Language is universal | Daily Digest 07/10/19

hello and welcome to another kangaroo English daily digest my name is Christian and today is Monday the best day of the week today I'm going to be talking about something which is kind of a little bit abstract a little bit kind of mysterious but it has something really important to tell us about about being human and about language learning especially if you are learning a language from the beginning okay now we need to start with today's word of the day and today's word of the day is pundit now this word comes to us from the Indian subcontinent okay and pundit well in the original language pundit meant a learned scholar somebody who knew a lot about a particular subject but unfortunately we took this word into English a pundit and it is probably a little bit derogatory a pundit is a person who likes to give their opinions about something you'll find pundit pundits on on television programs you know sports programs political programs giving their opinions and in the world of language teaching and language learning there are plenty of individuals and companies who are exactly like pundits giving their anecdotes and personal opinions about the best way to learn a language but we're not interested in personal opinions right because we want facts we want answers we want truth so I'm going to try to give you a little bit of of that today and today's word of the day is from the the Indian subcontinent and I want to continue to talk about the Indian subcontinent specifically I want to talk about a type of music from the Indian subcontinent called a rageh now a ragga has this these two particular types of sections right in Braga's they are the lab and the ghat so rhythmically they're a little bit different okay but the the kind of tone is the same and here's a question all right here's a question now if you grow up with with a raga do you have a better understanding of the Ranka then a person who has never heard the raga it's an interesting question do you enjoy the ragam or if you know the rageh like for example if you've never heard madonna would you like it or do you only like madonna because you you are culturally accustomed to western pop music well to try and answer this question these these researchers what they did was they took some ragas and they put them online and they did a survey they asked people to to tell them how did the rageh make you feel okay now they asked 143 people from the Indian subcontinent who knew exactly what the ragas were who had heard the ragas before and then they asked 112 people who had for heard the ragas and they were from the United States the UK Hungary France Germany Italy Japan Korea Romania Spain and the Netherlands so it's a very culturally diverse group of people right I don't think that there can be much more difference between somebody from from Delhi and somebody from Korea you know and then somebody from from from from Spain I'm very different cultures very different everything right and then so yes so they asked them to to listen to the ragas and then say how did it make you feel and there were different um different options for example did they make you feel tense sad angry calm devotional romantic happy or longing so then the scientists they took all this data together and they produced this so what you'll see is that the gray bars are the cultured people who knew of the ragas and the white bars are non uncultured people who had never heard the ragas before and the colored dots okay the circles they represent the the percentage of answers and immediately what you'll notice is that they all align they all match it didn't matter if you were from Korea or Spain or you were from the home of the rageh the music made you feel exactly the same way and tells us something really interesting it tells us that there is something universal in music there's some universal connection between the sound of music and how it makes us and that's what we're going to be talking about today we're going to be talking about universality of things of language so music has this effect that music is not the only thing there's also this research here okay where they showed people pictures of real objects like pencils and telephones and computers and then they showed them engravings of those same objects symbols and they light up exactly the same part of the brain again there's a universality a connection between real-life objects and the language and the symbols for those objects that we store in the brain so it's starting to give us this idea that well we think we're very different right you know because we are heavily cultured you know we are educated in different ways we wear different clothes we eat different foods but really deep down so similar in so many ways and this brings us on to our first really interesting piece of linguistic universality okay so this is um something called the leipzig jakarta list and we have to remember that that language has been around for a very very very very very long time a really long time and the language that we use the most right the language we use the most is also the language that tends to be the most irregular right it's a bit like your socks yeah the your you have your favorite socks the socks you wear all the time they are the socks with the holes in them and the socks that you that you never use your special Sunday socks those socks are in perfect condition and language follows this kind of trend the words that we use all the time they become irregular okay and kind of worn out I mean look at all of the irregular verbs in English they're all the common verbs to be you know to have for example okay and all of those words that we hardly ever use are much more regular now what this list is is a list of words that haven't really changed they haven't changed maybe since ever okay but what it means it doesn't mean that they are not common it means they haven't changed so it's actually the opposite the opposite in terms of they are words that have been around in language since the beginning they've changed their forms and they've become irregular but these words have been with us since we were monkeys scratching in the cave walls right now this list was compiled from lots of different world languages okay and the ranking is like this let me read you some of the words fire knows to go water mouth tongue blood bone root - come