Words are about creating pictures or ideas in other people's heads. When trying to engage other people you will pull from your own experiences and try and describe situations in words that will make sense to the other person.
This can be difficult when two people have not had similar experiences. I remember trying to describe the concept of a library to one of my Turkish friends who had never been outside the town she lived in.
But the problem of incomprehension is not the only obstacle. Words have amazing power and each person will attach experiences, pictures, and even emotions to the words. This is made abundantly clear when speaking with multi-lingual people.Suddenly everyday phrases can take on a whole new dimension when seeing the person's look of surprise, horror or confusion. Some examples:
This can be difficult when two people have not had similar experiences. I remember trying to describe the concept of a library to one of my Turkish friends who had never been outside the town she lived in.
But the problem of incomprehension is not the only obstacle. Words have amazing power and each person will attach experiences, pictures, and even emotions to the words. This is made abundantly clear when speaking with multi-lingual people.Suddenly everyday phrases can take on a whole new dimension when seeing the person's look of surprise, horror or confusion. Some examples:
- "I went for a lovely long jump last night."
- Overhearing a teacher shouting "DIE!!" to the students.
- When an expecting mother who decides to share her news exclaims "I'm embarrassed!"
It doesn't matter how well you know languages, you will always have a stronger connection to a sound in one language than in another. This makes the brain leap to conclusions before it has time to evaluate which language the other person is speaking in. In the above cases:
- "Spring" is the Swedish word for run. The same word means "jump" or "bounce" in German.
- "Die" means "Enough" is Hebrew.
- The word for pregnant in Spanish is "embarazada"
When learning languages you need to spend time working out which pictures/ideas/emotions to connect to the sounds. When there already exists emotions connected to the sounds you are hearing, it becomes harder to break or expand the bonds.
I still smile when I'm driving around Sweden and see the signs below. It's not very helpful as I probably take the speed bumps at a higher speed than I should, having attached a happy emotion instead of a careful emotion to the word.
And for those who are as fascinated by data visualisation as I am, Small World of Words is a cool website showing what word association people have and comparing how it differs to a standard Thesaurus.
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