The Love and Inspiration of Languages

Languages are something that everyone uses every day. We use it when we are having fun with friends, or when we are doing serious tasks. Of course, people who are indifferent to languages would think that languages are no more than an effective means of communication, but this is simply not the case. To me, languages act as the identity of a race as well as mentors of people. Their influence goes so far as to the emotional side of the human race, and there are so many positive aspects that come with languages that we are not aware of.

For years, studies have shown that exposure to the Spanish language is an effective cure for mental problems. Natives speakers of Spanish are less inclined to depression, and also the language seems to have a very strong influence on others. Visitors to countries in Latin America seldom feel sad on the streets, as Spanish is such a free, positive language that exudes passion.

Personally, I should say that I have witnessed an immense growth after I started learning this tongue too. In high school I was a very depressed and introvert girl, but after I started Spanish lessons I began to feel confident and happy, enjoying the littlest joys in my life and appreciating the beauty of a lot of things in the world. The enthusiasm that the Spanish language gives out really inspired me to look to the bright side of things, and I learned to be anxiety-free. The love that I have for the Spanish language exceeds the love that I have had for anything else in the world, as this is something that really changed my soul and my attitude.

Hence, though I may not aspire to be a Spanish professor in the future, the passion that Spanish has given me will sustain me still. Spanish has not only made me capable of communicating with 0.6 billion people in the world, but also it has given me light and energy, something so valuable that I shall treasure always. J

Are Languages Really Arbitrary?

 Are languages arbitrary? If you are a student of languages and linguistics, you might have been told that the answer to this is an absolute yes.Of course, language is a man-created subject, and as humans have complex, unpredictable thoughts and emotions, it is logical that languages are subject to arbitrariness in its most original creation. However, though I do agree to this to a certain extent, as a polyglot I claim that this isn't true for all aspects of the human language. Here I provide three examples to support my view.
  One evident example is the Korean language. According to Koreans, the Korean letters were invented according to the placing of the tongue when different sounds are produced. In this sense, even though the creation of the Korean lexicon may seem arbitrary, the Korean alphabet isn't.
  The second evident example that I have is Chinese. As most readers of this blog would know, the Chinese characters usually follow the form of the object that it represents. For example, water is written as "水", and wood is written as "木". All of this has to do with the natural form and shape that these words represent in life.
  Last but not least, we must not ignore the fact that not all words in occidental languages are arbitrary. In some English words, for example, the pronunciation or the feeling that comes with the word has to do with its meaning. For instance "squeeze" has a pronunciation that gets you thinking of the action of getting toothpaste out from a tube, and the word " splash" does leave the sound of water jumping in your mind. These are some of the numerous non-arbitrary lexicon in English, and surely there are a million other examples in the 6900 tongues that the world has!

Language and Personality

        “Kill’em, shoot’em, take all of ‘em down!”… These words and the fervent emotion that comes with them may sound brutal and “out of this world”, but unfortunately it has well become the language of a great many young males in the global society today. With the increasing popularity of violent video games in the market, kids nowadays often get exposed more to violent and dirty language and less to polite language. The case of the MRT Genocide on the 21^st of May in Taipei corresponds well to this issue, and from Cheng Chieh’s murder motives, we can see how linguistics and psychology can play a major role in an individual’s personality and way of life.

        For at least a dozen years, linguists that have a foundation in Neuroscience have been researching quite a lot on this topic. It seems that not only the images but also the language and the lexicon frequently heard in a person’s childhood can contribute either negatively or positively to that child’s further mental development. Researches have shown that kids who watch mostly “soft programs” (programs with only friendly words like “That’s very kind of you” and “It’s lovely to have people like you in this world”) or programs with no violence nor villlains usually adopt a friendlier character, whereas kids who spend time playing video games or watching hero-villain shows (shows which have lines like “Fight to death for justice!” or  “May blood be spilled till justice is served!”) tend to be more ferocious as they grow up.

        Hence, the language that kids are exposed to determines to a great extent what kind of person they will turn out to be. If the society wants to avoid violence, one serious and useful way to put that in action is to omit all violent programs and video games in the kid’s market.

Will English Cease to Become the World's Lingua Franca?

  The world speaks English. Everywhere you go, English seems to be a basic communication tool, especially in a land that is exotic and unfamiliar to you. However, is there a possibility that English would cease to function as the global means of communication? Personally, I believe that English would still flourish, at the very least for the next 100 years, and my defense can be based on three evident facts:
  To begin with, a "Lingua Franca" usually does not change in a short amount of time. No one can anticipate the death of English in the international media just yet, and neither can we expect the imminent generations to give up all English courses and switch to Chinese or Spanish courses instead. Humans in the present century are already accustomed to English as a primary means of communication and there is nothing much we can do about that.
  Secondly, if America continues to be the power of the world, people will keep looking up to this nation. As much as the U.S. decides the trends of the global market, there is no manner by which we can resist English to survive.
 Last but not least, English was the dominant political language when globalization began placing its roots in the west. Many aspects of the globalized world we see today were established by the U.S., and with the whole world enjoying America's inventions (modern democracy, multimedia, technology, etc...), it wouldn't be logical for the English language to lose its say any time soon.

