Discussion Post #5

[Tianhui Qiu]

The article mentioned pragmatics and it has great variations among societies, cultures and etc. For example, Japanese learners of English would use “I’m sorry” to convey their gratitude to a person who is in high status, while this would cause misunderstanding by native speakers since this actually means apologize in most of situations. This reminded me an experience when I was in an international school and a friend of mine is Germany. One time we were waiting for the bus, and we were talking about the tests we took the other day. She told me that she failed the grammar test, and I replied “oh, I’m sorry”. What I want to convey is I feel sorry for her or I am sorry to hear that, but she did not get the meaning (I guess Germany don’t use “I’m sorry” to convey this kind of meaning), so she asked me with surprise: “Why you are sorry? What did you do? It is not your fault that I failed a test!” I did not know how to explain it to her, and that was the first time I realized how pragmatics might be different across cultures. Also, in Turkish, they like to use a short sentence “Kolay gelsin”, which means “may it be easy for you”. They use it every day everywhere, they would say it to sanitation worker or friend preparing an exam or etc. But in Chinese there is no such expression, because we would use “thank you” to sanitation worker and “加油” (similar to “go for it” in English, but not exactly the same meaning) to friend preparing for exams. I feel like there is no such expression in English either.