Hi John,

Thanks for sharing your story!

It’s definitely harder to learn a new language when you’re a bit older, especially if all you’ve ever been talking is a single language. There’s a lot of positive talk going on some blogs and most of it’s good I guess but just as with anything there’s talent level. For some it’s simply easier to learn another language than for others. On the other hand, it could be dangerous to believe you’re not as talented as someone else. In many cases it probably isn’t even true.

Unfortunately, if you have tried everything, there’s not much I can do ;-). The only thing I can say is not to give up. Keep at it. Consider it a marathon, not a sprint. You may experience a breakthrough in the near future.

I wish you all the best,
Noel

…and all the best to you, Caroline.

Thanks for stopping by!

Great info.

Excellent.

It’s another reason why starting to speak (real life conversations) from the get-go isn’t always the best option.

Thanks.

John bought a book.
Noun Verb ? Noun.

What’s an ‘a’ ? It doesn’t matter right now, don’t worry about it. (It’s a function-word, for one thing, and function-words aren’t really important at the start.)

Depending on how far you want to get into it, ‘a’ is an indefinite article, grammatically, and pragmatic-semantically it’s commonly a new-topic marker:

   John bought ‘a’ book. (‘book’ is a new topic. INdefinite article)
   ‘The’ book was expensive (‘book’ is now a familiar topic; the DEfinite article signals that shift.)

I agree with the experts who say you shouldn’t get too involved with grammar at the outset. However, full understanding of the example above will illustrate the pitfalls of trying to have a native-like fluency without understanding what some morphemes actually do.

In Korean, the post-positive particle ‘neun/eun’ is a sort of subject-marker, but with (among other things) the common pragmatic nuance of marking previously mentioned items. Not only would it take years to stumble over this realization on your own, but Western teachers without advanced training can, and do, misinform learners of Korean what ‘neun’ does, and I’ve seen some who actually get it backwards and confuse it with the normal subject marker. If you can pick up a linguistically informed text, such as King/Yeon’s Elementary Korean, and you know a bit of grammar, you can start to use the particle correctly from the get-go, and not fall into the dreaded fossilized error trap, with this and many other grammatical and pronunciation problems.

If you want native speakers to compliment your ability, then you probably want them to actually mean it. With a wickedly difficult language (for anglophones), such as Korean or Japanese, you’re likely to be complimented just for trying to learn, whether you’re doing poorly or well. But you don’t want to be a drain on their patience.

Many Koreans might not know the technicalities of their own grammar, and mixing up -neun and -ga/-i markers won’t make a terrible difference, but they will perceive that your speaking is vaguely crappy in a hard-to-define way. And although they commonly leave off subject or object markers, if you happen to leave off both, you’re in danger of speaking nearly unintelligible garbage. So you better take care of these things nearer the start, rather than the end, and understand what they do and why they do it. That’s hard to do without explicit understanding of grammar.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Kerstin!

I agree, of course. 🙂

I just wanted to post on here and compliment all of the insightful and smart comments you guys are making. I agree with you on the language learning methods. DO NOT feel obliged to learn grammar in 25 new ways just because 25 of us other language learners have given some ideas. Instead, I would encourage anyone reading this to go with Noel’s advice and go one further: Just pick whichever sounds fun. If none of them do, come back next week. Your language isn’t going to run away….in fact, grammar’s going to catch up and kick your butt one day 😀