Spanish and Life Passions
Yesterday evening, I signed up for Rosetta Stone’s site Shared Talk. Ever since, I can only say that my life is now complete. Ever since, I can only say my Spanish knowledge has been incomplete. Ever since, I have foreseen that I would write an article about my experiences on the site.
I was seeking to truly personalize the language Spanish in my life. The nature of my academic career leans towards that I would cease to learn Spanish in my second year, after taking Spanish II. Since I have found myself genuinely passionate about the two foreign language classes I had taken in the past, Spanish I and Latin I, I had, upon realizing I probably would not continue the high school Spanish track, believed I could only overcompensate for my lack of classes.
Thus, I found the Shared Talk while searching for a way to find Spanish pen pals, native speakers who I could learn from. Seeing Shared Talk, I was surprised but truly ecstatic to have found an apparently omnipotent solution to my dilemma. Shared Talk was everything I was looking for; a facility beaming with lifefulls of native speakers of all languages and all the tools we’d need to teach each other… Chat, mail, and voice chat.
I had started off finding a few native speakers of Spanish on the site to mail, but while waiting for replies, I tried out the voice chat. I quickly met a nice man who was an engineer seeking to learn English, but I was all too easily intimidated. Though I never for once assumed that passing one year of Spanish with flying colors would equip me with all that I needed to hold a conversation with a native speaker, I was all too quickly struck full-blown with the force of my incompetence. And I was inspired.
It was then that I arranged for myself a fair schedule of learning. I would start off sending mails to native speakers of Spanish. In writing letters, I could take my time and look up the vocabulary required for me to write what I wanted to write. As I saw that I started writing letters more proficiently and knew the vocabulary needed for me to express myself properly, I would move onto real-time chatting, where I would be required to respond and read quickly.
All through this, I would softly read the Spanish I type and receive to myself out loud so that one day, I may voice chat in a foreign language without guilt of my awkward nonresponsiveness.
And at the end of the day, I can rest assured with myself that Spanish was not just a class; it was the start of a life passion.
September 12, 2009 at 8:31 pm | Lifepost | No comments
What’s that word? Ahh… Diction.
I have before said to myself, “The definition of a word is an average of all its contexts, weighted by usage frequency.” It has been about a year since I first made this proclamation and I have yet to find reason to retract it.
Multiple definitions arise when averages float around various peaks. The evolution of language can be attributed to changes in the use of words. An author creates a new word through his influence by inserting it into a context. It is from observation that one realizes the dictionary is only a field guide to the organisms which are words, constantly adapting themselves to specific contexts and changing in character over time.
A context is a created by a combination of words. Just as in an ecosystem, each individual word works with the others to create the whole, and each word finds itself a niche, a place to fit in. As most of the words used in English today are already well adapted to certain contexts, a writer searches for the best fit. The writer must evaluate the value of its candidates, a task which may either involve scrutinizing the pages of a thesaurus or completing a cursory scan of a few preset options.
It is when a niche is left unfilled that a writer goes in search of a perfect word, but when all in unsatisfactory, a word may be adapted to fit into the context required of it. However, if a word is too far from fit for a context, it breaks the sentence by changing its meaning. A daring author, though, may choose to simply create a new word, fresh in its first context with a perfectly molded definition for its initial niche. All who speak or write, thus, influence a language through their word choices.
And it is such that diction–or word choice–is considered one of the most important components of writing. It is such that in everyday life, people might pause to recall that perfect word. Words work together amongst each other to fit, and meaning is created. Diction is an ongoing vote for both the future of language and the message of a moment’s writing.
August 27, 2009 at 9:18 pm | Reflections | No comments