Learning Journal #3

[Ruofan Jiang]

Linguistics views language in an objective way. There are a few major branches of linguistics, which it is useful to understand in order to learn about language from a psychological perspective. Phonetics is the study of individual speech sounds; phonology is the study of phonemes, which are the speech sounds of an individual language. These two heavily overlapping subfields cover all the sounds that humans can make, as well as which sounds make up different languages. Syntax is the study of sentences and phrases, or how people put words into the right order so that they can communicate meaningfully. For me, I think the syntax of Western language and Eastern language differ the most. For example, if I want to say I like swimming in Japanese, I would say “I swimming like” (私は水泳が好きだ）,which means the subject and verb in different languages are totally in different orders. However, there might be exception. In Chinese, the order of saying “I like swimming” is the same as English. (我喜欢游泳) . As for my target language which is Korean, it is more similar to Japanese. Thus, I think Japanese knowledge will be really helpful for me learning Korean.