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August 11, 2012 at 12:44 am #39695adelParticipant
I posted this earlier but it seems to have disappeared (if it appears again
for some reason????)Found an interesting article on language…..a point of interest to me since I
have always felt to be living dual lives. My world in english is separate from
the one in japanese. One on the left the other on the right, not only my brain
but also emotional body.Recently, I think because of the amount of repetition I have been putting into
the grounding work as well as fusion and the eight channnels have started to
widen the channels. At last I find myself comfortable in either
language, don’t mind if people understand or not. I used to have feelings before
where I wasn’t sure which language expressed the “real” me. Which language has
the true me. I don’t worry, I can be both left and right (though they seem to
oppose each other) because of the center. Chi kung is the language that can
bind the two. Adelhttp://edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think
HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
By Lera BoroditskyHumans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?
These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.
I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they’d most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?
Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let’s take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.
Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.
Scholars on the other side of the debate don’t find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don’t include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn’t mean that English speakers aren’t paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they’re not talking about them. It’s possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it’s distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it’s impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it’s impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can’t be true, let’s find out what is true.
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms ย north, south, east, and west ย to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them ย in fact, forces them ย to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.
People’s ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., “The best is ahead of us,” “The worst is behind us”), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the “down month” and the last month is the “up month”). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, “This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?” When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4
Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., “That was a short talk,” “The meeting didn’t take long”), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like “much” “big”, and “little” rather than “short” and “long” Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5
An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?
One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we’ve taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you’re learning a new language, you’re not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception ย our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don’t line up across languages.
To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers’ ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call “blue.” Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.
For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, “blue,” and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.
Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they’re asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments ย and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.
When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.
Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders (“gender” in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, “women, fire, and dangerous things.”
What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun’s gender. For example, to say something like “my chair was old” in Russian (moy stul bil’ stariy), you’d need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with “chair” (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you’d use the masculine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.” These are the same forms you’d use in speaking of a biological male, as in “my grandfather was old.” If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat’), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.”
Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” ย a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish ย the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.7
In fact, you don’t even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art ย the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff!
I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people’s minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.
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August 11, 2012 at 3:12 pm #39696STALKER2002ParticipantFire=He=Yang, Water=She=Yin, in Russian Language. What about other Laguages? Is there any gender for fire and water?
August 11, 2012 at 5:15 pm #39698StevenModeratorIn Polish, fire is masculine and water is feminine, so it is the same as Russian.
In German, both fire and water are neuter, even though German has 3 genders.In English, they are neuter, as is true with 99% of nouns in English
S
August 11, 2012 at 5:38 pm #39700StevenModeratorBut that’s OK.
Important things sometimes need to be said multiple times. ๐
SAugust 12, 2012 at 12:55 pm #39702STALKER2002ParticipantDAY=He=Yang, NIGHT=She=Yin,( in Russian Language) etc.
August 12, 2012 at 10:03 pm #39704StevenModeratorDay/night makes sense, but . . .
I would expect “war” to be masculine,
and “peace” to be feminine.War is expansive, fueled by too much testosterone
and power-hungry men.Peace is passive, more yin.
Of course, it may actually be reversed
in a different language, as the article discussed.I’m sort of glad that English is mostly gender-free.
Most gender assignments in other languages to my mind
seem pretty arbitrary, although there may be some
intrinsic historical cultural reason unique to the
particular culture why a certain gender was originally
chosen for it. Even so, having grown up with a language
that doesn’t have this feature, makes it all seem so odd . . .S
August 13, 2012 at 2:48 am #39706adelParticipantIn Japanese no gender but characters do have images which give a distinctive feeling
or flavor to words:Man = 男 = working in rice paddy
woman = 女 = kneeling figure
mother = 母 = woman w/nipples
ocean = 海 = add water to motherEnglish seems to me to be a language with very little “flavor” which makes me wonder if that is why it seems to be a language which anyone can learn to speak enough to get by. My husband by the way has made a decision NOT to learn or use English because he does not want to become Americanized or westernized.
Adel
August 13, 2012 at 12:34 pm #39708STALKER2002ParticipantI repeat again that WAR=She=Yin in Russian Language. Tolstoy is one of the giants of Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, “What an artist and what a psychologist!” Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote, “When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature.”