  Hence, due to the nature of a franca lingua's life expectancy, America's influence, and the timing of the United State's rise in world history, there is no doubt that English would not die out any time soon as the world's most dominant language. You can still hold on to your Spanish textbooks, but never forget how useful English is in our daily lives.

Problems of Language-Learning Among Taiwanese Students

 

Foreign-language learning seems to be a great challenge for most Taiwanese students, and in recent years people have been spending loads of cash consulting English crams schools for the sake of getting a good grade in school, in the TOEFL test, or in the IELTS test. These students seek rapid improvement, but rarely do they take time to understand the wrong methods and habits that they resort to while learning languages.

 

With years of observation I have come to see that Taiwanese students use too many “vocabulary handbooks” (books that contain only hundreds of vocabulary with a Chinese translation and no English explanation). Such cramming is time-consuming, not to mention the fact that these books jeopardize students’ abilities to grasp the context where each word is utilized.

Another bad habit that Taiwanese students have while learning English is that they rely too much on “Chinese to English translation” to complete an English text. They resort to writing down Chinese and later literally translating every word into English using Google translation devices. In fact, “thinking in a Chinese and not English sense” could lead to serious miscommunication, and also it could mistakenly guide students to “write with an accent.”

 

One last bad habit that I witness among these students is that the memorize vocabulary "the hard way"; that is, they cram everything in without using logic to remember what they learn in class. They have no lexical observation and contain no idea as to how one should analyze new vocabulary from its roots.

These are some major problems that Taiwanese students should deal with. Only with this, an eager heart and a fearless mind can students anticipate to develop their language capacities to the absolute fullest.

Our Concept of Time in Language Structures

   To a certain extent, languages can be considered as the greatest reflection of a society's philosophy, culture, and accumulated train of thought. Most people are naturally unaware of this phenomenon; nonetheless, in the past century linguists, translators, and writers have been investing much effort exploring how the "time concepts" of a society could lead to significant changes or uses in grammar or language use. Though each language has its own unique grammar structure, experts in intercultural linguistics have basically classified all known world languages into two categories, according to "the impact that the concept of time makes in their languages".


   The first category includes basically all occidental (mostly international) languages. As races in the western hemisphere  view the flow of time as a straight line, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic tongues usually include very complex past and future tense rules(In the Spanish language, we see that the past tense can be even more detailedly divided into four types). In addition to this, the majority of these languages  include the subjunctive, a tense quite abstract which is often used in inconcrete contexts. Westerners believe that because there are many things in life which do not actually occur in the "straight time line", the subjunctive could serve as the most perfect tense when expressing uncertainty in the future. 

  The rules in the oriental nations in quite the opposite. Because Confucianism has been so influential in history, Asian nations follow China's train of thought to a great extent. As stated in China's greastest work of philosophyYiJing, Asians view time not in a straight line, but in a circle. Unlike westerners, they trust that things in life repeat, and that there is no need to distinguish that clearly the past from the future. With this mindset, Asian languages do not really have a very concrete past tense, future tense, or subjunctive mood, leaving the Chinese language with a very concise grammar structure.

Globalization: A Threat to Cultural Identity

 
Blonde hair, blue eyes; black hair, brown eyes; auburn hair, green eyes... With globalization on the rise, people from all ethnicities and tongues get together and open a new, exciting page of the humanities. Language exchange enhances respect among races, bringing about a more peaceful, more positive understanding among people from different corners of the world. Nevertheless, this exchange of culture has brought about confusion in some countries, certain religions, and a few mixed individuals. The excitement may seem mind-blowing, but the identity and essence of culture meets a point of crisis.  

 One reason may be that with immigration movements increasing, people now identify themselves not by their blood and ethnicity, but by their growing environment. American born Chinese individuals might feel more close to the western style and less engaged to their eastern roots.

Another factor behind this phenomenon has to do with the dominance of certain tongues. With western languages like English, Spanish, and French widespread and spoken by billions of people, Asians, Latinos, and Africans start to experience a crisis in their language identities. Should their own tongues be abolished? Is the frequent use of western languages washing away the confidence and pride of their original culture? These are questions that certain cultures continue to confront with, and with it we see an inevitable, even dangerous "complex of inferiority".

 In conclusion, globalization may be offering us numerous chances of expanding our horizons, but there are sone bigger, unknown problems that many people seek to deal with. There might be a possibility that this issue cannot be dealt with, but at the moment we all are clear on the fact that we'll be needing a broader mind and acceptance of new identity definitions in a very near future.