LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE. PRECIOUS, BUT OH SO ANNOYING!

by Jisoo Myung

A person taps my shoulder and pulls up their phone to reveal a map app. I pull out my earphones and look at where they are pointing at, but am unable to understand the words they are trying to convey. The person notices my raised eyebrows that not even I notice, and turns off their phone with a small sigh. They wave their hand with a shy smile and walk away with a weight to their steps. I put the bud back in my ear and feel a similar sense of dejection for not being able to understand. 

Communication is a huge, vital part of human existence, and spoken language is one of the most important methods of such. Of course, language and communication can stretch out to different mediums such as art, and meaning can also be expressed through these varieties, but I want to focus on spoken language. The situation above is something that I have encountered numerous times, especially while I was in Hong Kong, because I never bothered to learn Mandarin or Cantonese - one of my biggest regrets.

There are two ways I can take this topic: simply language, or communication. After thinking about them, I’ve decided to just loosely talk about both!

It’s impossible for everyone to learn every language, and it’s difficult to enforce a universal language upon every single person on Earth - English is kinda doing it, but it’s not like everyone learns, or should learn English to communicate. But, dear reader, I hope you take it upon yourself to try to at least be bilingual! I am not too well versed in this topic, but I have heard that there are a lot of cognitive benefits to being bilingual, and it’s an extremely rewarding thing to be able to do (as well as practical and useful). I feel that my Korean is too limited to label myself as bilingual, but I think that if I had only known English, the world would feel much more limiting, because there is just so much you can know in just one language.

Personally, I have met and broken up with numerous languages. Currently, I am most comfortable with English, and Korean comes second, but is nowhere near a close second. I can understand and speak a little bit of Japanese, just from growing up watching anime, and I have academically studied Spanish, French, and Italian. As of now, I have begun learning Mandarin in University, because I have recently become very interested in the Chinese culture, and there are many novels that I want to read in their original Chinese form.

Like I mentioned! I am able to easily share basic conversations in Japan, and read basic Japanese simply from my passive enjoyment of Japanese media. Although I made a grand and arrogant proposal of learning a new language, many people are able to ease their way into a new language through the media in that language. I am also getting used to Korean through entertainment that I enjoy: webtoons and web novels. Having only learnt Korean phonetically through conversations with my family, I felt alien when I was actually in Korea with other Koreans, but reading Korean texts and watching Korean movies (such as everyone’s favourite, Oscars Best Picture Parasite, 2019) helped me become more used to more casual and modern Korean language.

But even then, we still face difficulties and barriers when speaking the same language! Miscommunication is insanely frustrating and common, especially through social media and texts. As someone with a lot of self-doubt and anxiety, I have misread hundreds upon thousands of neutral or positive messages as anything but. Many of my friendships and other relationships ended through text, often in the heat of the moment, and I think many people face similar problems. I say that because I think society as a whole has become more sensitive and hyper-aware of their surroundings because of social media (e.g. FOMO), which is reasonable and again, unfortunately common. But like I said, I also struggle with this, and have lost several friends because of it, but I also learnt something from all that.

I have said something similar in my other piece for this magazine under the Identity section, but it’s impossible to get everyone to like you, and that’s a pretty rational statement that took me 20 years to fully accept and understand. Similarly, miscommunication is bound to happen, no matter how many emojis and extensions of letters (e.g. “nooooo”) you use, and that isn’t your fault, and you shouldn’t blame yourself for that! Having grown in this bubble of anonymity and relying on texts and emojis, I became too paranoid and afraid of calling people, especially as someone who was very very shy. This anxiety also made me read too deep into every message I received: the order they came in, their grammar, the use or lack of emojis. But I really do recommend you to call people rather than text, if the opportunity to do so comes up, because the occasional calls are much more heartwarming and fun than texts. And maybe I’m just too bad at reading the atmosphere (I am), but it really is easier to resolve misunderstandings and frustrations through speech than through passive aggressive texts.

This was just a simple rambling about my frustrations with language but I am very much in love with it and all its complexities! Studying languages and its different mediums is endlessly educational and entertaining for me, and I hope you share a similar sentiment about the wonders of languages. Even if its limitations really are frustrating.