English and Chinese: Similarities and Differences

Abstract

I have been trying in these lectures to build up a picture of how we—that is, people, human beings—use language to learn, and perhaps I might summarize, briefly, the perspective that I have tried to adopt. In the first place, I take ‘using language to learn’ to be something of a tautology: ‘how people learn’ would do just as well, since when we learn we are, in fact, using language. Even when we are not for the moment employing any of the four language skills, the categories and the patterns we are using to make sense of our experience—all the notions that we have of objects, events, qualities of things, abstractions and so on—are all semantic categories: they have evolved as part of language, and they get their meaning from being part of language. So in introducing these talks, I used the words ‘a linguistic interpretation of how people learn’.