What communication means to me:
-It is of paramount importance in all human relationships. Communication is the way by means of which we convey a message, an idea and exchange information with others. It not only serves as the tool by which we collectively gather and exchange data, but also serves to define and improve our relationships with others. To communicate well with others as a skill is especially important for some in their professional lives, such as academia. It is therefore a very important ability to improve.
What do I expect to learn from the pod-cast project:
-Communication in another language is a different matter altogether and particularly difficult. With the pod-cast project I hope to attain a better grasp on Japanese as a means of communication and demonstrate my language ability, employing it in a way that will serve as a tool of relating information to an audience, and gain some self-confidence in another foreign language by doing so.
Fair enough. I don't think we have any real disagreement about what "communication" means.
ReplyDeleteBesides a lack of vocabulary, I think one of the things that makes communicating in a different language particularly difficult is the different social contexts. Partly it's a matter of word choice and sentence construction style (like the fact that Chinese employs many more topic-comment sentences than English does), and partly it's a matter of knowing relevant background information (for example, knowing what 六四／六四事件 refers to or what 我的博客是被和谐的 means). I'm not sure how much our podcast will address these difficulties, but then again, learning a language is an ongoing process.