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Will You Still "Learn" a Foreign Language?

10/26/2017

 
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​When I started learning English, I had no idea whether it could really be “my language”. I mean, unless you’re raised in a bilingual household or born in a country in which the language is widespread, you know that acquiring your target language is frustrating but totally rewarding. Now I don’t have to knock myself out all the time, and English just pops off the top of my head... finally!

After that, by learning a new language I was welcomed into an entirely new world, a whole new dimension of living. And not just linguistically but also emotionally and culturally. I can laugh along with Conan O'Brien and discuss at great lengths how Americans and South Koreans think differently than North Koreans. I’ve talked to British people who say that American English is “an uncivilized dialect” (though I myself prefer and acquire American dialects). My boyfriend’s first language is English. Basically, half of my life is in English.

And yet, after all that dedication and reward, the world is telling me that in the future none of us will need to learn foreign languages; it will all be a fruitless hassle.


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Acquiring a foreign language: A journey


​"As human beings, we have a natural desire to learn and progress. Psychologists call it mastery," ​
- Vanessa King, a positive psychology expert

​A while ago I had a conversation with Kathryn. She is a Canadian learning Korean.

She said, “It is getting a little easier for me to understand some of the questions you're asking, so I'm happy to be making progress. But I still feel a little shy and nervous about speaking Korean sometimes.”

I totally understood where she was coming from, so with great pleasure I told her,
“Well, that’s very human, and I call it the beauty of learning. The point is to enjoy yourself while speaking and improving your skills!”

And here’s what I’ve learned about learning: Mastering a foreign language is not a race, and it's definitely not about finding shortcuts. It’s a lifelong journey. It's sad to think that people might not find joy in such an undertaking.

But so few people see the point in lifelong journeys and appreciating their progress over the course of years. They want a push-button solution -- CLICK! DONE! But learning a new language absolutely does not work that way! ​


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The rise of the translation machines


​Still, if you haven’t learned a foreign language out of curiosity but for a more practical purpose, I think I have great news for you: Mesay. I recently found this translating software and thought I'd share it with you.
​

​Isn’t this great? I know, it’s not new, and I know that Google Translate has spent decades building up its translation technology and at least doesn’t expressly suck anymore. It does improve slowly over time. And though the translation voice still sounds stiff, at least now you'll never be without some kind of translation service, assuming of course that you have internet access.

​And It’s just a start. In the future, perhaps we'll have an injectable microchip that will allow people to speak their target languages as soon as they open their mouths (and no one will know you’re using a machine, voilà!). Who knows?

​It makes me giddy to imagine myself speaking every language in the world without anyone knowing I’m depending on technological wizardry. And it's wonderful to think that anyone, especially older people, might travel the world without a linguistic care, chatting with locals and not getting hung up trying to order a cup of coffee or catching the right train.

And as an educator, I just keep thinking — “Wow! How can the human mind be so nimble and clever to come up with this stuff?”

​But then I worry:
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Are we also making people less clever? Why are we making these things so easy?
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How foreign languages change our brains


​Your brain gets smarter and more agile while focusing on a foreign language. Everyone knows that. But how? The list below is a collection of facts discovered and confirmed by researchers in the field:

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  1. The more you acquire and review languages, the sharper your memory and concentration become, not just in learning a new language but in all aspects of your life.
  2. Expressive writing in another language provides a great kind of therapy and can help vent stress and reduce anxiety and depression.
  3. The more you approximate a native accent, the more you feel at home in a foreign society and have the confidence to navigate it successfully.
  4. Foreign language acquisition can help lower the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The more you practice, the lower the risk.
  5. A bilingual brain has a greater capacity for gray matter, a major component of intelligence, than a monolingual brain.

And it's essential to remember: If you don’t make an effort to shift your brain to a target language mindframe in which you interact with the world in a foreign language, all of these wonderful benefits might slip away! As you acquire a new language, make yourself as much a part of the language as the language is a part of you!
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Will the translation machines conquer human translators?


First of all, can a machine ever achieve the level of sophistication and depth of a human being?

When learning a foreign language, what you learn is more than mere vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, and other things that can be coded in machines. As a human, you experience and feel much more than anything a machine can systematize. You learn culture, context, sentiment, ethnic undertones, and countless more subtle nuances. With this in mind, only a professional native translators can guarantee zero mistakes (or as close to zero as a human being can get).

​So then, a better question would be: Can machines guarantee the same? Can they ever be encoded to reach that degree of subtlety? If not, or at least until they do, human beings will have an inarguable advantage.
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Some might wonder if human translators or interpreters are really necessary. Can their most common tasks be done with at least a passable degree of skill by machines?

Not anytime soon, I'd say, but it's worth noting that machines and related software are improving by leaps and bounds with no clear peak in sight. People will use machines more and more to reduce budgets, be a bit more independent, and even secure some of their confidential information from prying human eyes. In an official capacity, too, machines can provide an efficient amount of common translation for simple terms, small announcements or instruction, and other content that does not depend on much subtlety.

So instead of fretting about being booted out of translating jobs, we should shift our focus to how humans can integrate machine translation into an overall better and more efficient translation field.

Both humans and machines have their own strength. With context that requires creative thinking and localization, it would be tough for machines to catch things like humor, rhetoric, and dialects. Hence, in addition to translating and interpreting, as time goes by human translators can also focus on editing and proofreading content produced by machine translators.
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The future of language educators


In the future, human linguists should divert more time and energy toward language that empowers as well as instructs and communicates. To meet this new challenge, here's what language instructors should embrace:
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  1. Culture as opposed to language
  2. Sound as opposed to letters
  3. Interaction as opposed to teaching ​
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These are particularly vital for native English educators. When the "almost perfect" translation machines are part of the mainstream, English-speaking educators will likely be among the first to deal with a decrease in students. This is largely due to the fact that many students in English classrooms are there out of necessity, perhaps to boost their appeal to would-be employers, with only a small number in class because they have a drive to learn and absorb English for fun or self-improvement.

​For languages that are less common or less in demand than English (like Korean), there could be a larger percentage of people who are motivated by interest and curiosity. Language educators, then, would need to adapt to a new role of nurturing and encouraging their students' passion for language acquisition.
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Will human intelligence and artificial intelligence work together?
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This isn't sci-fi, people. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is real. But it is much more cooperative than its cinematic counterpart!

​Three years ago, I made a note of my biggest fear: mankind losing its humanity. I love technology, but when it undermines or flat-out steals the joys of our daily life like work, interacting with others, and creation — we should employ it more carefully. Technology should reduce the burdens of our lives and accentuate our capacity to improve. When it starts to do the reverse, something's gone wrong.

Bottom line: Technology is NOT our adversary. It enables greater productivity by letting us focus on more specific details and more important tasks. So technology can be a great resource for accelerating human potential. It is meant to help people, remember, not menace them. And this means we need to prevent it from becoming a crutch. We need to keep in mind the great resources of our own nature.

​Logic and creativity spring from the human mind. The more we try to encode those things in machines, the more we take them away from ourselves. So let's use some common sense: It is humans who created machines, after all. So it is also our role to ensure that humans and machines maintain a win-win relationship.
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In the future, when it comes to foreign languages, bear in mind: To learn or not to learn — that is the question! So which foreign language are you into these days? Will you be still up for this lifelong journey years and years from now? If so, why?

(Incidentally, I am Korean but wrote this article completely in English. Let's see a machine do that!)

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Content Curator | Cebin Jeong
cebin@korean-it.com


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