Looking at Aitchison’s diagram on page 9, I realized that linguistics involves many different disciplinaries like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It shows that learning a language isn’t just about memorizing words or grammar rules but also understanding how the ways people and society use it, how it reflects culture, and how our brains process it.
I don’t think I would stick to just one approach. If I only focused on the structure, like syntax or phonology, I would miss out on the bigger picture of how language fits into society or personal identity. At the same time, if I only looked at culture or social context, I’d probably get lost without knowing how the language works systemically. So I would want to pull pieces from each perspective depending on what I’m working on, maybe like leaning more on sociolinguistics when I’m trying to understand slangs, trendy words, and regional differences, or psycholinguistics when I’m thinking about how I process and remember vocabularies.
In terms of my learning plan, I think my knowledge of structures (like phonetics, syntax, semantics) gives me the foundation I need, while those other disciplinary angles such as psychology, sociology, anthropology can really help me layer on meaning, context, and real world use.
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