. Chomsky believes that children do not aquire a language through imitating alone but are inherently born with some basic knowledge of language that does not have to be necessarily learned. If they obtained language only through imitating, then they will never make errors such as I goed from the first place. Learning a language is always linguistically interesting. Knowing a language itself is a miracle because it means one understands the morphemes of that language. As a college student, I cannot say I am completely fluent in English because it is not my first language. But I will say I “know” English since I understand the internal structure of words, morphemes for …show more content…
Thus, the lack of semantic and pragmatic information exists. For example, to know a word “brother,” one needs to know that it has a meaning of “a boy sibling.” When one learns the word “brother,” one needs to know how to use the word in certain contexts. Nonetheless, I make fewer mistakes when writing or speaking in English because I fear making errors in front of native speaker students. I always study grammars or spellings that are confusing and try my best to reduce same errors. The native speakers, even though they fully understand the rules and forms, still make speech errors. This type of challenge is called The Model of Linguistic Performance. According to Chomsky, we sometimes unintentionally make errors even though we already understand correct forms of a language. For example, “Me and John went to the gym” is grammatically wrong; however, we cannot ignore the fact that quite a lot of people unconsciously make this type of error due to the “real situation performance.” What I learned through several past classes is that children all make grammatical mistakes before they learn irregular rules. However, children acquire those rules as soon as they understand how to apply forms into irregular