Writing Prompt: You get to choose one superpower. Pick one of these, and explain your choice:
- the ability to speak and understand any language
- the ability to travel through time
- the ability to make any two people agree with each other
First off you’re telling me that snark is not a super power? Well F*CK!. Now I have to rethink my entire existence…. this may take a while, because for real my mind is blown… BLOWN!
The options are great, but how come something like, “judging people silently with a single glance…. I got that one down pact….fine, FINE!! I’ll pick, “the ability to speak and understand any language “ There seems to be a certain freedom you have when you are a polygot, you can navigate between different cultures more easily, it my small amount of travel, I have found that people appreciate when foreigners know the language (or even have a tiny grasp of language ) of the country that they are visiting, and I always advise people to learn some key phrases…. just in case.
Benefits of your super power include:
- Your interactions with people of different cultures go deeper
- You feel a sense of connection with your heritage, history and family.
- Your self-expression excitingly takes on a multitude of forms
In short I would be a bad ass in multiple languages..gosh can you imagine… Oh my goodness…. it’s my SUPER POWER!!
While I am passively learning Korean/Hangul I’m finding it somewhat frustrating because the spoken language I’m sorta getting, it’s the written language that has been just staring, I think it would be probably because Korean is an agglutinative language. And the verb information such as tense, mood and the social relation between speaker and listener is added successively to the end of the verb. This is in contrast to English which makes extensive use of auxiliaries to convey verb meaning. And there is not such thing as articles in the Korean language, so switching my sentence structure around seems inherently “wrong”. And while we are talking about learning other languages, I thought (probably for a half of a day )about learning Chinese, but it scared me to the point where I nearly cried)… okay so there are several different dialects .. but the tones, are what get me….so I let that dream go
But back to this super power, let’s be honest, we live in a world were there is a lot of conflict, I’m not saying that it would help, but being able to communicate with someone easily learning about their daily life and their struggles, opens up your world, it opens up the possibilities of what we can do (to help each other, and make the world a better place) And that’s probably the best super power of them all
(The Written )Language is strange yet beautiful… this is the same phrase in different languages
“one language is not enough”
один язык никогда не бывает достаточно
ett språk är aldrig nog
één taal is nooit genoeg
ett språk er aldri nok
et sprog er aldrig nok
-一种语言是远远不够的
하나의 언어는 충분히 결코
ภาษาหนึ่งจะไม่เพียงพอ
一つの言語は十分なことはありません
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
Until next time; let’s practice our super powers,
