The Confession of a Polyglot

What does it take to learn a foreign language? In what language does a polyglot think?

Photo by CX Insight on Unsplash

A polyglot is a person who speaks more than three languages. A bilingual is one who speaks two languages, of course. Then how do you call a person who speaks just one language?

“An American.”

That is an old joke, but it has some truth to it. Most Americans do not feel the need to learn a foreign language because the US is made up of immigrants who want to assimilate and learn English.

I, for one, was one of the immigrants who had to acquire English as a foreign language. My story is not unique. It is repeated many times in every immigrant’s life. What might be different is how I acquired three very different languages along my life path and how it affected my worldview and everything else. First, a brief description of how I acquired three languages.

How I Acquired Three Languages

Korean

I was born and raised in Korea so Korean was my mother tongue. However, my Korean was not the standard Seoul dialect. My hometown was a small farming village in Gyeongsang Province located in the southeast part of the Korean peninsula. Growing up, the Gyeongsang dialect was the standard Korean for me. It did not occur to me that what I spoke was a…