Describe something you did to learn another language/ a second language.
You should say:
- what language you learned
- what you did
- how it helped you learn the language
and explain how you felt about it.
[Instruction: You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]
Model Answer:
Learning a different language, other than one’s native language, is always a challenging matter. But, it surely can be done if one is willing to invest his or her time and take the appropriate steps, just like I did when I learned the Japanese language a few years ago.
Now, I didn’t really care much about learning the Japanese language until I started attending my university. Prior to starting my university years, of course, I did learn about the English language, but that’s because it was a part of our school curriculum, and I just didn’t have any other option but to learn it. In other words, I needed to learn the English language because I needed to graduate from high school.
But, when it came to learning the Japanese language, I went for it, purely because I had become extremely fascinated about Japanese culture and customs, especially, after watching some family drama on some of our national television channels.
In fact, I became so interested in learning that language that I actually started to video record those Japanese drama serials one episode after another for the purpose of watching them again later on. But, a little later, I realized that just watching drama serials wasn’t good enough to learn Japanese characters and their associated pronunciations since the Japanese language uses three different kinds of scripts. So, I went ahead and bought a good, but expensive, Japanese language book with English translation, of course. It was then with the help of this Japanese language book and Japanese TV serials, I began to understand many of the expressions and important phrases of the Japanese language.
Anyway, even though, now, I haven’t quite managed to master the Japanese language completely, it still feels really good that I already know a bit more than just managing to have some basic conversation in that language, and that too without attending a language school or anything like that. I also felt that we all should learn at least one foreign language to appreciate the other cultures and customs of this world.