Language and Culture

I love languages, with a particular emphasis on learning them, but throughout my adventures on many occasions I have become acutely aware of the fact that despite the possibility of becoming proficient in a language, you can never achieve native status in that language if you were not born into it and raised within it.  I say this because there are experiences which children have as they grow that you can not experience as an adult and any attempts to recreate them fall flat.  It is inescapable that our mindset shifts with age as does our perception and with it the possibility of experiencing things for the first time again becomes impossible.

Take for instance your favourite novel that you read as a child.  When you set out to learn a new language, one of the common approaches to developing an understanding of that language in written form is to take novels that you have read in your own language and look for translations of it to read in the language you are learning.  Despite the fact that this is the first time you read that novel in that language it can never recapture the experience you had as a child reading it for the first time - no more than you can by reading it in your own language again could. 

One thing I find interesting about the language learning process is the exploration of the culture attached to that language and that invariably leads to exploration of the type of content you would have experienced as a child had you grown up with it.  In the previous post I mentioned a TV show I watched as a child called 'Bernard's Watch' anyone who grew up in the UK and is of a certain age will know of that TV show and the premise, whether they watched it or not just by virtue of the fact so few channels existed and so few shows were created for children that we were at least aware of everything that was produced, it wasn't a lot of content to keep track of really. 

Trying to watch a show like this as an adult does not get very far, the content is clearly aimed at children and there's almost no appeal for adults.  This isn't true of all kids TV shows, there are quite a few with jokes aimed at adults included within them that as children the go over your head completely but when watched again as adults there is a completely different experience to be had.  Shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Magic Roundabout for instance both have adult humour throughout that is often missed entirely or acknowledged but not completely understood by children.  That's not a statement made in an effort to be condescending or patronising, it simply reflects the decisions made by the writers to include content that would appeal to parents who watched them with their children or to people who revisited the shows later in life as was the case in the latter.

Pop culture is fluid and constantly moving forward.  It is not something that it is easy to rewind and recapture.  You only ever experience glimpses of it in retrospect which makes it difficult as an adult to experience much of what another adult of a different culture experienced in their childhood.  Indeed there are questions of cultural appropriation that rear their head when it comes to how deep you dive into those cultures and how immersed you become.  Nevertheless if you were to engage with English speakers for any extended period of time you will hear references to pop culture past and present, the dating of which will reflect the age of the person making them.

This isn't something unique to separate cultures it can also be apparent within the same culture where shifts have occurred through time that make the experiences of different generations so divergent that they can be considered separate.  This is where the concept of a frame of reference comes into play which also features when learning languages as you need to define what time period you want to be able to reference, as it is unrealistic to want to be able to reference the culture of a country dating back hundreds of years.  Even within those cultures native language speakers won't possess a deep understanding of their own cultural heritage, even the language itself will have limited understanding.  Most British people will at least be able to reference Shakespeare for instance as his work still features in the national curriculum but ask them to name a single piece of work from that time period not created by Shakespeare and the vast majority will not be able to answer - myself included, it's just not a period we pay that much attention to.

One identifier for instance of native level speaking is the use of "correct mistakes" in other words the use of words or phrases that are used in the wrong context when defined syntactically or from an academic perspective but from an everyday perspective are treated as right and understood without anyone noticing the mistake that occurred.  These can best be described as syntax errors or semantic errors, for example "I have written a book" vs "I wrote a book" mean two different things and have different purposes from a grammatical context but from an everyday perspective they mean the same thing and a native speaker for the most part won't notice a mistake.  This is where you have to draw a perimeter around the concept of native understanding and demarcate it from the concept of proficiency, the latter is about fluency and understanding of the language in an academic context.

Trying to acquire frames of reference in another language is difficult not only because of the fluidity mentioned previously but also because it is often difficult to gain access to the content that was produced at the time.  Streaming services have made this much easier but there is still a wealth of content that is not available through any platform - something which I have mentioned in past posts in that it is ultimately driven by demand and the existence of markets neither of which tend to be high for content that was created decades ago unless it rose to the surface of their time periods.  Whilst you can argue that the most popular content will be available and should suffice in building a frame of reference, it does not lend itself to a native or near native understanding as that will inevitably reference experiences that you can no longer acquire.

For me personally having grown up in Northern Ireland there is a culture shock of sorts that would await anyone who had never been there during that time period if they were to try and recreate it.  Although the TV series 'Derry Girls' does quite a good job of giving you a glimpse into what it was like.

What I take away from this whole observation is the realisation that learning a language should be something that gives you a framework and the tools needed to explore another culture but that the depth of that culture is something that should instead be shared and exchanged with someone who actually lived through it in order to learn more about one another - it's also not a bad place to start a conversation, if there's one thing people are confident talking about it's their own experience because they can't be wrong about what they experienced as it is entirely their perception.