Learning Twi

I realized that I have not even blogged about my Twi language class. So far it has been very interesting, although challenging. The only foreign language instruction I have been exposed to was three years of French in high school. However, French had many cognitive words to English, because of the common Latin base. It is very cool to be learning a language that is entirely different from English; it even has a couple different written letters. Once one starts to grasp the concept of communicative language, it is easy to see how even this one element could create a culture incomprehensibly different from another.

Language - words, phrases, even sentence structure - are metaphors for our actual thoughts and feelings. Our internal minds can never truly be known to another in full, and the main tool we as humans have to convey messages from our mind is language - spoken, written, acted out, etc. Thus, it is more clear why a person from another culture would act or think or say things so differently than me, when I realize the toolbox of metaphors they are raised with to convey their internal meaning is of a completely different brand than my toolbox.

Little things I have started to learn about the Twi language have already begun to give me insight into Ghanaian culture as a whole. For example, the noun one uses to refer to another person can change based on whether that person is an equal in class and age, younger, older, or much older. This makes me infer that the culture includes respect towards the elderly, or towards authority figures.

I am excited for the rest of my semester in Twi. I believe learning the spoken language of many Asante Ghanaians will give me a deeper understanding of the culture as a whole, since language is a vital underlying current of all cultures and societies. Also, hopefully being able to say even a little in Twi, will help me develop a rapport because of my invested interest in a significant part of their society.