Cultural Immersion: Explore Tradition In Language Apps

explore tradition in language apps

Have you ever wondered how pizza became a staple in American diets or why yoga has gained such popularity worldwide? These are just a few examples of how foreign cultures have influenced our own. Language is one of the things that most essentially makes humans ‘human’. It is the carrier of all human culture. Almost everything we ‘do’, ‘make’, and ‘are’ is an experience that we mediate through language. In fact, almost everything we learn how to do, we learn with the aid of language.

Ans language learning apps can be your passport to exploring these traditions firsthand. From learning karate to understanding the philosophy of nirvana, you can easily explore tradition in language apps via cultural immersion.

How Can Language Learning Promote Cultural Awareness?

Every individual language carries the culture of its speakers forward as they change and develop with their language, generation by generation. Traditions, jokes, stories, and social trends old and new that are particular to a given culture are likewise manifested in and carried on by a particular language.

On the internet there is a lot of interest in posts about “untranslatable words”. Many of these may be more translatable than people think. For example, Japanese umami has made its way as a loan word in English, although it is the same in meaning and use as the word “savory” that already exists in English. Others may in fact not be translatable but can be loaned in just as umami has been to some extent into English. It has also been loaned into French which doesn’t have as clear an equivalent word as English does – savoureux is more or less “tasty”, and salé is “salty”.

But we spend less time thinking about the difficulty of translating whole discourses, whole cultural points of reference, etc. One can enjoy Japanese culture through English translation, but many of the cultural references, the emotional relatability, the subtlety, and the humor will be lost since one cannot stop word by word, sentence by sentence. This cultural experience can be lived only from the experience of speaking, reading, and living the language, day to day.

This is one of many reasons to learn a new language. Thanks to the widespread and near-instantaneous availability of such a large amount of information over the internet, today more people are learning more languages than ever before.

Explore Tradition In Language Apps

One of many tools people make use of in their language-learning journeys are language learning apps. These have many advantages, from their interactivity and mechanisms designed to present and re-present information and quizzes, as well as their capacity to work for multiple languages at once through the same app and purchase. They are available in the palm of your hand on your smart phone, whenever and wherever you are, so you can use them on your own time, and keep up at least a baseline of discipline and practice with less effort than using a book and making your own flashcards.

People use language learning apps to communicate in a new language, and as a result, take part in a new cultural experience. But more than that – language learning apps can also constitute a cultural space on their own. Apps have distinctive branding and distinctive means of social outreach through the internet which enables them to become a point of cultural reference for students.

But how do you explore a new language? How do language learning apps approach the culture of the languages students are learning through them?

Language Pedagogy And Culture Across Apps

Many language learning app designers are acutely aware of the role of culture as a motivator in language learning, as well as something that conditions how people approach the study of a given language. They will frequently design courses for a given language based on the associated culture of the speakers, or the perception of the cultural interests of learners. Apps like Babbel, Busuu and Memrise have dabbled with these features already.

However, in my view, this instinct can sometimes go too far! Some apps will put disproportionate emphasis on the learning experience for some, especially lesser taught languages, on food (namely the ordering and identification of specific dishes), or on very particular sites where heritage speakers might want to use the language (such as in church or when visiting grandparents) while assigning more broad, modern, or serious topics to other languages, particularly major languages across the world.

This can be really limiting. First, for the learner’s ability to feel that they really have a command over the language (rather than just a few phrases specific to one experience). Second, to the perception of the totality of the culture of the people who already speak the language fluently, conversing on many topics!

One quite exceptional case in this particular regard is Ling, which not only boasts one of the most diverse selections of languages for students but also has as a baseline for the launch of each language a diverse curriculum covering all manner of topics whether the student is learning French or Khmer! These include languages that are hard to find anywhere else, from African languages like Yoruba and Amharic to the official languages of Southeast Asian countries like Lao and Thai, from very small languages like Sorbian to large but rarely offered languages like Pashto, Bengali, and Telugu!

All of these and more are covered by the curriculum in the Ling app, with a perspective to ensure you can communicate about all basic topics and cover all the crucial vocabulary you would need, generated by native speakers and experienced educators!

How Can Cultural Content Aid Your Language Learning?

It would be disrespectful to these languages if we didn’t treat them all as equally valuable for study and use in various subjects. The same reasons that motivate people to learn these languages should also guide how they are studied. Ignoring their unique cultural aspects wouldn’t do them justice.

While these languages are equally capable of expressing a wide range of ideas, it’s often their distinct cultural differences that draw people to study them in the first place!

The team behind Ling are themselves passionate learners and educators of many languages who believe their product has a particular mission, and they endeavor to expand Ling’s cultural footprint and impact.

Ling offers language learning beyond the app. It also offers an associated blog, and video content on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Ling YouTube. Much of this content is geared towards getting people excited about learning a new language, and expanding their cultural and linguistic palate as they learn. Ling’s videos and blog posts offer vocabulary specific to cultural particularities and traditions, as well as offering primers in these topics.

Throughout Ling’s video and blog content on specific languages, you will find information and insight which students and teachers of these particular languages found useful or interesting along their own journey with the language.

The Ling team is always hard at work creating new content on particular individual languages, or comparing multiple ones, to provide crucial context for the many languages Ling users are studying.

a cartoon of a girl reading a book

Ling: The Immersive Language Learning App

Like the social media platforms and the blog, the Ling app is being updated by the team all the time. Short articles providing notes and lessons on the connection between the particular language and cultural norms are being introduced at the same time.

At present, Ling has already been rolling these out, first and foremost for some of our most popular languages. You may or may not be surprised or pleased to learn that at the moment these include Thai, Tagalog, Khmer, and Punjabi.

If you have been looking to study Punjabi, there are very few apps that offer this at all. But our dedicated team is determined to not just gain you as a user by you having no other place to go, but by zeroing in on the particular needs of users who want to study Punjabi and providing them the highest quality learning and practice experience an app can provide, and this includes our cultural notes!

Experience Cultural Immersion With Ling!

Whether you are a polyglot looking to learn more languages, or a unilingual who wants to learn a language you can’t find somewhere else, we encourage you to give Ling a try! Users will have instant access to all of our in-app content, which they can combine with our social media and blog content to learn more than they can learn from any other source about many of the languages of the world!

Furthermore, we believe in Ling as a community in the making. Ling maintains a dedicated Discord channel, where you can discuss points from grammar to culture with other users going through similar experiences and maybe facing similar questions to those you are facing.

The cost of a year subscription to Ling is considerably less than a semester of lessons in one language, and can provide you with much of the information you would take from grammar and lesson books on so many languages for a fraction of the cost of books on only a few!

You can download Ling from the App Store and Google Play Store and subscribe to our social media platforms to get updates on our content. Join our Discord community and watch your hope of speaking a new language transform into a comprehensive experience. Bonus? You’ll make new friends, both other learners and existing speakers!

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