chapter 1

We’re always following rules, like playing a game. Once we learn the rules and master them, we can create sentences we’ve never heard or seen before. “Language is the cornerstone of culture.” It’s how we communicate what it important to us. We unconsciously search for the most relevant information as it’s coming into our brain. We use this information to make inferences and thus draw conclusions from the simple and sometimes meaningless words we hear. We know and understand what meaning is generally associated with the words in the context and order in which we heard them. From a very young age we learn not only how to speak these words but the meanings associated with them. For example, we learn the word “mom” or “dad” but we also know who and what that refers to. Our brains usually even know to desire to know the meaning of a word we may not have heard before. There is so much emphasis placed on words, for instance our vocabulary terms from each chapter are things we need to understand to get the meaning of the whole reading. 

What interested me was, when I learned German, at first I translated every word from English to German in my head before I understood it. Eventually, I was able to hear a word and German and think of the meaning in German. This made it SO much easier to speak and understand German. The reading mentioned how sometimes there's different meanings for the same word in a different language. I just thought it was interesting how that works. It also makes me wonder, do words change meaning at the same pace with technology and fads in multiple languages if the languages are close together? (as in, not English but maybe French and German or French and Italian)