Many people hold an idea that linguistics is all about learning foreign languages. Most of my friends are curious about the subject I am studying. “How many languages have you learned so far?” is the commonest question being asked. This was not surprising to me, as I too held the same impression about linguistics before I actually got in touch with the subject.
Two years ago, as a secondary school student hunting for a suitable subject for study, I read through a brochure introducing linguistics. Linguistics was a subject completely new to me. I was thrilled to learn more about it just by reading the brochure. Linguistics is more about the study of language rather than the learning of languages. With the exposure to different languages including English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and some Korean in my childhood, I have always been curious about why there are so many languages in the world, why they are so different from each other, while similarities could still exist between them. I wanted to know why direct translations between languages sometimes fail. How language and culture interact was also of great interest to me. It seemed that the answers to all these questions could be found by studying this subject. Therefore I made up my mind to take the undergraduate study programme in linguistics here in this Department in CUHK.
Throughout the two years of study, the idea about linguistics became clearer to me. Linguistics tries to understand what language is. It aims to explore how languages function in aspects of their sounds, grammar, and meaning. Furthermore, linguists also try to find out the universals of language. Thus in most of the core fields of linguistics like morphology, semantics, and phonology, languages are broken down into smaller units, for finding out what the common elements between the variety of languages are. The methods of study are more scientific than I ever imagined, though linguistics falls under the humanities.
As a student of the science stream previously in my secondary school years, phonetics, being very scientific, became the most appealing field of study to me. In it, the mechanisms of production and the perception of speech sounds are explored. Some previous knowledge in biology and physics may be advantageous for studying phonetics. However, even without previous knowledge, the mechanisms are not difficult to understand with clear explanation from the professor. My classmates and I had lots of fun in class, especially in learning to produce a variety of speech sounds in the world’s languages. Do you know how “>” and “F” and “B” sounds? We had to know how to produce these sounds while most of them were unfamiliar to us and thus somehow sounded funny. We kept on practicing on our way home, even when we were taking a shower and when we were on the school bus. You could never imagine how much happiness we had when we finally got the correct sound.
Being a student of linguistics, also meant that you had the chance to go to a field trip. Our class went to Wuhan last year to study the sound patterns of the dialects in Hubei. We learned all the useful skills in class before we went on the trip. We learnt to distinguish tones, vowels and consonants, by merely hearing the words in the dialect. The professor then showed us how to do recording and analysis. When we got to there, we were assigned an informant who spoke the dialect. Working in groups, we tried to analyze their dialect with the skills that we had learned in class. At last, every group had successfully found a system in the speech sounds of the dialect. We were really proud of ourselves for the work we had done. This was the first time that we could apply the knowledge from the classroom into actual practice. Furthermore, the field trip had provided us students with a chance to get in touch with the culture in Hubei. By working in a group, sharing knowledge of eachother’s languages and sharing life experiences in the two very different places, we had built a good friendship with our informant as well. It was a fantastic experience that I will never forget and a chance that you should never miss.
The learning of sentence structures and word formations in syntax and morphology is also interesting. After the course in syntax, you will be able to draw tree diagrams for the analysis of the structure of every sentence, ones as short as “He sleeps.” or ones as lengthy as “The editor has already informed the authors that he asked the reviewers to comment on the paper and that one of them did not agree with the authors’ idea but the other one actually liked them.” With the knowledge in morphology and syntax, many grammatical inaccuracies could be explained. Why “non-” is incompatible with a word like “fluent”, but can form a word with a word like “human”? And how words like “submarine-sandwich” and “muffin-top (the roll of fat above somebody’s waistline)” are formed. These are to be investigated in morphology.
There are still more fields in linguistics. One of the fields that interests me a lot is first language acquisition, and I am going to take this subject in the coming semester. By then, I would have more ideas on how infants are able to acquire their first language without difficulty. It is fascinating to know that infants all over the world \ pick up their mother tongue with similar degree of ease no matter how “difficult” their mother tongue is to the second language learners. Chinese, for example, is believed to be a difficult language to learn for foreigners, but Chinese infants learn to speak it with ease. They learn as fast as the infants acquiring English, Japanese, or French. This is still a mystery to me, and I am going to find the answer in the coming semester.
Although language learning and the study of linguistics are very different, the knowledge of foreign languages could undoubtedly enhance the understanding and application of the theories learned in class. Therefore, linguistics majors will get a chance to immerse themselves in at least one foreign language. I have chosen to learn Spanish and take it as one of my minor subjects. The Department has granted me a chance to study the language in Spain as a summer exchange. Thus I am now writing this article overseas, enjoying a fabulous summer interacting with students from all over the world and the locals in Spain, while at the same time learning Spanish. Here I have opportunities to practice the language, and therefore can actually grasp the grammar and usage more accurately. I can really look into a language, together with its culture. If I did not come here, I would never know that the Spanish people finish a shower within five minutes but could close everything for three hours in the afternoon just for taking a nap. I am sure it will be an experience of a lifetime for me.
If you love languages and want to know more about the mechanisms underneath languages, and think that linguistics is for you, why hesitate? Be one of us and let’s explore the world of languages together.