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Exotic is dead - Long live reality | ||
Tags: Living Language | Cultural Identity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 5 02 May 2010 at 11:59am | IP Logged |
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I got to thinking after reading a recent post by 'guesto' in the 'Life of a monolingual' topic about how once he learned some foreign languages the feeling or illusion of some language or culture being mysterious and exotic was gone. It just became real just like his own language and culture.
Although I haven't yet learned any language that i might earlier describe as exotic, English even though being foreign, to it I was exposed through TV and computers since I was a child and I learned a great deal about Western Anglophone culture through these media. But for example Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Japanese and even Portuguese, to me these languages once seemed so exotic and mysterious that I guess just that feeling was enough for me to want me to start learning them. But now, that I have exposed myself to them through books and videos I'm starting to lose that feeling more and more every day. Suddenly I'm becoming a global person, a cosmopolitan, because I'm realizing more and more that people are people just like me all over the world. Even though they live far away in what may seem as a different world, they are not that different. In fact I have neighbours that are more different from me than people in some backwater in China for instance. I grew up in a bilingual, although by frequency of active usage a monolingual environment and around people that know almost nothing of the outside world (the parable of the frog in a pond: what does it know about the ocean?). Telling them what is generally accepted even by people from the West, which they idolise, is a lie to them, because they cannot imagine the world being different then what they perceive of it. When I was younger I had similar thoughts, but then I discovered the internet and that was my red pill. What do you think? Does learning languages changes our whole perception of the World? Does it make us more cosmopolitan? Should we put effort to allow more and more people to see this somehow? 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Mafouz Diglot Groupie Spain Joined 5325 days ago 56 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: German, Japanese, French | Message 2 of 5 02 May 2010 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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Well, after some months living in the United States, they seem to me still pretty exotic ;)
Just kidding. You can say the same silly things in all languages, but I would defend that language learning changes your perception of how people think and live and, perhaps, makes you indeed more cosmopolitan. The very same idea that the people think and feel in a very similar fashion independently of their language is quite revolutionary, if you think on how works everyday perception of "the other", as sociologists and social psichologists say. Maybe the big change of perception is is normalizing the lives and worlds of others. In my humble opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 3 of 5 03 May 2010 at 7:17am | IP Logged |
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Zamenhof thought we'd get world peace if everyone could talk to each other, so he created Esperanto. Frederik Bodmer thought the same thing, so he wrote Loom of Language. Then there's the idea of sister cities and culture exchange. The European Union and United Nations are other efforts to create a shared community and thus bring about peace. Even the Geneva conventions - rules for war! - are supposed to bring us together by bringing about shared norms. And I think that's what this comes down to: In learning a new language and the cultural assumptions built into that language, you wind up shifting your perception of the world so that the other ceases to be "The Other".
When I started learning French, it was strange and exotic and the idea of being able to go to Paris and talk to people in their own language or read Victor Hugo in the very words he wrote seemed an incredible thing. But if you offered me a trip to France today, I wouldn't go to Paris for adventure; I'd go to Brittany to alleviate an emotion closer to homesickness. I remember learning to count to ten in Spanish when I was in second or third grade. Then we all ate tortillas. It was a big cultural experience in our little school and it made an impression, even if Spanish never held the allure for me that French once did. Today I speak Spanish just about every day and am working on improving my Spanish not to get closer to "The Other" but because I have friends with limited English and it makes it easier to talk to them. Then there's Mandarin. When I was in high school, I got a Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Tao with Chinese characters and worked at deciphering to see just how much of that mysterious sounding translation actually was within the characters. For years and years, I came back to Chinese, and I even studied with a tutor after I'd been living in the Silicon Valley for a couple years. Today, Mandarin is one of the few languages I've consciously sworn off, as opposed to just letting it drop away. What made the difference, I think, is precisely that knowing lots of Chinese speakers and shopping in Chinese shops and finding Chinese restaurants on every corner removed the exoticism. Living in the Midwest, learning Mandarin brought me to a strange and faraway place. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it gave me the ability to understand why they phrased things that way on their menus. The exoticism was gone, and my motivation to learn followed. I think learning one language shows you that the world is stranger than you'd imagined, but that you can deal with it. Learning multiple languages gradually makes the world yours. And while that's neat, it can make you blasé or jaded - you've been down the path of learning a new vocabulary and a new way of thinking before so even if what you're learning is new, the process is familiar. You can see this on these forums in the way that people talk about how they might as well learn Italian since they already know Spanish or Dutch since they already know German. It's kind of funny to think that the countries involved hung onto their own languages all this time as a way of maintaining their cultures while we use the similarities of language to make the borders go away. But that's what we do, in any case - we use language to make the borders go away. That's neat, of course. But it's hard to maintain the idea of places as exotic once the whole world's just a phrasebook away from conquest. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5336 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 4 of 5 03 May 2010 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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I think learning a language for the hyped culture is not a good idea, you will generally
be disappointed and leave the language. You should learn a language if you fall in love with the language itself. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Tally Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Israel Joined 5608 days ago 135 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English*, Modern Hebrew* Studies: French | Message 5 of 5 03 May 2010 at 10:07am | IP Logged |
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I don't know about you, but I never feel disappointed about it! I just want to keep on
going. Basically for me the main lure of languages is to being able to communicate with lots of interesting people and find out new things that i couldn't before, and be exposed to new ways of thinking and new cultures. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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