I am currently in language school for French to work in France. Previously, I learned Japanese and worked shortly in Japan as a volunteer.
Japanese is a high context language. Most of the time, you don’t even say the subject of the sentence cuz the other person knows what you’re talking about. (Plus, it takes four syllables to say “I”) (Not to mention they don’t even have a future tense while French has 3.)
French is a very low context language. In speeches, you give exactly how your argument will roll out (even the opening speech at the Bastille Day parade started off with “Let me tell you exactly how everything is going to go today”), you can’t just say “I have 3” but rather have to say ”I have 3 OF THEM” to be grammatically correct, and even in regular conversation with my French friends, I have to specify what I’m talking about more specifically than in English or Japanese or else my friends get lost.
(This does shed some light on English’s reliance on “it” and “they”, though, for naming undefined subjects lol.)
It’s well-appreciated on the receiving end because of its clarity, but it took a bit of patience to accustom myself to saying all these details. During the oral production part of the B level exams, if you receive a picture to talk about, you start your discussion of said image by saying, “This is a picture. In the picture is...” My English teachers would have abhorred hearing me say this in an essay or presentation because it’s considered too obvious. Further, one must use connector words or else the listener gets lost. In English, we let the sentence speak for itself; while I was using the English style of presenting, my French professor and later my tutor said that they got lost because I didn’t use any connectors. The entire time I wanted to just tell them to figure it out from the context, just like my Japanese Sensei would tell all us context-heavy Latin-based language speakers whenever we looked at our texts as if they were actual hieroglyphics.
I realized that, by relating this experience to that of my Japanese professor trying to teach us a new understanding of linguistic context, that a language is more than just the words and grammar.
Either way, it’s kind of nice to have all these specifics.
Just don’t tell my English teachers that I actually gave a speech starting with, “This is a picture” while holding up said picture. š¤«š¤
What about you guys? Have you noticed a difference in context levels in the languages you’ve studied? Do you have to talk more specifically in one than in the other?
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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