The initial part of this reading really caught my attention, for years i have told myself that i was a math and science person, and the other side of my brain, the creative/language part was not my strong side. I am a business major, i love math, loved all of my science courses in high school, and even the one i took in college. Languages always proved to be a struggle for me, I had to work that much harder and pay that much more attention in order to not fall behind in the course. The descrtiptions/ correlations between our brains/ dominant hand with what our strengths are (language, creativity etc etc) is really interesting and something i appreciated learning about.
The next section immediately following the brain breakdown, tong slips- the story of my life. I am always messing up words, and now know why i do that, its not that im dumb, rather this happens often when word are found "within the same grammatical construction of rhythm unit" (178).
Words convey meanings, how the same word is spoken dictates how we understand the statement, influxes and various emphasis on syllables can change the importance of spoken words. Words not only change importance of language meaning can also change based on hand movements, eye contact and much more. There are different views on meanings and how words are conveyed, learning this was interesting as well.
How we learn vocabularies, learn meaning, define words, grow our vocabularies, study grammar, classify words (nouns, verbs..) all gave a lot of depth and great meaning to the basics of language i have taken for granted. I have not given much thought to why i know things, how to organize a sentence when speaking in english etc. When i learned french, i did struggle with these concepts much more, and reading and learning about how important the fundamentals are, i truly wish i could go back and take french again!
This greater understanding/ reading into the fundamentals of languages are great, and i cant wait to learn more.
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