So hi everyone my name is Tianhua. I'm a senior Government and Linguistics double-major
here at Smith. As an international student originally from
Shanghai China I came to the US for the first time four years ago and I started
learning German at Smith in my first year and went to Hamburg for a semester
in my junior year. The idea of learning German first entered my mind when I was
watching a film in which there was a scene where the protagonist of
German descent was talking in English while listening to the news in television
which I then believed was in German and he then acted according to the
information he got from the news. I thought it was super cool to be able to
multi-task like that and to glean information using both English and
German. So I just decided to study a language on the side in my first year of
college. Probably I should have concentrated on improving my English at
the time because I was a total newcomer to this environment but
the academic freedom here really inspired me to be greedy and to try out all sorts
of things like logic, political theory, even literature in addition to German. All went on
well now well except one rather embarrassing point and that is not so
long ago when I watched that film again I realized the news was actually in French.
Well how could I have possibly mistaken French for German which are two
completely different languages. Not so surprising though if you consider when I
first came here I sense no difference between American and British accent. My
point is I believe language learning really opens one's ears and eyes. Not until I started to delve into the field of the
realm of foreign language did I really notice those nuances between and within languages,
started loving and all sorts of translation errors and inside jokes and to notice pay closer attention to
people's intonations and those emotions conveyed by their utterances or even
overhearing conversations of people working by our streets or sitting at the
next table. The last point the last example may
sound a bit creepy but please just think of me as a objective and well-meaning
code collector. I've been afraid of opening my ears to the outside world for
a long time but as a language learner I really pushed myself to stay avid for
the quotes people threw at you intentionally or not because after all
the more codes you collect the easier you can find patterns and decipher them.
This is why I think it's most beneficial and also efficient to learn a language
by really using that to pursue your interests. I believe the pivot point of
my learning German was when I started using this language to pursue - - for other
purposes for example in my second year of learning German I started to read The Visit
visit or 'Der Besuch der alten Dame' or watching german musicals for which i
remained a huge fan up to this date. Remember what i mentioned all those
different interdisciplinary things i tried in my first year they became my
laboratories of language use as the carrier of thoughts when I studied
abroad. In Hamburg I was able to use the language to read Max Weber for my
territory theory course to give a presentation on hy literature to do
research in linguistic film assets and to study Hamburg's early history as a
merchant state. That's when my language skills really took off but that is not
to say that I happily accomplished all those things by
simply by overhearing conversations. Immersing oneself in the environment is
helpful but only a start. It's more about the entire box of used batteries for my
electronic dictionary it's about hours I spend in the noisy
and shaky train or subway carriages reading or about painstaking grammar
checks that cost me double triple time to write just about anything. The story I
just told you shouldn't be just about me though. I've been thinking what you can take
away from this short speech; I think as a multilingual I can confirm that language
skills do get transferred which means your native language skills can even be
honed once you take a closer look at it from a meta-linguistic level and it gets
easier if you study a second foreign language for example my familiarity with
language parts transitive or intransitive verbs adverbs versus
adjectives really give me a head start in understanding the more complicated
structure or conjugation in German and skills can even be transferred beyond a
field of language. I learned how to search for resources find help and deal
with communication barriers and I have more confidence in adapting to
unfamiliar environments and more appreciation of the accumulative
learning curves for the acquisition of any skills and I can also pretend better
like now. Consuming one's private feelings like stress or fear or
self-consciousness in order to be a more effective communicator. So I encourage
you to study language or languages not as an end in itself but as
a set of transferable knowledge that can be useful helpful beyond its immediate utilities. That's thank you