Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2022-03-22
Here are my thoughts on language and culture – or, more precisely – on the question of why it is so difficult to thoroughly understand and consequently communicate with someone from another culture, for me as a westerner with someone who is from Asia. I was wondering about the use of direct and indirect articles in English, one of my two native languages, this morning as I stood in the kitchen cutting bread for my breakfast. If I say, “the newspaper” it is obvious for anyone from a western country, that I mean “the newspaper, in general” or “a specific newspaper”, or maybe “the morning newspaper”.
If I say, “a newspaper” I of course mean “any newspaper”. Whichever article I use, it is perfectly clear to any other person with a western upbringing or education what exactly it is I mean, and there is no need for further explanation unless I choose to provide any. I do not need to add the when, where, why, by whom, etc. of the newspaper to make it understood that I am speaking about articles printed on thin, folded paper which present recent news of the day or upcoming events. The word itself is unambiguous and the use of an article doesn’t change its main or basic meaning completely.
Those thoughts carried me on to how easy it is for us who speak a western language to learn another western language because of the way most of our languages are so alike one another – in vocabulary born from our common history, in the type of sentence structure and in the unmistakable meaning of words. True, there are many words that can be ambiguous but, for the most part, each word stands on its own and has its own clearly defined meaning. Sentences give us more structure as to the time in which something happens through the correct use of tenses and logical and chronological order within. By using certain words in specific parts of a sentence I can show politeness, authority or a request. And all that can be seen and understood immediately by anyone who speaks another western language.
And now my thoughts were taken back to my years of teaching English as a foreign language to German speakers and more recently to my encounters with Chinese speakers trying to perfection their English and German. Particularly these students had studied these foreign languages at colleges, memorized grammar rules I hadn’t even heard of and yet they could not really understand me completely and could not easily converse with me in simple, everyday English about things they dealt with on a daily basis. These people were business professionals in a variety of jobs, positions and had varying numbers of years of experience in their fields. Those I taught worked with German- and English-speaking colleagues and for German companies. Therefore, they were completely immersed in the foreign language most of the day, and most every day.
After having lived in the Chinese capital for nine and a half years, I know how frustrating it was to not be able to communicate with most of the “locals” I was surrounded by. Yet, I knew that I had simply not taken enough time to learn the language and so it was my own fault. I even had the help of a kind of personal interpreter in the first months after my arrival, but her English was so poor that I soon relied on my own instincts, maps, business cards with addresses in Chinese characters and a sense of adventure that would somehow take me where I wanted to go and get what I requested.
So, coming back to the problem caused by unsuccessful communication, I soon noticed that I could rely on my knowledge of my language, as well as from my teaching it, my intuition and my sense of context that helped “me” in dealing with “them”. Was it really that easy? Could my Chinese students not understand and use western languages because of how they were educated? I learned that much is learned in the Chinese school system by repetition and memorization, as it was in our schools in the nineteenth century. I watched my daughter study for hours every day after she came home from the language school she was going to in her efforts to learn the Chinese language as fast as possible and saw why repetition and memorization was vital and central to this language.
The Chinese language, Mandarin, is thousands of years old, simplified in its calligraphy but maintained in its structure to today. The character depicts a syllable, not a word and depending on how these are put together, the meaning begins to become clear. An easy example is the syllable -ma-. It can mean, mother, horse, a question mark or have no meaning at all. Our western languages know one word has one meaning and no matter how we put words together with others in a sentence, the meaning of the word will most always be the same.
That was it, or the beginning of understanding where my students’ difficulties might lie. In having learned their language as they did, thought structures were learned as well. Is this an interdependence that comes with language acquisition?
Has the way we are, influenced our language, or is it the other way around?
No matter, hearing this immensely complex language, to my ears anyway, the way things and thoughts are described and how instructions and explanations are given must have an effect on the complex way in which Chinese people “think”. This of course is carried over into the new, western language they are trying to use. But, since they are using their thought mechanisms, in the other, foreign language, it is not working.
Finally, I realized that not only are our words in western languages individuals with individual meaning, we westerners have been raised as individuals and live and work as individuals.
Contrary to that, the Chinese language, being a syllable-based language, needs context in order to be understood and interpreted correctly. Syllables can not stand alone and have no clear meaning, which is a mirror of the people in China. The society is strongly collectivistic, visible in their education, lives and manner of working.
For me, this does have strong implications for our dealings with, communication with and understanding of each other. Without taking this fact into consideration, we cannot effortlessly understand one another because we do not think alike, which is revealed in our languages.
by Helen A. Stoemmer