Journal #1 SDLC 105

[Krystin Schwarze]

After reading the articles for this week, I was challenged by how many factors go into understanding and speaking any language at all. It's pretty remarkable what our brains do, and how much we learn in our native languages, without thinking about it. From the first article, "How the Brain Handles Language", I learned that in order to say anything as simple as "Hi, how are you", requires multiple parts of your brain, and if you were to read those same words out loud, it would take a different set of parts. From the second article, "How to Investigate Language Structure", the thing that really stood out to me was the author's point that vocabulary by itself doesn't enable someone to communicate. Not because vocabulary doesn't have meaning, but rather because it has too much meaning. Therefore, grammar and other semantics are necessary to communicate the meaning of what it is you are trying to say. I will definitely incorporate this idea into my learning plan as I will emphasis grammar, such as basic sentence structure, in the beginning of my plan, and gradually introduce more and more vocabulary throughout the semester. I believe by structuring my learning this way, I will be more easily able to implement the vocabulary I learn into sentences, and thereby be able to practice communicating what I want to say with the vocabulary I learn. In the final article, "How We Analyze Meaning”, reflecting on the fact that different languages have words or phrases (such as "Kick the bucket") and collocations (such as green with envy), which don't translate to other languages, makes learning a new language seem very hard, slow, and long process. These facts will be helpful to keep in mind while I learn another language. Working with a language partner will be very helpful in regards to this, and will hopefully prevent me from making the mistake of miss-using an English collocation in Hindi.