Band 6+: Some people think that you can never become fluent in a language unless you have spent time living or working in that country. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

As it became a globalized world, individuals invest considerable amount of time to speak well in a certain language. It is commonly believed that only spending time abroad allows to an intensive learning. However, the given topic is contradicted by the fact that alternatives these days have replaced the actual real life experiences from foreign countries.

Language is a kind of a study that needs training and studying. An effective way to improve language skills are exposing themselves to the environment that they would speak or hear the language usually so they could study in a regular basis. Nowadays, it is so easy to find contents about other areas that people could easily make a background to be used to the language. Additionally, not only covering the basic ones, a wide range of videos or movies can also teach about the cultural ones. This is, living in the place is not the only way to acknowledge the characteristics of other nations.

As a student majored in linguistics, language is a structured system to be adapted and used by speakers. This means that people do not have to memorize all the sentences to communicate. As a matter of fact, if people know how to structure sentences, it is now all about memorizing words. Lexicon, a dictionary that people has in their head is not working systemic so not only foreigners, but also natives have to make an effort on it. For instance, a sentence of Korean can be made with a subject, object, and verb respectively. That is the structure of the Korean language, and the words to put inside the structure is a thing to memorize. This is what we could study anywhere because only after understanding the rule and order, it requires only to remember words.

These are why staying overseas is not the only way to smoothly communicate with different language speakers. Various forms of learning materials are over the internet that could replace the overall statement living in the country, and understanding the order of words, which is the most important thing to study, could be held in any place.