I went into this course thinking that the purpose of it was to teach mehow to teach myself Turkish. So I found the readings frustrating atfirst because they seemed so irrelevant to what I thought I was supposedto be learning. The book discussed the history of language, the sensoryexpressions of it, and how they interrelate to each other. I found allthat fascinating because I love language and studying it, but I keptwaiting to really get to the heart of the class because I thought itshould be structured differently. Then, about halfway through, Irealized that this class wasn’t about teaching me to learn a language;it was about the cultural dimension of language.
The readings dealt with a society’s relationship with language, andincluded things like how one society’s body language can unwittinglytranslate wrongly into another’s body language. This was very usefulbecause differences in body language or gestures can be the differencebetween a compliment and an insult. It’s necessary to know what NOT todo when in another country as part of the basics of communication. Ialso found it very useful how we looked at the characteristics ofcultures like different perceptions of time, and explicitness versusimplicitness. On the whole, I found it very rewarding, and I feel betterprepared to know what to look for when studying cross-culturelanguages.
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