Learning a Southern Bantu Language for an Unfamiliar Reality
A practical way of exercising mindfulness includes my first morning thoughts upon waking should consist of having gratitude for the smallest things. An example of this is contained in savoring my sense of hearing to birds chirping early in the morning and being grateful for that experience. There are people who may not be able to have this instinctive ability which is overlooked on a daily basis. Gratitude creates easier processes to welcome logic that is outside of my normal box such as the benefits from learning a new language. We often indulge in speaking our native language fluently from conception which should create the innate confidence in mastering another language through experimental practice. According to a YouTube clip, “the more languages we speak, the more lives we can live within one lifespan”. As I study Educational Technology in Africa and the Diaspora as my final course at Georgia State University, its led to developing a keen interest in learning at minimum one Southern Bantu language such as Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, or the Dutch based vernacular language Afrikaans. After observing racial injustice via social media in the United States, I found refuge in delving into the adversarial stories of Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela also known as Madiba held a juxtaposition to learning Afrikaans that one may maneuver through diversity at a young age. Expressing oneself through a wide range of cultural context, emotion, and expansive word choice is a psychologically positive way of using labeling theory to avert cultural norms or unfortunate circumstances in the western hemisphere of the world.
It seems there’s an intellectual prosperity to using language for gaining a new perspective. You begin to see how language either liberates or confines our mind similar to our personal definitions of what culture is based on our experiences. I recently published an article about the significance of attention on the cognitive learning process titled “Why Can’t Fish See Water and The Significance of Attention on the Cognitive Learning Process”. Deliberate concentration to learn a new language has been most useful by forcing ourselves to speak, read, and interact with those who use the language to carry on a daily conversation. The YouTube channel Learning Phrases with Chris & Friends has been useful and free prior to conditioning myself to have gratitude for five physiological senses in the morning followed by applying specific learned phrases to interactions throughout the day. Some polyglot routine include acknowledging 14 words per day and for others it means watching movies of a specific culture with subtitles. Gaining a new language in your toolbox opens you up to perspectives outside of eastern or western cultural philosophy and you’ll give more thought to not doing things based on the life others may have had for you. Surrounded by the benefits of exercising your muscle memory to learn a new language, statistically you could be delaying dementia or Alzheimer’s disease by up to five years. As a dog walker throughout my senior year of undergrad, I was shocked to learn that African Wild Dogs are not domestic animals but live on the open plains of Sub-Saharan Africa. Particular parts of the United States perceive dogs as a companion however in areas of Sub-Sharan Africa dogs were used as symbols to threaten.
Dutch social psychologist Gert Hoffstead came up with the uncertainty avoidance index from a theory that particular groups of people from specific parts of the world are perceived to be more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity than others. Uncertainty avoidance is a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
