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Learning Chinese gave me a new understanding of language acquisition, and a new direction for my research. By going through the process myself, I experienced the mechanisms of language learning subjectively, with my own feelings and experiences. I found topics I wanted to study in more detail, objectively and using robust research methodologies. By pairing my own experiences with my research, I was able to look at learning from a different perspective and certain processes caught my eye. For example, listening to learners who were a little bit better than myself, but far from perfect, I was able to copy their strategies to make their speech sound more ‘fluent’, because their strategies were more restricted and stood out to me immediately. I started to study these strategies in detail, learning a lot of useful expressions as a byproduct of my research, so reinforcing my learning of Chinese. My language learning and research worlds had started to go hand in hand, supporting one another.

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