In Atchison’s linguistics, he provides a diagram to show the range that linguistics covers. It has phonetics in the center, surrounded by phonology, then syntax, then semantics, then pragmatics, and then various fields of study centred in linguistics. Similarly in the structure of language, David Crystal divides language into disciplines—pronunciation, grammar, and meaning—which have their own sub-disciplines and some variations of approach like sociolinguistic, historical, and psycholinguistic. After reading these texts I’ve come to understand that I would not want to learn a language by perfecting the inner circle before moving onto the outer one in Atchison’s linguistics, or by perfecting one discipline before moving onto the next in David Crystal’s structure of language. Instead, I’d want to work on each of the circles/ disciplines simultaneously as I keep learning. What I mean to say is that I do not want to just perfect my pronunciation before learning about grammar, I want to learn common phrases and words and dive into each one of them by examining their structure in the order of moving from inside out in Atchison’s analysis and from right-to-left in David Crystal’s analysis. I prefer learning ‘안녕하세요’ along side learning Hangul, pronunciations, and the correct way to use it, over just working on Hangul till I perfect it.
Similarly, I think that it would be best to analyse what I learn in a historical, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approach to get a holistic understanding of the language.I personally prefer diving deeper into the sociolinguistic approach because I find this approach to be the most exciting in the way that it relates how different social situations influence language which essentially speaks to the culture of the native speakers of the language, and that is something I’m really interested in learning about.
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