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Language and Culture | ||
Tags: Cultural Identity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4147 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes  Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 24 10 June 2013 at 11:12am | IP Logged | |||||
LOL, Gomorritis! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4147 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 10 of 24 10 June 2013 at 11:15am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with you. I have been interested in my foreign friends private lives of course, but that's it. Culture in terms of litterature, art etc interests me a lot, but all the minute details and nuances, only if a friend is involved. For example I know a lot about irish and danish history because I have friends in those countries. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DarrenDaka Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4563 days ago 28 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 11 of 24 10 June 2013 at 11:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have many Polish and Italian friends but, It is hard for them to explain their culture
as it is something they have grown up with. It is like somebody coming here to the UK and expecting me to be a full ,up-to-date book on British history and grammar. Although I have studied these two subjects at college I don't know everything and therefore I am unable to give a complete and insightful picture. I think it works in the same way for language . It is hard to learn all the grammar points from a native as they don't know they are using them. One of my Polish friends didn't even believe Polish had cases until I told him and he began learning English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4428 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 12 of 24 10 June 2013 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is an interesting topic, which to me has two answers, depending on how you define "culture". To me, culture related to language consists of two elements: Firstly the "literary canon" and the great historical events of a country, which is relatively easy to dive into. For languages like Italin and German, I believe I have a decent knowledge of this capital C Culture, i.e. I have read Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, Moravia, Goethe, Schiller, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Kafka etc. I know the basics of the history of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, and quite a lot about classical music from these countries.
Then you have the second element, which is more difficult to acquire, and which some people have referred to already in this thread, what I would like to call the "collective cultural references" that often come from popular culture, TV, films etc. This require not only following very closely what the tabloids and the popular media transmit, but also getting to know past history. Thanks to my wife I believe I have quite a good insight into the Spanish cultural references, I have been exposed to a lot of British culture and feel pretty comfortable with references to "dead parrots", "don't mention the war" etc. However, I cannot claim to have this knowledge for all my languages. I don't think you necessarily have to go and live in a country to acquire this "deeper insight" into the culture, but you need to keep up constantly with the media of the country, (watching a lot of crap TV helps:-) read newspapers and gossip magazines and if possible spend lot of time with natives. Not to learn grammar from them, but to learn about what their cultural references are. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6492 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 24 10 June 2013 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
And then you might be tempted to ask yourself: is acquiring enough knowledge about the 'culture' really worth such a terrifying ordeal? Or could you curtail your wild ambitions and settle for something less demanding like Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, Moravia, Goethe, Schiller, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Kafka and the history of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy plus something about classical music from these countries ... knowing quite well that you will be seen a vile cultureless barbarian by those who have watched X factor and Big Brother in the local vernacular? Edited by Iversen on 10 June 2013 at 2:25pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6228 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 24 10 June 2013 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
There's a middle ground: if you spend a lot of time around people from the local culture who don't read gossip magazines, you'll pick up on the key pop-cultural highlights of the past few decades almost by osmosis. It's the route I usually take, and while it won't give you the breadth of current pop culture that gossip mags will, it has the advantage of being bearable - from my perspective, anyhow. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4428 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 15 of 24 10 June 2013 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I sincerely hope I didn't give the impression in my previous post that I spend my time watching bad TV shows and reading gossip magazines. I certainly have a lot of better things to do with my time.
The point I hoped to get across was that what the natives of a country and a language often get more or less automatically in terms of cultural references, as a foreigner you will need to make a real effort to get there, or at least you have to actively engage with the culture, which can be difficult if you do not live with it every day. Believe me, I have no interest in knowing that La Duquesa de Alba married (again) at the age of 80, or that David Bisbal has a new girlfried. I sort of happen to know these trivial and uninteresting facts because of my Spanish wife and the fact that I have spent a lot of time in Spain - and after all, these are some of the things normal people talk about (in addition to talking about unemployment figures, the financial crisis, football and tennis, corrupt politicians etc.) Another observation I would like to make is that as a native Norwegian, I have a whole set of cultural references related to the first 30 years of my life, which I share with all Norwegians of my own age. However, at the age of 30 I left Norway and I haven't lived there since. Although I do skim through Norwegian news on the internet regularly, I still notice that I have become a foreigner as regards current pop culture in Norway. My friends who still live there talk about singers, comedians, musicians and actors whose names don't mean anything to me. So today I would have to make the same effort of getting up to date in my own language and culture as I would have to do with regard to German or Italian popular culture. To answer Iversens question, I do not think it is worth it, and I rather stick with the old boys Ibsen, Hamsun, Sandemose, Bjørnebo, and a few modern ones (including Jo Nesbø of course). 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5321 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 24 10 June 2013 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think that if you're aiming for any degree of social integration, it helps to know at least some pop culture. If, for example, I try to discuss literature with French speakers, then I may wind up watching my poor victim scramble to remember the last time they read Candide. And Candide is a popular classic, compared to some of the excellent books on your list. And when French speakers talk to me, I don't want feel like Captain America, stuck in an iceberg for half a century and not getting most of the jokes. For me, the trick is finding pop culture that I actually like, and saving it for when my brain is too fried to do anything worthy. There's no way I'm going to watch reality television in any language. But I've been having great fun watching children's cartoons in French. Of course, I make a point to discard garbage quickly, and try to ferret out things that actually appeal to my personal tastes. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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