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Culture and Learning | ||
Tags: Cultural Identity | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| mandalore Newbie United States Joined 5459 days ago 4 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 37 30 October 2012 at 7:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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I had an argument with a classmate earlier over the necessity of immersing culture to fully learn a language. Basically want I want to ask is "is it necessary to learn EVERYTHING about a culture (food, art, music, etc) in order to be able to be fluent in the language"?
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 37 30 October 2012 at 8:12am | IP Logged | |||||
You're new here, so you probably haven't caught on to the fluency rule yet. The rule is: If you're gonna use the word "fluent", please define what you mean by it, or the word is meaningless. This word has tons of different meanings depending on who uses it, and it usually makes discussions terrible if it's used without a solid definition. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 37 30 October 2012 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Even if you move to another country tomorrow, you stay there for the next 10 years, and you speak the language very well, you're still going to lose at games like Trivial Pursuit. Come to think of it, if you're born in that country today, and you spend 10 years growing up as a native, you're going to lose at Trivial Pursuit. Culture is huge. It takes a lifetime. My favorite example is this French rap song:
My wife is French, and she gets at least 75% of the references in this song. A French speaker from Quebec would get a lot less, as would a 9-year-old who's growing up in Paris. As Ari points out, it all depends on how you define "fluent". If you choose to define "fluent" to include this kind of knowledge, then extremely few people will ever become fluent, including a large number of monolingual French speakers who grew up in the wrong place or time. Edited by emk on 30 October 2012 at 1:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 37 30 October 2012 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What's the difference between culture and wrong anyway? Female circumcision is
"culture" in many African countries but it has nothing to do with culture. To know what culture is (and fluency for that matter) you need to first define why you should want to learn elements of a certain culture, and how it aids in the fluency of your speech. Does it mean you use certain badly translatable words well? does it mean you can recognise specific pop culture references in that language? I speak English very well but if somebody quotes me a lyric from some popular singer nowadays I won't know it at all - I have never listened to f.e. Justin Bieber. And as emk points out, there are many people who just don't care for cultural references and will not understand them regardless, even if they are native speakers of the language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4931 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 37 30 October 2012 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good points. Without a doubt cultural knowledge is unequally disseminated among natives. Social group, place of residence, gender, age, personal interests and individual habits all heavily influence learning process and compass varied results. Not a soul can heap an excessive enlightenment of all cultural references. It is simply impossible. Edited by petteri on 30 October 2012 at 2:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 6 of 37 30 October 2012 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Isn't it the case that once you get into learning a language, you inevitably get exposed to some of the culture in which the language developed, and it either turns you on or it doesn't. If it does, this will probably encourage you to carry on with the language, and in turn you will be exposed to and learn, and want to learn more about the culture and so on, in a hopefully virtuous circle.
And if it doesn't turn you on, you eventually lose interest in the language, because, well, what's the point? I suppose there are exceptions if you absolutely must do for work reasons, but even there it is not inevitable. I can't imagine successfully learning a language with gritted teeth, somehow. I can think of one famous polyglot who gave up one or two languages simply because something about the language or culture didn't really fire him up, so he moved on. I imagine this is not uncommon (in the rarified world of true polyglots). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 37 30 October 2012 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
In a word, no. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4867 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 8 of 37 30 October 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What is culture? Maybe a basic, wide definition by Oxford Dictionaries suffices for our purposes: although it is not an unproblematic definition, we could call culture "the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society". I'll take from this definition that everything a group of people share and communicate amongst each other is culture. That means language - which is communication - is inseparable from culture. You could even go so far and say that language is simply one part of culture, but I think in our discussion it is useful to make a distinction between the two concepts. Language must at least be a result of culture (a result of the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular group of people). It is one of the tool which are necessary for making and communicating complex cultural transactions. Because language has its origin in culture, it must therefore be informed by culture down to its very core.
I'll argue that some of this culture is shared by all humans, some "ideas, customs, and social behaviour" are part of human nature. This makes language a universal phenomenon and it probably also makes certain properties of languages a universal phenomenon. But there are certainly distinct differences in "ideas, customs, and social behaviour" between regions, nations, transnational areas and also between age groups, social groups, etc. As emk, petteri and tarvos have pointed out, there are certainly parts of what we usually call a language that not every native speaker knows or uses. There are dialects, sociolects, genderlects, what have you. But regarding your question, I think it is best to look at the influence of culture on language on the national and transnational level. After all, when we learn a foreign language, we usually think of one or several nations whose inhabitants speak it. And there are definitely cultural phenomena with a national and transnational scope. First of all, let's look at the nation. Nations are basically territories that share a government and have done so for a longer or shorter period of time. What is national culture? I don't want to get too deeply into this argument, so I'll just say that today education and the media are often nationally regulated and/or distributed nation-wide. Those two factors influence the norm that all speakers of a language (from one country) are expected to have in common. The official, "correct" language is usually a national construct and this is what the foreign language student will be taught. As school and the media not only teach grammar, but also things that concern national identity like history, philosphy/religion etc., these cultural facts are also part of foreign language education and a competent language student will be expected to have some knowledge of them. This gets tricky with languages which are not restricted to one country or even one continent. You could argue that they are different, albeit similar and/or mutually understandable languages - there is a reason why concepts such as "World Englishes" exist and why there are several standard forms of English, Portuguese, etc. What I personally find the most interesting is the transnational level of culture. We make broad distinctions between Eastern, Western, Middle-Eastern, African, Polynesian etc. cultures. I'll speak from my Western/European viewpoint, otherwise it gets to complicated. I notice pronounced cultural differences when I look at, for example, Asian cultures. This extends to Asian languages. While learning a Southern or Central European language, I'm confronted with many basic cultural concepts and assumptions which I'm familiar with. I'm familiar with the argumentative structure that is the norm, I'm familiar with the Latin- and Greek-based educated vocabulary. With Korean this is very different. Everything about this language, except for the English loan words, is unfamiliar to me. If I don't learn some basic cultural assumptions and values of Korean society - some of which are also applicable to other Asian countries - I'm not going to be able speak Korean in a manner that native speakers are going to deem correct. To give you an example, if I don't understand hierarchies based on Confucianism, I'm not going to be able to use honorific speech correctly. There are also fairly basic words which have no real equivalents in any of the languages I know. This entry has gotten far too long, but it's a topic I'm very interested in. I chose to learn Korean, because I'm of the opinion that learning such a different language will give me more possibilities to understand and express myself, because learning a different language means learning a different culture. However I don't think it's feasible or even possible to learn "everything" about a culture, because there is no one culture of any given country. You could go as far as to say that your friend's definition of fluency means that it is a theoretical concept that can never be achieved by any human being. Edited by druckfehler on 30 October 2012 at 4:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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