Language and culture

（湖南澧县双龙中学：马芙蓉07363550610）

Chinese people and Westerners do approach friendship differently. Compared to Asians, North Americans seem to smile a lot and be very informal. This is true  even with people they don’t know well. When you start conversations with Westerners, don’t ask questions those are too personal. So, what should you talk about with Westerners you’ve just met? You can always ask about their family, interests and job or schooling. Their hometown and travel experiences also make good topics.

   In teaching English ,we all feel that English as foreign  language teaching is much more difficult. In fact, the Chinese ELT teachers and researchers have been looking for the best method for ELT in China for many years. Different methods have been introduced, tried out and found unsatisfactory. All in  all, to meet  the  paricular needs of the Chinese learners, should be taught to use  English , not just to know something about English , the method used is a combination of modernism and traditionalism, so should start with the easy to the more difficult, from the known to the unknown in a spiral system so hat what is learned can be reviewed, consolidation and expanded. No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways. There is great disagreement, however, about the proposition that each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers . On the one hand, anyone who has learned more than one language is struck by the many ways in which languages differ from one another. But on the other hand, we expect human beings everywhere to have similar ways of experiencing the world. Comparisons of different languages can lead one to pay attention to 'universals'--the ways in which all languages are similar, and to 'particulars' --the ways in which each individual language, or type of language, is special, even unique. Linguists and other social scientists interested in universals have formulated theories to describe and explain human language and human language behavior in general terms as species-specific capacities of human beings. However, the idea that different languages may influence thinking in different ways has been present in many cultures and has given  rise to many philosophical treatises. Because it is so difficult to pin down effects of a particular language on a particular thought pattern, this issue remains unresolved. It comes in and out of fashion and often evokes considerable energy in efforts to support or refute it. For example, in English it is necessary to mark the verb to indicate the time of ourrence of an event you are speaking about: It's raining; It rained; and so forth. In Turkish, however, it is impossible to simply say, 'It rained last night'. This language, like many American Indian languages, has more than one past tense, depending on one's source of knowledge of the event. In Turkish, there are two past tenses--one to report direct experience and the other to report events that you know about only  by inference or hearsay. Thus, if you were out in the rain last night, you will say, 'It rained last night' using the past-tense form that indicates that you were a witness to the rain; but if you wake up in the morning and see the wet street and garden, you are obliged to use the other past-tense form--the one that indicates that you were not a witness to the rain itself. Differences of this sort have fascinated linguists and anthropologists for centuries. They have reported hundreds of facts about 'exotic' languages, such as verbs that are marked or chosen according to the shape of an object that is being handled (Navajo) or for the relative ages of speaker and hearer (Korean). Among the strongest statements of this position are those by Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half of this century--hence the label, 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', for the theory of linguistic relativity and determinism. Whorf proposed: We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way--an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language' (Whorf, 1940; in Carroll, 1956, pp. 213-4). And, in the words of Sapir: 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' (Sapir, 1929; in Manlbaum, 1958, p. 162).

   Of course, these tips are just rules of thumb and may not apply to all.