Vision and parsing

While we have been discussing the interconnectedness of the brain and vision, I am reminded of an experience I had ten years ago. I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, which is not a particularly metropolitan area. I had just returned from a year of living in Tokyo as a foreign exchange student. One weekend, I was in Chicago, staying in a hi-rise hotel, for a Usenix conference. I looked out the window at the urban street view, and for a second, I saw Japanese characters on all of the signs. Before I could actually make out any words, the signs reverted back to English.

I attribute this to the fact that over the course of a year, I learned to try to parse meaning out of text as Japanese characters, and I associated that with an urban context. I unlearned this pretty quickly, and now that I am back in the States, it does not happen to me any more.

Linguistics

"There are no absolute standards of correctness in language. We can say that a foreigner has made a mistake, if he says something that violates the rules immanent in the usage of native speakers. We can also say, if we wish, that a speaker of a non-standard social or regional dialect of English has spoken ungrammatically if his utterance violates the rules immanent in Standard English. But, in saying this, we are of course assuming that he was intending, or perhaps ought to have been intending, to use Standard English. And that is itself and assumption which requires justification."
- John Lyons, Language & Linguistics, p 52

When I earned my undergraduate major in Japanese language, I was surprised that the degree did not convey even a resemblance of fluency in Japanese. For some reason, as an adolescent, in high school French classes, I was under the impression that if I continued to take those classes, someday, I would be a fluent speaker. This does not seem to be the case. Foreign language fluency has been a holy grail for me. Finally, this year, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, a Japanese expatriate whom I met through a Japanese conversation group. She said she had gotten to the point where people were going to have to take her English skills as they were, and if that wasn't good enough for them, there was no point in continuing to work with them anyway. I suppose that this should have been obvious, but to me it was not. I kept thinking that if I could somehow live for 5 years in each of the countries of the world, I could become fluent in every language.

My best friend gives me evidence to the contrary. At least, in a way. She and I grew up in Wisconsin together. When she graduated from college, she married and moved to England. To this day she does not have a British accent. She has picked up British words and phrasing but she does not sound the least bit like a British person. She sounds like an American. In contrast, her daughter sounds English through and through.

Another thought I had about foreign language was the different forms of English that we use. I hear frequently "Everyone speaks English in Europe." or "Everyone speaks English in Japan." Well, guess what. They don't. Not "real" English. I find myself unconsciously speaking in a very different way when I speak to people that I know speak English as a second language. I use the most common synonyms for words that I choose, words that I think will be in a dictionary. I avoid excessive word omissions. I avoid jargon and slang. When I completely alter my speech patterns to sound like my 9th grade grammar textbook, am I really speaking English anymore? Because that's not how people talk. Or if that is English, perhaps I am never speaking English.

What is fluency? I also think that not everyone believes that "fluency" means "equivalent to a native speaker". As an adolescent I also believed that those two concepts were identical.