Three years ago, I chose to study Linguistics, instead of pure science subjects which I had been studying in secondary school, simply because of my fondness for language. Luckily, studying languages from a scientific perspective has not let me down. Linguistics explores the nature of the different aspects of communication. It studies the general rules of the grammar, how sounds are produced and patterned, how words are formed, how sentences are structured and how meanings are expressed.
Besides these core areas, it is also interesting to study how babies acquire their language(s) after birth and also bilingualism - the phenomenon of people speaking more than one language. Linguistics is closely related to other fields, which makes this subject so fascinating. These interdisciplinary subjects include Psycholinguistics, Clinical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Neurolinguistics. However, it is the nature of Linguistics, itself, which profoundly attracts many people to devote their lives to studying just a small part of it.
Studying Linguistics has provided me with many of opportunities to experience various things. We have the opportunity to choose to study one or more foreign languages including French, Spanish, German, Korean and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) in our Department. With the help of knowing the general rules and characteristics of languages, we can learn a new language more easily on the ground that hardship of learning language increases with ages. Needless to say, speaking more languages increase our competitiveness in the job market. The most appealing reason for learning more languages is that it gives me a greater chance to understand diverse cultures. Motivated by my own passion and the study atmosphere at the Department, I have started learning four languages, French, Spanish, Korean and HKSL. I will continue to learn at least two of them, French and HKSL, as I really like learning languages. I believe that speaking the language of a country is the key to truly understanding its culture and enriching my life and experience.
Another great learning opportunity our Department offers us is the field trip study. We are financially subsidised to do a language survey in a city outside Hong Kong. Last year, we went to Wuhan, China to find out the phonological pattern of a language we do not know. We applied what we had learnt in collecting the data and discussed with each other in a group to solve any problems we encountered with the guidance of our professor. This allowed us to learn much more than from lectures and reference materials. At the same time, we did some sight-seeing and tried the famous food there. Working, studying plus visiting together made the whole trip very enjoyable and rewarding.
One more learning opportunity I would like to highlight here is the summer programmes held by the Department to let students have an immersion study of the foreign languages they are studying. We can choose to go to France, Spain, Germany and Italy to learn their languages for one month. In the summer of my first year, I went to Lyon, France to study French, and I also traveled to 6 more countries during my trip in Europe which lasted for one and a half months. It was an unforgettable experience. After this journey, I found learning French to be much easier and it fueled my passion for learning because I really loved the French culture. In addition to language ability enhancement, I learned to be more independent and treasure what I already have.
In the past three years, apart from the required courses, the Department offered a wide range of interesting elective courses to widen our exposure in the field. I chose some interesting ones to take, for example, Pragmatics, Clinical Linguistics, Sign Linguistics and Bilingualism. In all the courses, we are required to do a mini-research project on anything that interests us. Some interesting topics my friends studied are foul languages, gender and language, code-mixing, and language in advertisement.
Sign Linguistics, which I took in the last semester, was one of my favourite courses. I am particularly curious about the classifier structures in HKSL. My classmate and I carried out a small-scale study on it. After reading some books and journals, and consulting our instructor, we designed our own data elicitation experiment to collect data from native signers in the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies. While doing this project, we came across plenty of difficulties which may have been due to our lack of knowledge in HKSL and Sign Linguistics, and the fact that very few linguists have studied HKSL. In spite of all these, we had a great sense of achievement and satisfaction when we finished our work.
I have now fulfilled all the requirements to graduate and receive my bachelor's degree in Linguistics. Fortunately, I will receive two bonus points before I leave the university. First, I will work as a Research Assistant this summer in the Language Acquisition Laboratory and second, I will go to the University College London (UCL) next semester to exchange next semester for one term. Both experiences will be very beneficial to my future life and career.
Linguistics is really a subject highly related to our life and it is worth exploring!