Language Blog

Part 1

I did this assignment with a friend, I engaged in a 15 minute conversation without using any version of a symbolic language. This part of the assignment was very interesting to do. It is difficult to say if it was easy or difficult. Some of the conversation was easy to understand and some took a long time for my friend to understand. The impressions from my friend were that she was trying really hard to understand what I was saying she kept asking me to do a better job. I used my hands to help her make her understand and she did a good job with understanding most of what I was saying. Whenever she thought she knew what I was saying she would yell it out and if she was wrong it would make it harder for me to explain to her that she is wrong.

If my friend and I were from two different cultures I would say my friend definitely had an advantage with communicating in spoken language. I had to work really hard using symbolic language to help her understand and all she had to do was speak and get her point across. I don’t think our culture would have a negative attitude towards people who do not use symbolic language because for people who speak, symbolic language is not a necessity to communicate.  In our culture people who are deaf use symbolic language and the person who speaks needs to understand those symbols otherwise they won’t be able to communicate with each other.  A person who uses spoken language may find it very difficult to learn symbolic language if they are only use to their type of communication.  There are not a lot of people that I know who are deaf; people who chose to learn sign language normally have a close family member or friend who is deaf which is why they want to learn the language so they can communicate with them.

Part II

In the second part of the assignment I spent 15 minutes communicating with my friend without any physical embellishments. I was not able to last 15 minutes without using physical embellishments; it was very difficult for me to communicate with my friend. My friend had become very frustrated and was begging me to start talking or using physical embellishments.  Not being able to speak was already hard but not being able to use my body was even harder. My friend told me that I probably did not read my assignment right and she was sure I was able to use some sort of physical embellishment which was funny she tried really hard to understand me but said she won’t understand a thing that I am trying to explain so it was best that we just gave up. This experiment says a lot about how important using signs to communicate is, if people do not speak we have an alternative method which is the sign language, if you take that away communicating would be very difficult. There are people in our society who have trouble reading body language such as people with Asperger syndrome and people who are blind.  People who are blind can only hear things but are not able to see someone’s body language. For example people don’t normally ask for hugs its a gesture that you normally read through body language but when a person is blind they won’t know what’s going on if a person reaches out and gives a hug or holds the person. An environmental condition when there might be a benefit to not read a person’s body language is difficult to say. Maybe when you are playing poker you may not want to be expressive or use body language. When a person is nervous or experiencing anxiety most people are able to  read that through their body language because they tend to shake their leg, bite their nails so not being able to read body language can be beneficial for someone who is a public speaker.