Journaling in Korean, learning English alongside — with an AI

You're writing your journal in Korean and a phrase trips you up — "how do I say this in English?"

"My heart was heavy" — is it heavy heart? heavy hearted? my heart was heavy? "I was stuck" — does the literal my feet were tied even make sense? These moments are golden for language learning. There's something you actually want to say, and you're missing the tools. That hunger beats a hundred vocabulary words.

Translanguaging

Linguists Ofelia García and Li Wei call this Translanguaging — and they make a counterintuitive claim:

Learners don't have two separate language systems. They have one integrated set of language resources, and they choose from it depending on context. Using both languages at once actually improves learning, not slows it down.

Traditional English education taught "don't think in Korean, think in English." Recent applied linguistics keeps pushing the opposite — using your first language as a stepping stone produces deeper understanding and more natural expression in your second.

Cummins' Common Underlying Proficiency model goes further. The two languages may look different on the surface, but the underlying cognitive ability is shared. Skill in one language transfers to the other.

A natural Korean → English flow

Three Lines has users who journal in Korean and users who journal in English. What we're after is an environment where the two mix naturally.

You write in Korean: "오늘 회의가 길게 늘어졌어" ("The meeting really dragged on today"). Normally that's where the day's journal ends. With Learn Mode on, the AI shows you one more line:

"The meeting dragged on today." — drag on means "to extend in a tedious way," and it's commonly used for meetings, movies, or anything where time crawls.

The expression you actually wanted to use, in English. That one line sticks deeper than a hundred memorized words.

The Noticing Hypothesis

Psycholinguists call this the noticing effect. Richard Schmidt's 1990 Noticing Hypothesis argues that learning happens at the precise moment the learner consciously notices the gap between the two languages.

When you read your Korean phrase and then see with a heavy heart underneath, you notice the subtle difference. That noticing is the learning. Next time you feel the same emotion, heavy heart is much more likely to surface first.

Schmidt also stressed the inverse — input that isn't noticed isn't learned. You can watch 100 hours of English movies and not learn a single new expression unless something causes you to consciously notice it. An AI side-by-side comparison creates that noticing naturally.

Don't stop journaling in Korean

Many learners try to journal in English, get stuck, and fall back to Korean — and feel guilty. There's no need. Journaling in Korean is itself the starting point for English learning.

Express your real emotions and experiences in Korean first. Then let an AI suggestion sit next to it. Over time, Korean and English expressions for the same feeling end up paired in your head.

Language isn't two separate shelves. It's one shelf with English and Korean books filed side by side.

Try Three Lines →