Monday, March 26, 2007

Spreken ze whatever.

I love trying to learn a language. The sense of listening to English and automatically knowing, without having to translate from a basic, a medium; but when your learning another language you struggle to translate from English as others try to translate from their basic, their medium. It’s like dunking your head in water, passing into something else, something foreign and you know that others are doing the same thing when they try to talk to you in something other than their native language. It’s annoying when the other speaks so quickly that you struggle to pick up the translations and miss the proverbial or literal boat but it’s worth it to know that now you possess the ability to speak to an entirely new culture of people, people that can educate you in things that you may want or need to know.

And there’s that little bit about speaking in another language to a person that doesn’t understand it.

But mostly the culture thing.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't see the point in learnin another language, everyone should just learn english especially if your in America! Besides, first of all- I don't know what their sayin'; and second of all- I learned english, it aren't that hard. As far as dunkin my head in water, there better be apples or somethin in there.

Nathan said...

I can completely understand. Translating can be a struggle. Especially seeing how messed up the English language is where we polish the Polish furniture, put an R in February, and have upwards of 20 different definitions for some words. That and the fact that the English Americans speak is a vastly differing dialect.

Unknown said...

I love language too. In high school, I took French and Spanish. In college, I took German. Here at High Point, I studied Esperanto. Now, I can't say that I speak any of them very well. I can't say that I read nor write any of them very well. But I can say that taking them has helped me become better with the English language.

Knowing another language or two would be great. I mean really knowing. A good friend of mine was a French major and after studying for a long while, she began to dream in French. She told me that's when she knew she had mastered the language. Isn't that cool. If I dreamed in another language, I'd wake up confused and out of sorts wondering what was wrong with me.

I've read some interesting articles on how important it is to be language literate. The crux of many of them is that it's more beneficial to be literate about many different cultures than to be language literate about one or two. Something I'd not thought of before.

As for being able to speak to someone in another language that no one around us understood, I could get into doing that.