Complete Reflection Paper #2 (500 words) and Post to Your Blog in the Ning
Reflect on your language learning so far. How would you describe the relationship between understanding the target culture and target language. What do you need to improve your communicative competence? What other kinds of competence from the readings by H.D. Brown do you need to consider to make tangible advances in your linguistic abilities?
When studying a language, the attached culture becomes just as evident. In fact, the culture is a type of language that communicates a society’s social norms. Untranslatable phrases and meanings help to illustrate the cultural barriers that divide different languages. Therefore, to truly understand my target language I must think outside of my own cultural entrapments. I must reconfigure the ways I understand certain concepts to properly engage with my target language. A small example is the use of articles in French. I’m not saying I force myself to understand the philosophical underpinnings of French article usage, but I certainly have to be conscious of this concept when I’m writing.
This relationship also goes the other way around. From sentence structure down to philosophical semantics, the language quickly becomes the culture’s proxy. Certain phrases and structures in the target language serve as windows into the culture. It’s then my job to ask appropriate questions to be sure that I thoroughly understand the concept at hand. As I described in an earlier journal, Senegalese culture exhibits such communal tendencies that the literal translation of “How is your mother?” from Wolof to English is “Where is your mother?” This one example along with several others speak to the intrinsic nature of language and culture. There no way you can understand one without at least partially understanding the other.
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