Language Barriers

[Exia91]

Hello Escapists!
For the past year I have been lurking these forums frequently and I often had the feeling I should participate but it never came around until today. I figured I would start off with a thread after going through the Forum Guidelines! Bear with me!

Beside gaming I only have a few things which I really like. One of those is -using- Language. At this point in life I am a student studying English at University. I like to write and read and I am not bothered with walls of text, as you like to call them. At this point, all my thread ideas are about the use of Language.

Language is what connects us together. We use it to communicate and express our thoughts, feelings and describe objects of any kind. Now, everyone is raised bilingual, or at least the majority of us. But there still are Language Barriers.

What are the moments in life that these Barriers kept you from moving further? It could have many reasons; not speaking the language, not being able to express your thoughts and so on.

Mine would not being able to communicate with a person who visits my work (I work at a grocery store) often. He is deaf and if he tries to ask me something, say he is looking for a certain product, I struggle to comprehend him. The other way around works just fine, since I believe he reads my lips when I explain to him.

Do you think it is possible to have a Universal Language? Or do you happen to know another idea to remove these Barriers?

 

[delet]

Welcome aboard! You should have fun here; just keep to the rules and stay out of the basement.

OT: I tend to just stick to situations where the regular English language works for me, though this puts me at a disadvantage since I can't understand really any other language. I know how to say "I don't speak [this language]" in several languages though, so that works.

I say it could be possible to have a Universal language if we all just threw our backgrounds behind us, or at least set them to the side, and all practiced a single language first and foremost, but there's not a very high possibility of that happening...

 

[Galaktia]

Welcome to the forums Exia91, I only just stopped being a lurker myself, although I was a site lurker and not a forum lurker.

Language is very intresting to me but I have always struggled with it, my first language is english and I still nearly failed english tests back when I was in school because my grammar and spelling were and still are so back. On that note I apologise for my writing ability.

However I do really find languages and communication intresting even though I don't particularly excell at them. In my position as both a Karate instructor and a Karate student I of course face large amounts of Japanese (my arts are karate and judo both japanese in origin) and so that can sometimes be a challenge...
And on top of this I live on the welsh-english border and also face welsh primary and english primary speakers who attend lessons I teach, and unfortunately my lack of any welsh means I have to ask the welsh primary speakers to work with my english as best they can till they start to pick up the basic japanese commands and exchanges.


I also like to look at sign language and can fluently "Finger spell" in BSL (british sign language), however I can hand-speak yet, and have to resort to spelling out each word letter by letter, which even when I am working at full pace is a somewhat slow and clumsy communication method.


I also happen to be a fan of writing and reading, so yay.


We are already headed towards a universal language, there is currently a language spoken by over 3 times the number of its nearest competitor and spoken in almost 40% of countries by at least a small percentage of the population... I am of course refering to "Manglish" or the Manderin English crossbreed language.



EDIT -- Above Poster -- Surely being able to say "I only speak English" in multiple languages is better than being able to say "I don't speak [this language]"?? Otherwise they have to take you through all the languages anyone they can find to translate can speak.

 

[SomeLameStuff]

Well being Chinese most people are very surprised when they jabber on in Mandarin only for me to give them a blank stare, or when I reply to some comment they made (usually racist, I am in Australia after all) in perfect English.

And by the way, there already is a Universal Language that everyone speaks! Its called Gibberish. Understanding it is a tad bit harder though.

 

[Guffe]

Welcome to the escapist fellow grocery storist!

There have been tries in history with a world wide language which would help out a lot but the problem is that not everyone would like to learn this and some people wouldn't even be able to. The idea is great all in all.

Problems with language have never been my problem since I speak both languages of my country and English on top of that, now at later years I think it would be nice to speak German (I understand small portions since it is a bit similar to my mother tongue), French or Russian. But I like to use my body language if we don't understand each other and that often helps. It would be nice to be able to "speak" deaf language, I know some of the letters with my hand but nothing major.

 

[Nickolai77]

I sometimes toy with the idea of taking a year out to continental Europe and doing some work experience over there after university. Being a EU citizen, i don't have to worry about securing visa's and work permits, but what's holding me back is the language barrier. I'm not very gifted when it comes to learning other languages, i only got a C grade at GCSE German, dispite the fact that they interest me. Baiscally, i wouldn't like to be in another country and not be able to understand the people around me.


As for the idea of a univeral language, the idea does interest me. I think a univeral language would be a good thing because it could help bring the world closer together leading to more peace and co-operation at the grassroots level, and help dispel various myths and prejudices against other people and nations if ordinary people from different countries are in contact with one another. I think it would also be of great benifit to trans-national organisations such as the EU, as it would help it's people commicate with one another.

English is the closest we have to a universal language, but i'm sure there are more people on Earth whom don't speak fluent English than those whom do.

 

[RivFader86]

Had the same "problem" as you do with a deaf customer, very nice guy though.

PS: I guess english is as universal as it's going to get.

 

[delet]

EDIT -- Above Poster -- Surely being able to say "I only speak English" in multiple languages is better than being able to say "I don't speak [this language]"?? Otherwise they have to take you through all the languages anyone they can find to translate can speak.

