Saturday, March 29, 2008
Something I've noticed about languages, is that they aren't just learnt, they are understood. We have an amazing memory, even people like me who can lose their wallets 3 seconds after finding it (after scaring the whole bus into helping me check under their seats).
Think about the thousands of letters, words, things, names, places, little facts that we just "know" - that we have unknowingly memorised so well it's just ingrained into our memory. It's amazing.
When you see a traffic light, you don't have to think about the day your dad told you red was for stop and green was for go, then look back and match the colours to a rules book (this is red, this is blue, this is yellow and this is green...). You just 'know' because you've already memorised it all. That's how amazing your memory is.
Anyway my point was that languages can be learnt, but to be truly used, they need to be "known" in the same way we know colours, or we know our own first language. In Spain, when we saw a sign, I'd match it to my knowledge of spanish - Spirt-something means Exit, entrada-something means Entrance, etc. I'd think back on what I'd learnt - the words and phrases we'd memorised, etc, and match the words I saw. But they didn't
mean anything to me. I know they had meaning, but to me they didn't, because I didn't understand them. They were symbols in a complex code that led me back to my own primary language, english.
Even for Chinese, which I suck at. When I look at a page of (simple) words, they can
mean something to me. I understand them, and the characters aren't just code, they've got meaning. That's what's so cool about languages. You don't need a code, you already understand them. It takes a while, and that's why some people can never learn a language. It can't always be taught.
Posted by nayrakroarual at 11:55 AM
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