What is learning?

We often hear the word of learning. Moreover when we are studying, the word of learning is always mentioned. Here I wish to tell you what learning is.

Learning is a process of knowing or doing something. It always needs time. For me, whatever we do is learning. Not only studying at school or university is named as ‘learning’ but all what we do, such as working, exercising even dating and so on, can be called as ‘learning’. We work, for example, means we do something and try to understand how to do it well. During what we are working, we also think how to make our work easy to do. It means we learn something to be applied in our work so that our work can be easy and the result can be good.

Learning is how we make something become our experience. What we have learnt could be our experience. And someday later, we can use our experience to do something that relate with our experience. We learn something means we experience it. After we experience it, we of course have input in our mind and we can apply it as our experience in learning something.

Learning means observation. When we are observing something means we are learning it. We use our brain to know about what we are observing. For example, we observe someone who is poor at understanding English language, and because of his weakness, he turns to be lazy to try to understand the English. When we are observing him we always wonder what’s wrong with him and why he cannot understand the English. We learn his character and ask him whether he likes studying English or not. After we get it we try to look for the solution to make him interested in English. Here means that we observe someone’s difficulty and learn how his difficulty can be solved.

Learning English

English is a second language for Indonesian learners. It is not easy to get English. It does need afford hard to get it because we have been affected by our first language. It is called our mother language. When we are communicating with English, we have to translate our mother language into English. It is not easy, is it?

We are as the English learners, we have to be active in learning it. Active here means that we have to learn and apply it in our communication practice in English language. We can observe when the first time we learnt to be able to speak our first language. From our crying that could be understood by our parents until we can speak with them like the language that they use. We seldom think where our language comes from. It suddenly comes into our mind and go into our mouth then speak it. We seem to have been hypnotized. The first language that we have become our tool to communicate with the people surrounding us. We are accustomed to use it. So for me, if we can make the language become our habit, it will make us have it like we are the owners of that language.

Here how we make English be our habit so that we can use it for communication well. By learning and practicing it gradually, I am sure it can be our alternative language to communicate with the people who do not understand our language. And you know, English is an international language that is being used nowadays. So many people in the world can speak English. Do you want to be out of date? Of course we don’t. Therefore, let’s get English as well as possible.

Learning English based on my perspective learning

For the first time I though that English was so difficult to get. I tried to understand it many times but it could not be easy to understand. A lot of ways I used to make it easy but it could not easy at all.

The first time, when I got it at junior high school, it seemed to be my most difficult subject. I could not understand at all. I tried to memorize the vocabulary but the more I memorized the more I forgot the prior vocabulary and the more I was confused that made me frustrated to memorize it. Just few vocabularies that I could understand and the problem came again. That was how to pronoun them. The words that my teacher said was so different from the words that I had memorized even those words were the same. I could not practice speaking English because I did not know how to spell the English words. I used it just for doing my written tests.

When I was at senior high school, the English subject that I got was so different purpose. The teacher used different method to teach me. I was required to be able to speak English rather that just writing.