I am/was an English major and I still have no idea what over half of the words mean in the texts I read or in the words people speak.
This sounds rather sad to me on a number of levels mainly because it's true. As an English major in college, there were a lot of words I had NO idea what they meant. I could blame this on the lack of reading that I do outside of school. I remember reading books for fun all the time when I was younger, but like some people on this planet Earth, I get bored of reading the moment it becomes required. Granted, there have been a few good/great books I've read that were required like "To Kill a Mockingbird," anything history-textbook related (I love history...), and even random books that I had to read while abroad.
I remember once in 5th grade that my teacher would give us extra credit if we read the dictionary. I think I got about three pages in and gave up. Looking back, it was probably a really smart idea. But for a 10 year old, reading a dictionary could be really daunting and scary with how many words there are in that thing and we don't even know half of them in our own English language.
Vocabulary is also interesting in the sense of this: I'm bilingual. Yes, I can prove it, but I'm not going to here, but I did pass a French fluency exam called the DELF. Pretty hardcore to take as foreigners and taking the BAC at my French high school was incredibly ****ed up to begin with for a number of reasons. Anyways.
English is my native language and there are several words that I don't even know what they mean. Or I go to an English 110 class and I'm flabberghasted by how incredibly dumb I feel. Dumb in the sense of there are these other people in my class and they know all these fancy words (misogyny, for example, is a fun example) that I hadn't heard of before. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. But then I can relate to a second language better? In this case, I know a lot of words in French but have no idea what they mean in English. This is mainly because I stopped translating everything before my first real month of being abroad was over. This is a good point though, because think about this:
We all use words we've probably heard over years and years through our friends, family, the internet... but how many of these words do we actually know the definitions to?
Consider the word "the" and how do we define it? We all know the word as English speakers, but... how is one to define this? Just a small perspective here, but hopefully you get the point.
No matter how we may or may not look at things, language is a part of every day life. Whether it's verbal or body language, it's everywhere and how do we come to understand it? Just part of life is my guess. We all grow up and get the exposure and go from there. But how many of us really think about language? We all get misunderstood at times, sometimes for better or for worse, and yet we can all have a big understanding of language just because of how we live as humans.
There really isn't a point to this post, yet there is a point. Not that I'm a terrible English major because my vocabulary almost seems so limited in English, yet I know so much in French more than the average bear. I mainly am thinking about this because, again, it marks the whole 5 years before I left for France and... well, I did apply for a teaching English program abroad for this upcoming school year. I'm not going to mention details to those on the internet until I know them for a fact myself. But to say the least, the country I applied for.... not a lot of English. It's a cultural norm to learn English in school, but this country (or rather, this continent) is one I have never been to *nerves commence here*.
This blog post could take a lot longer because I could say a lot more. For now, though, I won't go too far into things. Par contre, je ne sais pas qui, en fait, a lu ce blog. Je veux que les personnes lisent ce blog, mais si c'est juste moi, bref. C'est pas grave. ^^
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