breast rein name etc okay you get the idea right you get the idea that these are words that are kind of like fundamental to human existence 25% of them are body parts okay and nose is and and another big percentage of them are insects or animals like for example the fly is on here the dog is on here okay and so this this tells us again about this universality because we all know all of the things on this list right so we are moving from this idea of music and sound being universal at creating emotion to symbols being universal in creating a connection with language to language being universal in creating a connection with the world and now we're going to go just just one step further okay and we're going to look at this list of semantic primes now semantic primes are different from this list because semantic primes are not specific words they are concepts okay and let me let me give you an idea so we have things like people someone body good and bad big and small think no want don't want feel see and hear in fact on this list there are hardly any words okay now these semantic Prime's were were created by the polish linguist wears wish wish bow ski I'm not I'm not very good at pronouncing polish words sorry and and what's what's really really interesting about these is this takes the link between those basic concepts and messages so we're moving from universal emotions all the way through to Universal messages well what does that mean okay it means that using these semantic Prime's and it's been shown in the research that using only 60 of these concepts 60 concepts we can say anything just just let that sink in for a moment 60 concepts allow you to say anything you need to say in language and there's some specific examples okay so how can you describe lying you know not telling the truth using such basic vocabulary well this is how you do it someone said something to someone else someone said something to someone else there's some concept the concepts are someone and saying and and someone else right or an a thing and a thing someone said thing to another person four basic concepts okay this this person knew that's the verb on the list to know this person knew it was not true true and false on the list they knew it was not true okay this someone they said it to the other person because they wanted them to think it was true hmm people think it's bad if you do this that's how you explain lying using these basic semantic primes okay you say okay okay fine what about the beautiful detail of language what about how can you describe the difference between being happy and being content I think even a thesaurus or a dictionary would have a difficult time with this happy and content well well again there's a specific example we can describe the difference between happy and content using these semantic Prime's ready happy someone thinks like this so many good things are happening to me right now I can do the things that I want this is good because of this I feel good at this time okay that's happy so now what's the difference between happy and content content something good is happening to me now I want this I don't want anything else now because of this I'm content explained perfectly and succinctly using these basic Universal semantic primes now I know what you're thinking okay happy content earn what about something really difficult really meaty and again they give a specific example so there's a word in Japanese which is a my I don't know if that's a good pronunciation I'm a and if you google ma they tell you that it's a very difficult word to translate into English it's a difficult concept for non-japanese people to understand in fact on the internet it says it says what is the census it's a peculiar peculiarly Japanese emotion which shows the true essence of Japanese psychology so something like that something very specific to Japanese culture and Japanese psychology it will be impossible to translate that emotion using only sixty things right let me let me let me do it okay this is what the person thinks when they have am a this person can do good things for me this person wants to do good things for me when I am with this person nothing bad can happen to me I want to be with this person that's am I now isn't that isn't that a beautiful a beautiful thing to take these concepts and realize that we can condense them down into sixty basic words or ideas and why am I telling you this why am I telling you all this I'm telling you because none of this has any relation to understanding the structure of language none of this has any relation to memorizing lists of vocabulary none of this has any relation to the present perfect continuous versus the past simple right none of this has anything to do this I'm going to leave the explanation to miss Adele Goldberg in her book okay this is what she says listen to this the learners goal is to comprehend messages given the forms she and to produce forms given the messages she wants to convey learning a language using a language isn't anything to do with the technical stuff it's about conveying messages okay she doesn't say that the learners goal is to use the third conditional correctly it's about conveying messages and messages are universal you think that if you're Japanese and you're learning English you think it's so different it's not because we're all human we're all the same type of animal that share the same emotions when we hear music that understand the same concepts when you explain them correctly and so if you're learning a language you don't need to memorize the 10,000 most common words you can probably get by just fine with sixty and focusing on messages focusing on what makes us human our needs our desire to communicate that's how you get from zero to fluency I hope you enjoyed today's daily digest I hope that it wasn't too abstract I'm Christian this is kangaroo of English I'll see you in class

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 20,081

Keywords: learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, esl, linguistics, Wierzbicka, semantic primes, Leipzig–Jakarta list, semantic explications, linguistic universals, untranslatable words, language and culture, how to learn English from zero, How many words do you need to get fluent, canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english

Id: V76TV4N5_EM

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019