Language as a Way of Life

Autobiographical Paper
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Introduction
According to Derek Walcott, “The English language is nobody’s special property”. Rather, “it is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself” (Ratcliffe, 2010). In my linguistic journey, I found out that learning a language does not only mean improving one’s ability to create new sentences, nor widen one’s vocabulary. Instead, I learned that learning a language also entails knowing the very culture where that language originated. In the book written by Lippi-Green (1997), part of the discussion involves a statement about the equality and the characteristic of flux for every language in the world. In line with this, I believe that my very own journey towards learning and improving my english ability is characterized by a state of flux, where there exists a need for me to constantly adapt to new situations at hand. This means that in order to learn a new language, I must be able to know the very culture and adapt to it. However, part of the difficulty in learning English entails the fact that not all of the words in my language has a direct translation of every word that they have with it. At first glance, this might seem that the English language is much more sophisticated, however, knowing for a fact that my language also has a lot of vocabularies that are not present in the English language. In retrospect to our discussion earlier, this then shows Lippi-Green’s (1997), idea that all language is equally sophisticated on their own. However, while this might be true, the downside to this is that this characteristic of sophistication proves to be a difficulty because plenty of times, the meanings, and the users are very much different in between these languages. In this article, much of my analysis regarding my journey would be focused on the ideas provided above. Particularly, I would link them towards my very own story of how I learned the English language. Although I’m not that fluent yet, I believe that as I continue to learn about the very own culture of this region, I’m also learning how to use English more than its syntactic sense.
Language as a way of Life
The very first language that I’ve learnt is Chinese, particularly, Mandarin. Being the very first means to communicate with the world, most of the interactions that I had when I was a kid was in this language. I’ve studied elementary and middle school in a Chinese private school, and after then I went to an English language school to be able to refine my English skills. After all these years of trying to learn the English language, what I realized was that one of the difficulties with learning English when you’re originally Chinese is that the syntax and the semantics of both languages varies greatly from each other. Some examples of Chinese words that do not have a direct English translation are: “緣分 – yuán fèn” and “師傅 – shīfu”. While the first one, yuán fèn, roughly translates to ‘fate’, its usage is different and more context specific. Literally, it refers to an instance where two people hav...