Week 3: Language

During the first experiment where I could not use any language to communicate, I did find it a lot harder (and frustrating) than I expected. I initially thought it would be funny, until I decided to just randomly try the experiment without letting my partner aware. My partner was my younger brother, when he came home from school he was trying to ask me to help with his homework, I simply just shook my head yes and walked into his room and began reading what it was his homework was. He looked at me kind of funny, but ignored it and kept going. Lucky for me, he began telling me which homework he actually needed help with. I found it hard in trying to explain to him what he had to do, to where it became frustration for us both. Since he did not know why I wasn’t talking, he was becoming frustrated with what I was trying to say. He began just asking if he does this or that and I would simply shake my head yes or no. It is tremendously hard to engage in a conversation where you can say little to nothing at all. The speaker has the advantage in the conversation since they are able to both, listen and respond. They do not have to deal with trying to figure out ways, besides ASL, to tell you what it is they want to say. However, for the speaker it may be hard trying to carry on the conversation with someone that cannot communicate back. I recently had an incident where a Spanish speaking woman wanted to know the color number of my hair dye. I do not speak any Spanish, so I was trying to explain that I did not know the color number to her by using hand gestures and facial expressions.

When engaging in a conversation without any physical embellishments, I found the conversation to be extremely dry and not really interesting. Although we were able to finish the conversation, I am not sure my partner really wanted to. The hardest part for me was reminding myself I could not do any vocal intonation. In a regular conversation you do not realize how much you do them and it really changes the tone of the conversation. My partner seemed to be confused as to whether I was interested in their conversation really or just listening to what it was that they were saying not trying to be rude. Their facial expressions and vocal intonations made up for my lack of them. Their voice seemed to decrease and be less interested more and more. They also seemed to have no really excitement in telling me their story, probably because they felt I didn’t really care about it anyway. This experiment shows that using signs in our language really helps get whatever it is across. The highs and excitement give off that feeling, as does the lows and non excitement. Body language is also another big factor in communication as it better helps tell your story and makes the conversation more comfortable. The benefits of being able to read body language, is simply using that with the conversation to tell what and how they speaker really feels. The only types of environments that I can think of where there may be a benefit to not reading body language, is when the body language is negative. If you cannot read body language, you will have no really emotion from it.

If I was able to use writing in the first experiment, I feel the conversation would have been almost exactly like a regular conversation with both people speaking. Being able to write what you want to say, allows the other person to know exactly what it is you are saying as oppose to guessing. Although writing will take a lot more time, it will help a great deal having the conversation. Written language allows you to always keep whatever it was said. We find old writings and are able to use that to find out about the culture it came from, the time period, and other factors. Written language is something that can be kept forever and tells more about a culture than anything else since it was written by someone from that culture. The findings of old scriptures helps tell the world about our history and gives us more information on the differences of the people. The makings of newspapers, allows us to know about local and international news. Its keeps us up to date on current news, as well as, allow us to keep historical news from older newspapers.