105 Week 7

[malory rodriguez]

After reading communicative competence and discussing it with a few class mates the thing I began to think of most was the concept of sarcasm. I know it isn't entirely the same thing as the article discussed (the article spoke more about being able to understand the language outside of just vocabulary). But with sarcasm it is more about understanding the context of what the person is saying. When you first learn a new language it is primarily focused on learning the words and how to formulate sentences. But actually learning how to speak than language and understand the context of the language is a whole new thing. I know I am a very sarcastic person and a lot of my international friends have trouble understanding my sarcasm because they are doing the basic steps of translating the things I said and are trying to form a response. Another point I wanted to bring up about the article is that language is not always a literal translation and thats what can be so frustrating sometime. For example after I left Molly and Louise for our Swedish dinner I was trying to tell them "thank you for a goodnight" so I translated it to "tak for bra natt" but then Louise responded "tack for en trevlig kvall" (thanks for a nice night). Looking at what I said you could assume I was right because I was using the vocab I had learned but it was the context that made my statement incorrect. I think thats the next step of learning a language, is to learn the context and be able to combine everything you know.