Finding your Way to the Heart

    Language learning is a way of developing of your skills in understanding things like grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. One other important part is the way that you use your own language and how you relate it to other languages that you may or may not know. So once you have a grasp on your Mother Tongue (the language you grew up speaking with) and perhaps an L2 language (a language that you have acquired later in life), then you can begin to understand the concepts of language learning.

    First, there is the issue that language learning (LL from now on) will be spoken of using the language of concepts, which are substantive ideas that need to be explained rather than talked about using ordinary language. Once we understand that the essence of LL is coming to grips with the overall way that the language is used, then we can begin to apply specific languages in understanding the realm of LL. So this is the overview map that will guide us in the journey of LL, which is how we acquire languages.

   Second, there is the spoken phonemes and the written words that are found on the page that have to be interpreted by understanding the meaning of these things. This is done by listening and reading and then digesting, so that the language could be spoken and written. The digesting process of language learning is how you acquire your target language. So the main part here is to see that the metaphor of digestion is how we are going to understand LL, the key to getting linguistic information into us, so that it can be expressed to others.

   Third, there is the issue of how different languages are related to each other. To begin to approach this issue, we will be focusing in on specific languages without the use of how they are unique in themselves. So this means that I will only be using the English language, for example, to discuss how languages are understood as a whole. Also the issue about how to speak about Spanish, for example, without using the Spanish language will be addressed. For now, let's be content to say that we are able to discuss LL using the current language being communicated.

   To conclude, LL should also be a fun exercise, rather than just dry academic discourse. Otherwise no one would approach LL because the culture gets extracted from the analytic prose. So there will also be a way of approaching culture from the discourse of LL by looking at some real world examples of how people do things, which will be important to have a full understanding of LL. More could be said about LL, but let the above be the way that we approach this subject. I will be going over some specific and concrete examples to make all this more clear next time.