War is of female gender because it is a dark ENIGMA rather than SIMPLE like a day PEACE
August 13, 2012 at 1:01 pm #39710STALKER2002ParticipantOcean is something more visible and definite (YANG) than atmosphere (YIN)
August 13, 2012 at 1:07 pm #39712StevenModerator>>>My husband by the way has made a decision NOT
>>>to learn or use English because he does not want
>>>to become Americanized or westernized.Not to be contradictory, but a language does not
make one “this way or that way”. It is your personal
values that do this.If one lives in a foreign country, one should make
an effort to learn the language, because language
is the means to communicate with others.Otherwise it is like saying: I like your country
enough to reside here, but I don’t actually want
to communicate with any of you people.This is a very unfriendly and
closed-hearted philosophy, in my view.S
August 13, 2012 at 10:49 pm #39714adelParticipantI do believe that the language you speak (when you are
fluent of course) changes you. I know this from my own
experience. I have mentioned this to other (fluent) bilingual
Japanese people and many agree with me. They understand the
reason for his not speaking. Many Americans can not bridge
this understanding and I find it to be a huge cultural
difference between the two.>Not to be contradictory, but a language does not
>make one “this way or that way”. It is your personal
>values that do this.Of course this is true but it is also true that in order
to speak correctly in a certain language there are basic
values that most in that society adhere to. If you dislike
some of those values it makes using the language distasteful.>This is a very unfriendly and
>closed-hearted philosophy, in my view.Actually the view above is one that is often expressed by
Americans to him and is a major reason for him not being
interested in communicating with some. There are people to
whom this is not important and have a natural way of com-
municating with him and they have become friends. I think
it is a more natural way for him and I support him in his
decision. I think this works great for him and am often
blown away by his insights into western culture which he
picks up where others can not because he is not being side
tracked by talk. Silence is a great are to become sensitive
to nonverbal communication.>If one lives in a foreign country, one should make
>an effort to learn the language, because language
>is the means to communicate with others.Living abroad for 13 years I have seem countless Americans
who have very little interest in learning the language and
speak only english but they get by, even though they may be
expats for decades. For myself, I am verbal and naturally
pick up languages.In short, I often find that though my husband is not bilingual
nor very talkative he often has deep understandings of situations
that he picks up from his 5 senses rather than relying on the
verbal. I am reminded of (was it) Blake who retreated from the
world only to be able to see all in the world.Adel
August 14, 2012 at 12:59 am #39716StevenModeratorLet me give you an analogy:
If I go into someone’s home, and they expect people
to take their shoes off at the door, and I don’t do
this (because I’ve decided I’m wearing shoes no
matter what, just as I do at home), then I’m being a jerk.
You don’t go into someone else’s home, and expect
people to play by *your* rules.>>>Living abroad for 13 years I have
>>>seem countless Americans who have very
>>>little interest in learning the language and
>>>speak only english but they get by, even though
>>>they may be expats for decades.I find this equally offensive to be honest.
And I have the same negative feelings for
Americans that behave in this manner–Americans
going to other countries and expecting people
to speak English for them. It’s maybe understandable
if someone is a tourist, but not if you move there.If you move to a foreign country, you are
presenting that you want live in the land with
the people there. Hence you should learn
the language and try to understand the culture,
even if you want to maintain your own culture
as the dominant one. See the shoes example again.If you *don’t* want to do this, the answer is simple:
Don’t live there!Why live in a place whose language you do not want
to learn, and whose culture you care nothing about?
If you don’t like the culture, don’t live there.If someone here in America, moved to (say) Poland,
and they refused to learn Polish when they arrived . . .
either expecting people to speak English or use
gestures, while not accepting any Polish instruction
from anyone, the Polish people wouldn’t think you
were very friendly, and you know what, they’d be right.We’ll likely have to just agree to disagree, because
I doubt your opinion or support for your husband’s
view is likely to change, and I know mine won’t.
For me, it goes back to the example with the shoes.
Am I, as a guest, trying to fit in into the host’s
home and atmosphere or not? If not, I’m not being
a very good guest.It’s good we have some disagreement, usually we
agree, so we agree too often, ha ha. ๐Qi,
StevenAugust 14, 2012 at 1:33 am #39718StevenModeratorI do know that Western culture has
really “invaded” Japan. There are
a lot of young people in Japan that
have abandoned traditional Japanese
culture, and speak English among friends.
