Tag Archives: Second Language

“What language do you think in?”

I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela were the native language is Spanish, and I was lucky enough to attend a bilingual school where I learned English. Ever since I moved to the United States, about eight years ago, when people find out that I speak two languages, they ask which one is my native language, and although I learned both almost at the same time, I had always considered myself more fluent in Spanish; time has changed that. Living in the States has made me as native in English as I am in Spanish. The question that follows is: what language do you think in? To be completely honest, the answer to this question is almost as hard as Dr. Rettinger’s favorite question: Does the tree make a sound if it falls in the middle of the forest? The truth is, I do not know. For the most part I consider myself to think in English when I am in an English-speaking environment and vice versa, but there is always the exception to the rule like when I count in English, once I get to 20 I start counting in Spanish

So while we learned about language in our cognitive class, I thought this would be a great time to see if there had been any research done about bilingualism and which language people think in when they speak more than one language. I found an interesting article that talks about the function of the brain when people switch form one language to the next. While the different languages activated the same exact area of the brain, there was an increase in intensity for when the participants switched languages, and no difference when they switched tasks in the same language. Although the article isn’t exactly about how to detect which language I think in, it most definitely suggests that something does occur when switching language and that given that they activate the same area of the brain, it could be highly impossible to think in two languages at a time.

Interestingly enough, I also found an article that suggests that the way people think changes with the language they are thinking in, or the environment they are in. What I mean by this is that language can activate specific cultural frames and therefore change your personality to some extent. This was shown to be true with Hispanic people and Arabs. Maybe then, it makes sense that I think and congruently act a certain way when I’m in an English speaking environment, as well as a Spanish speaking one.

Overall, bilingualism has been proven to be more beneficial than detrimental, here is a fun video that summarizes a few of them:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZANBvuS_iDU[/youtube]

Although I did not find much of an answer to my impossible question, I did find a lot of interesting studies about language, more specifically speaking more than one, and how it can affect us without it us even realizing it.

PSA: Even if you are not good at learning languages, explore the world, you will learn so much from it!

“Knowledge of “Culture” Enhances Second Language Learning Abilities”

I took a Linguistics class last semester and psychology was never brought up, so I found it really interesting how Linguistics was brought up in our Cognitive Psychology lecture.

I found an interesting article talking about “Knowledge of “Culture” Enhances Second Language Learning Abilities”. The article is by Ms. Bhanushree Agarwal, a M.A. student in Linguistics from the University of Delhi (http://www.gjms.co.in/index.php/gjms/article/view/674). This woman’s motivation for her article is the classroom sessions of Spanish learning language. She goes in to great detail and talks about how the knowledge of culture helps to learn a second language. She mentions “Culture and language are two sides of a same coin which go together hand in hand be it anthropology, linguistics, or psychology”.ForeignLanguage-Training

She suggests that the first step towards leaning a second language is to know about the culture of the place where that language is spoken, until and unless one will feel connected to that language one cannot learn it. She quoted from Wikipedia with “ differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so the speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the language they use”. She agreed with this quote saying that one word is one language is not necessarily exist in the same form or context in other languages.

Culture is defined as traditions, rituals, thinking of people, set of ideas, behaviors, attitudes that exist within a large group of people (families, countries, ethnicities, etc.). Language learning is more of knowing about the people who speak that language, feeling and thinking in the same way they do. This is why communicative method is one the important tools for learning a foreign language. Learning a new language does not completely change your thinking towards the world but gives you another direction for looking at it and perceiving things.

She concludes with that language is a culture. If learners are being taught language without teaching about the culture in which it operates then students are learning meaningless and empty symbols or they might interpret the meaning in an incorrect manner. She also mentions her own experience when trying to learning Spanish as her second language. She says as she was learning Spanish, she would love to watch movies in Spanish. She also tried to get to know names of famous Spanish actors, singers, painters, and everything because then only she used to feel connected and enjoyed her Spanish learning classes.