Language is constantly changing and adapting to fit the need of the people who use it, as it is a vital part of human life. Growing up, language courses were never of any interest to me. I knew how to read, speak and write, so I saw no need to suffer through countless language classes. Only in recent years have I grown to like language. University has provided me with the push I have always truly needed to become fascinated with language. This occurred through having to constantly expand my vocabulary through countless hours of looking for the best possibly synonyms in a thesaurus or looking up words in a dictionary every time I did not understand something in a scholarly article. The following topics will provide an insight to my experience
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My first exposure to morphology was in a topic sociology class that got a little off-topic. A fellow classmate had learned about morphology in their psychology class, and they were asking my sociology teacher if it related to the topic we were discussing. Looking back, I am almost certain they were doing it to show off, but it sparked and interest in the entire class. After that class was let out, I didn’t hear about morphology again until university. But that isn’t quite true. We discussed free and bound morphemes a number of times in English classes, but no one ever called them that. They were always just prefixes, suffixes or root words. It wasn’t until almost too late before my first linguistics midterm that I clued in to how root words and suffixes translated into linguistic …show more content…
I had never understood phonetics prior to linguistics, and having near completed the course now, I still could not differentiate between the majority of symbols used for vowel sounds. I consider myself to be a bit of a “band geek” because that is all I did throughout high school. I have many friends who were required to have knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for singing. I can now joke that my lack of ability to use IPA is why I never got into singing.
I believe learning phonetics would be equally as difficult as learning a new language that requires the use of a totally different alphabet from that of your first language. I understood the different shapes the jaw and lips must take on, as well as tongue placement, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember the points of articulation and what consonants they formed. As difficult as consonants were for me, vowels were even worse. By the end of the phonetics section I still could not write my name in IPA.
External Linguistics
First Language
My first exposure to morphology was in a topic sociology class that got a little off-topic. A fellow classmate had learned about morphology in their psychology class, and they were asking my sociology teacher if it related to the topic we were discussing. Looking back, I am almost certain they were doing it to show off, but it sparked and interest in the entire class. After that class was let out, I didn’t hear about morphology again until university. But that isn’t quite true. We discussed free and bound morphemes a number of times in English classes, but no one ever called them that. They were always just prefixes, suffixes or root words. It wasn’t until almost too late before my first linguistics midterm that I clued in to how root words and suffixes translated into linguistic …show more content…
I had never understood phonetics prior to linguistics, and having near completed the course now, I still could not differentiate between the majority of symbols used for vowel sounds. I consider myself to be a bit of a “band geek” because that is all I did throughout high school. I have many friends who were required to have knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for singing. I can now joke that my lack of ability to use IPA is why I never got into singing.
I believe learning phonetics would be equally as difficult as learning a new language that requires the use of a totally different alphabet from that of your first language. I understood the different shapes the jaw and lips must take on, as well as tongue placement, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember the points of articulation and what consonants they formed. As difficult as consonants were for me, vowels were even worse. By the end of the phonetics section I still could not write my name in IPA.
External Linguistics
First Language