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!
Reblogs this x1000 to try to get rid of cultural ignorance when it comes to this. Because breaking down Indian stereotypes in particular is incredibly important to me for many reasons.
She gie’d her mammy a cake, she turnt intae a big bear, and her old yin tried tae dae her in. If that’s no pure mess, I don’t know wut is. Simples.
I’ll be honest, I got the first part of that, and the last part. But there is an entire sentence in the middle, that evidently is about her father trying to kill her mother, that sounds completely unintelligible to me. I assumed it was another language – potentially Gaelic but honestly, I’ve never heard that spoken before so I was taking a guess there.
I watched Brave and had absolutely no trouble understanding the entire movie so they’re definitely increasing the accent here for comedic value. But also it’s not just an accent – that second part of the first sentence isn’t understandable even transcribed.
I’m
a weird one though – I grew up in an asian country (not white), and
somehow despite multi-lingual parents and siblings (as is expected in
that asian country), my only and mother tongue is English.
It’s no Gaelic, it is however Scots 🙂
“Big Yin” is a common Glasgow term, and this is important, cause Billy Connolly who voiced her Da, is from Glasgow. It’s also the name was known by during his rise to fame, and is still affectionately known as “The Big Yin”.
It basically means “the big man” (note: a person does not need to be tall or large in stature to be called the big man, sometimes it can mean something else like “boss” or “strong personality”). So yea. Was a nice wee addition to her dialogue, though they’ve made her more Weegie for sure.
So i mentioned about a server for intensive language learners yesterday. Here’s the invitation link.
Again, the server is a technical one. I didn’t add chats/channels for each language because you can find many servers like this. (If anyone wants the invitation link to one, @lipwigvonmoist will gladly give you one.)
If you want to chat occasionally, there are 5 plain chats (text and audio) that you can use anytime for practice or anything else.
The server has several channels (the ones that I’ve mentioned here) and i’ll add more if there’s a need for new ones.
We will choose 5 languages and @lovelybluepanda makes 2 files with 1-2 grammar lessons explained and 10-25 words and your job is to learn what the files contain for whichever of the language(s) you want to learn!
We are starting on August 1st so you still have time to join and vote for the language(s) you’re interested!
The 5 languages we chose for the event are Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Finnish. Although the event has been going on for two weeks already and we have four lessons for each language, feel free to join if you’re interested!
A lot of people want to study Japanese but think it’s too hard and that they will never succeed. That is really a myth, though. Here is why Japanese is actually easy.
1. All verbs are regular, there are only 2 exceptions
If you know French, this must sound like a dream to you. In other languages [like French] there seem to be more irregular verbs than regular ones. Not in Japanese, though. There are 3 groups of verbs, the first 2 being regular and very easy to conjugate. The third group consists of only 2 irregular verbs!
2. Easy pronunciation
Japanese doesn’t have any exceptionally hard to pronounce letters. Unlike Arabic, German or Finnish, Japanese should be quite easy to pronounce for English speakers. Also, Japanese isn’t a tonal language like Thai or Chinese.
3. No genders, plural or articles
Anyone who studies a romance language [and many other languages that have that] knows how frustrating it can be when you use the wrong article or verb ending. In Japanese, it doesn’t even exist, so nothing to worry!
4. Grammar is easy!
That’s true. It’s just completely different from English, but that doesn’t make it hard. After a while, it will feel completely normal. The best part about the grammar is that you can build a whole sentence with just one word. For example, if you wanted to ask somebody in English if they did their homework, you’d say ‘did you do your homework?’ Kind of long, isn’t it? In Japanese, you can ask by using only the verb ‘to do, can, be able to’ – like this: ‘done?’ Also, spoken, you can drop many words if you don’t really need them, especially particles! So if you’re not sure what particle to use, chances are you can just easily leave it altogether without the sentence losing its meaning. It’s easy to build sentences that seem to end in ‘…’, but that’s completely normal in Japanese and everyone will understand.
5. Tons of resources
Sadly, there are some languages people don’t really care about or not a lot of people want to study/ are interested in. Japanese is not one of those languages. There are hundreds of books about Kanji alone! And so many courses for every level. Also, it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in – anime, manga, books, movies, game show, video games, dramas, music – it’s all out there and super easy to find, so you definitely will find something you can listen to or read to practice your skills.
6. Kanji/the writing systems are hard?
No. They aren’t. It’s just a huge workload, it takes time and effort, but they are not hard.
At first, having to learn 3 writing systems will seem exhausting. But believe me, later, when you start reading, you will be so glad! You can detect if a text has a lot of foreign words at one glance if it has a lot of Katakana, for example, and you could say a lot more on twitter because of the syllabaries!
So actually, the 3 systems put together makes everything easier to read!
So please, just start studying and go at your own pace, and have fun studying every day ⭐︎
can you believe after so many years of using french’s “c’est la vie” because the nuance doesn’t translate, we’ve finally obtained a flawless translation with “that’s just the way it is on this bitch of an earth"
La pomme d’eau. La pomme de terre. Le pomme de feu. La pomme d’air. Il y a très longtemps ces quatre patates vivaient en harmonie. Mais un jour, la pomme du feu décida de passer à l’attaque.
i don’t even fucking speak french but I fucking know what that last comment says
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