Jung Hanna

EPISODE 10. LANGUAGE

This is what I felt when learning European languages. The most special part of language learning is that it feels like rewiring your brain to think in a new way through that language.
If someone from East Asia has never learned English or European languages, they might never have experienced thinking about individuals as objects to address directly. In East Asian languages, subjects like “I” or “you” are often omitted in conversation. When a speaker says something, the “I” is implied but not explicitly stated, and the “you” can refer to anyone in the context, not just the person being directly addressed. For example, in Korean, “배고파” (“I’m hungry”) omits the “I,” and “어디가?” (“Where are you going?”) doesn’t specify who “you” is, it could refer to the listener, someone else, or even the speaker, depending on the situation.
Because most East Asian languages are high-context, we grasp the real meaning through situations and shared understanding.
When we learned to write as children, the first thing I had to remember was to omit myself and avoid writing “me” in sentences, even when the content was entirely about my thoughts and experiences. For East Asians, it feels too obvious to state the subject explicitly, so we omit it. I guess this is where the collectivist mindset begins.
I always feel like I need more information when I speak in Italian, but at the same time, I receive more explicit information in Italian conversations. In contrast, the context in East Asian languages always depends on the people and situations, much like East Asian philosophy itself.
This is just a personal perspective, and maybe I’m generalizing too much, but I hope some people can resonate with what I’ve felt.
If I have another opportunity to learn more languages, I’d like to try Hindi or Arabic, which are completely different from what I’ve learned so far. If I could speak those two, I could communicate with a significant portion of the world’s population, and I could also understand more about how the world is structured. That would be super cool.

• Reference

L.S. Vygotsky (1930). The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 6, “Tool and Symbol in Child Development” (pp. 145–156).

Linguistic relativity remains controversial to this day, with debates persisting due to diverse cultural and historical factors: Boroditsky, Lera; Liberman, Mark, The debate “For and Against Linguistic Relativity”. The Economist. on 15 February 2012. Retrieved 19 September 2019.

Ping Li, Jennifer Legault, Kaitlyn A Litcofsky, Neuroplasticity as a function of second language learning: anatomical changes in the human brain, Corte, Sep 2014.