Oh, well I meant that I know what to say "I don't speak [language]" in a few different languages, like "No hablo Espanol" and the like. I tend to make a joke out of it and just refer every language to "No hablo Espanol" even when it's blatantly not Spanish though; I like to have fun with it.

 

[Ekit]

Welcome to escapist!

Remember to stay out of the basement!

OT: Sometimes on the forums I have a hard time expressing myself and I end up not posting.

And I think English is as universal as it's most likely going to get.
But maybe chinese will be the new english in the future? Probably not though...

 

[Exia91]

Welcome to the escapist fellow grocery storist!

Well thank you Sir!

Had the same "problem" as you do with a deaf customer, very nice guy though.

Seems we share the same fate.

OT:

English is the closest we have to a universal language, but i'm sure there are more people on Earth whom don't speak fluent English than those whom do.

Well, why English? Why not Chinese or Spanish?

It would be an Utopia, A world with an universal Language. But so far I agree, that it's unlikely to happen. Probably, because people do not want to learn a new language because they are too proud of their own.

 

[Jack_Uzi]

Welcome!
If you don't speak a foreign language, be creative. Most people wil try to understand you if they see you are making an efford being understood. When I was a kid, my parents loved to go to Fance on holliday. I didn't speak French but I could make quite understandable by drawing something or just make gestures with my hands a lot. As soon as you understand them at a basic level, you will pick up a bit of the language sooner or later.

The only barriers we know are in our head, we just give them a name like language for example.

 

[Diligent]

I have a language barrier with most of my family on my dads side. See, he is bilingual but he failed to teach my sister or myself how to speak French. We're pretty much the only ones in the family that can't fluently speak it, and therefore are basically locked out of most conversations, (picking up key words here and there, but it's not the same.)

So due to exceptionally lazy parenting, there is that barrier and it's pretty annoying.

(And I know somebody is going to say something to the effect of "if you really want to learn it, what's stopping you?" and that's true enough, but you can't learn a language the same way a 5 year old does, when your brain is all malleable.)

Oh, and welcome to the escapist!

 

[Rylot]

I took Japanese for a few years but in western Washington there's no one to speak it with so I only remember the basics.

Do you think it is possible to have a Universal Language? Or do you happen to know another idea to remove these Barriers?

Esperanto was created to be an international language with about as much success as anything else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

 

[RooftopAssassin]

When thinking of a universal language, you can never say English. It is the second hardest language to learn. So you have to think simple, it's actually kind of funny. Difficult language= World Superpower (Ex- US and UK-English, Russia-Russian, China-Chinese (Mandarin and/or Cantonese) , Japan-Japanese, Germany-German). There is also France, but French is pretty easy to learn and Icelandic is probably the hardest to learn because it sounds like gibberish to someone who doesn't speak it and Iceland is pretty... unimportant.

 

[Exia91]

Esperanto was created to be an international language with about as much success as anything else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Ooh, Do I love me some Trivia! This is going to be stuck in my head the rest of my life.

You Sir, are in line for the E-cookie.

Spoiler

 

[Quaxar]

When thinking of a universal language, you can never say English. It is the second hardest language to learn.

Wait... what? English is actually really, really easy to learn compared to other languages. Conversational English I mean, sure there's also Shakespeare and the like, but that's nothing you have to concern with in a regular conversation.

 

[thylasos]

Esperanto was created to be an international language with about as much success as anything else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

It may be apocryphal, but I believe more people speak Klingon than Esperanto.

Personally, I'm opposed to linguistic unification. We already have a number of very popular second-languages, and if emphasis on language learning in schools improves, we can increase the number of bilingual people in our societies (in the English-speaking world, that is, since we appear to be among the laziest linguists on the planet).

If certain languages fall out of use, you lose the perspective and idiom of that language too, a key to the culture it facilitates, which would be a loss for all of us.

 

[RooftopAssassin]

When thinking of a universal language, you can never say English. It is the second hardest language to learn.

Wait... what? English is actually really, really easy to learn compared to other languages. Conversational English I mean, sure there's also Shakespeare and the like, but that's nothing you have to concern with in a regular conversation.

Your from Austria, right? So that means you probably spoke German, right?(Just correct me if I'm wrong) English is a Germanic language, as is German. So naturally it is easy for speakers of both to pick up on both languages quickly. Although for most languages, English is hard to learn.

 

[thylasos]

When thinking of a universal language, you can never say English. It is the second hardest language to learn.

Wait... what? English is actually really, really easy to learn compared to other languages. Conversational English I mean, sure there's also Shakespeare and the like, but that's nothing you have to concern with in a regular conversation.

Spoken, perhaps moreso, but written English? Not at all. We have an incredibly odd jumble of grammatical rules and exceptions, varying spelling as you travel through different regions, which even from it's starting point hasn't been phoenetic since the 14th century, not to mention the wealth of accents across the english-speaking world, as well as dialects with completely impenetrable idioms and metaphors for those unfamiliar with the culture they were spawned by.

 

[BrailleOperatic]

Oddly, I encountered a language barrier when moving from the UK to the US. Much of the regional dialect I used didn't translate offer so even though I was technically speaking the same language, no one had a clue what the hell I was saying.