I’m sorry but could you elaborate on how you need to understand a culture to learn the language? I’m not saying I disagree- if anything I know being raised in a Dominican household has given me an edge to learning Spanish, but could you explain it further and give advice on how to learn about cultures? It would help me in my German studies. :)

languagesandshootingstars:

Hi! Language and culture are tightly connected. Language is formed by culture and culture is influenced by language.

One great example of the connection between a language and a culture is these so-called “untranslatable” words, or words that lack direct equivalent in other languages, as I prefer to say. Let’s take an example. The Finnish word “sisu” has no direct equivalent in other languages, but it is often translated as “guts”, “bravery”, “resilience”, “hardiness”, or “grit”. If you don’t know about Finnish culture and history you won’t truly grasp the meaning of the word and what it means to Finnish people and their national character even if I provide you all those words that kind of describe it but not really.

Another example would be the Japanese words “本音” (honne) and “建前” (tatemae). Jisho.org translates them as “real intention; true opinion, what one really thinks” (honne) and “face; official stance; public position or attitude” (tatemae). These translations probably don’t say much to you unless you know about Japanese culture, behaviour patterns, and communication styles.

Another example of why language and culture are connected are jokes. You may be advanced in a language and understand every single word but still not quite figure out what was so funny about the joke that was just told to you. If you understand the culture, you’ll understand the sense of humour the people of the culture share and you’ll understand the jokes. This applies to memes as well.

Understanding the culture is not only important for understanding “untranslatable” words or jokes, but also important for avoiding misunderstandings and conflicts. In the beginning of my Japanese learning journey I used to make a lot of Japanese people uncomfortable and even get into conflicts with them because even though I was speaking their language, I was acting like a Finnish person. I didn’t understand what they were really thinking because I didn’t understand their culture. Now that I do know about their culture and understand their communication styles I can adjust my behaviour and language in such way that it doesn’t make Japanese people uncomfortable anymore and I haven’t gotten into arguments with them anymore – in fact, I have gotten a lot closer to them because if I speak to them in their language and act in the way that they are used to they trust me.

There are a lot of great quotes that describe how important it is to learn culture along with learning the language but one of my favourites is “the person who learns language without learning culture risks becoming a fluent fool”. 

If you’re looking for more proof or information just google “language and culture” and you’ll find a lot of great articles that probably explain it much more

elaborately than I did. Hope this cleared it up a little though!