During my brief 1-day layover in Japan
on an overseas flight, I was amazed
to see how some Japanese youths were looking
even more “American” than actual Americans.I suppose if I lived there and was
part of the traditional generation,
I would not want to lose my culture either.
So from that standpoint, I completely
respect your husband’s viewpoint about
not wanting to learn English.But if that’s the case, why live here then?
Why live in the very place that you want
nothing to do with?For instance, if I don’t want to learn to
speak Russian or take on some Russian culture,
I’m not going to move to Russia.S
August 14, 2012 at 11:10 am #39720adelParticipantAm I, as a guest, trying to fit in into the host’s
home and atmosphere or not? If not, I’m not being
a very good guest.This is the very attitude that makes people here so
paternalistic. It is not coming from a space of love.
It is “I have given you such and such and I demand that
you show gratitude”….I’ve heard this from most of my asian
foreign friends (esp. Vietnam and China). Just think, is this how
you treat your shen?By the way these are not “guests”,
the very stance that the US is built upon is space and freedom for
everyone from anywhere, who are legal status and pay taxes. Paying
taxes is showing gratitude IMO.If you move to a foreign country, you are
presenting that you want live in the land with
the people there. Hence you should learn
the language and try to understand the culture,
even if you want to maintain your own culture
as the dominant one.My husband came to be with me not to be an American…he had open
views upon arrival and after several years of living here has come
to his conclusions, that is because he does understand the culture.
And I understand because he sees so much of it as not coming from
a space of love but from the above paternalistic stance…not something
that he resonates with. That is why I support him in his decision.This is good stuff, remember I started this whole thread talking about
how it was starting to not bother me with whom I talked to if they
didn’t understand what I meant. I can discuss this with you even
though I feel that we are just two lines running parallel without it
frustrating me like before. It is just our differences. Great Stuff!!
AdelAugust 14, 2012 at 1:37 pm #39722StevenModerator>>>This is the very attitude that
>>>makes people here so paternalistic.
>>>It is not coming from a space of love.
>>>It is “I have given you such and such
>>>and I demand that you show gratitude”….
>>>I’ve heard this from most of my asian foreign
>>>friends (esp. Vietnam and China). Just think,
>>>is this how you treat your shen?I think you have a misunderstanding of where
I am coming from, and perhaps how others you
call “paternalistic” similarly view things on this end.It is not about being resentful that others
expect gratitude. It is about as an individual
simply showing gratitude because you WANT TO. If I go
somewhere else, someone’s home, another country
etc., I try to follow their customs as a
courtesy and a sign of respect, not because
I feel it demanded upon me. *I’m* the one
that takes the initiative, I don’t expect others to.
It’s called being proactive in friendliness.In any situation I’ve found myself in, if
I am with people who speak a different language,
and I have taken some time to learn even a few
phrases or show interest in the language, it is
amazing how quickly you see people’s eyes light up,
the corners of their mouth raise into a smile,
and suddenly you’ve just connected to their heart.
I witnessed this with my ex-girlfriend’s Polish parents,
and I witnessed this with the Chinese couple that
I get Chinese massage from. The reason is simple:
you show that you value their language, heritage,
and culture, and now you are no longer just
an outsider that they can’t talk to.So from my experience, I’ve found that learning
other languages helps to connect you to others,
which IS coming from a place of love. When
I meet others that don’t take that approach,
it smells too much like “I don’t want to connect.”
And ultimately, THAT is what I suspect other people
(who you call “paternalistic”) are reacting to.
The projection of “I don’t want to connect.”Intended or not, this is the message that is being
projected when someone doesn’t want to learn the
native language and doesn’t show any interest in the
culture. One who adopts such a position needs
to recognize that they are doing this, if only
to understand others better.>>>This is good stuff, remember I started this
>>>whole thread talking about how it was starting
>>>to not bother me with whom I talked to if they
>>>didn’t understand what I meant. I can discuss
>>>this with you even though I feel that we are
>>>just two lines running parallel without it
>>>frustrating me like before. It is just our
>>>differences. Great Stuff!!Good . . . thought I’d give you some practice. ๐
Just teasing. ๐The fact that people have unique perspectives
is what makes life interesting. Keep smiling. ๐Qi,
Steven -
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