This week's reading was interesting because it gave me a stronger understanding for the difficulty a language may be to learn. There are so many layers in a language to learn, and this week, rather than learning the physical parts of a language -- the grammar and vocabulary -- I learned about how the brain is involved.
In "How the Brain Handles Language," I learned about different parts of the brain and its role in helping the individual learn a language. I do not completely agree with the idea of localization, as I think learning something involves the entire brain as a whole. From a biological standpoint, the human body is not a simple prokaryote with simple structures and simple function. The human body is a eukaryote with complex structures that all work together to make a complete functioning being. So my opinion is that there is a whole range of factors that affect our speech and language learning. I agree when the article talks about how three parts working together: 1) for speech production, thought is generated in the Wenicke's area and sent to the Broca's area for encoding, 2) for speech comprehension, the signals arrive in the auditory cortex from the ear and the signal is transferred to the Wernicke's area, and 3) for reading aloud, the written form is received by the visual cortex and sent to the Wernicke's area. If the brain worked with the theory of localization, then anyone who is handicapped at the slightest would not be able to learn a language. However, this is not true.
"In "How We Mean," the concept of "collocation" was interesting. Collocation is the consistent juxtaposition of one word with another word. Sayings we have in our own language can be seen as lexemes and will differ from language to language. Because of lexemes, it may often be difficult to learn a language, as not everything should be taken literally. One single word such as "mean" in the English language can be used in so many different ways. In addition, a single sentence can pack in so much information that, to a learner, it may feel impossible to dissect a sentence. In order to mitigate some confusion, the article "How to investigate language structure" was helpful in introducing a four-level model of language: phonetics, phonology, grammar, and semantics. With a division of language into organized gameplans, it may be easier to learn Korean, my target language. I know that many languages love to use metaphors to describe feelings and situations encountered, so hopefully with a gameplan of dividing everything into simpler parts will help me grasp the Korean language with less difficulty.
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