Teaching. I Love it!

Assalamualaikum WBT,

Hi everyone,

I know, I have abandoned this blog for quite sometimes. I have tonnes to be written but I have so little time to do so, plus, the internet connection at my home town is not as good as before. I am depending on the Kampung Tanpa Wayar 1 Malaysia and I do not know what happened but the person in charged said they will change the has broken but until now, nothing happened.

As I promised before, and the entries before, I will try my best to update more often.

 

I tried to update using my handphone but it did not have the feel as I update entries from laptop or desktop. 

But as far as I am concern, I have covered all the basic grammar rules, right? So, I will try my best to look more on advanced English grammar and I really hope I could share it with you here.

But as for now, I need to read more on teaching as I am the English teacher as one of the IPMAs in my hometown. It is a wonderful experience indeed. So, keep reading my entries and I will be back with new and fresh ideas but for a while, I will be writing on something that not related to English grammar. I do not know yet what would be the ideas, but hey! I will figure it out later.

Assalamualaikum WBT

p/s: I love teaching!!!

Economy Nowadays Is Hard!

Assalamualaikum WBT,

How do you do people? Readers? Followers? I really hope you are doing amazingly fine.

I went to a Xerox shop just now and the Chinese lady was talking to me,

"Where to send this documents?"

"To a company, my resume and job application"

"oh..good. Haiya, these days ar, so hard to find job maa".

"you tell me".

"Ya lorr... when you have job, you want better job but then the economy is higher, the cost of living, hard loorr".

"You tell me aunty".

"Ya looorr... when have job, have to work hard also do loads of work for money. Like me, my daughter stay in England, study, piano, music, her interest. So many money to use... I have to work hard for her".

"well, what to do aunty, so how much these tupperwear?'

Hello... this chinese lady is a chinese, to me they have reason to work and her reason is her children. Amazing huh? How love could give to people.? The benefits of loving others.

And btw, the expression, "you tell me" is not you have to elaborate more on the case, but it was an expression on, "right, I feel you"-ish. So, next time, if you heard some use this expression, please, respond with care. Hahaha..

Assalamualaikum WBT

p/s: economy nowadays, hard ma..

The Principles of Newspeak.

Assalamualaikum WBT,

Well, well, well... I am back again with more new information. After Malaysia's 13th General Election, dramas, dramas and dramas. Hahaha.. Well, whatever it is, the results were out and Barisan Nasional is back AGAIN to rule Malaysia. *sigh? hahaha.. I do not know. I wish for better Malaysia, I love Malaysia, but then.. Well, enough! 

Now, I am going to write about Newspeak. Do you know what is Newspeak? Well, Newspeak was official language of Oceania, and it had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc. What is Ingsoc? Ingsoc is English Socialism. Ingsoc is also a Newspeak, Eng-lish and Soc-alism so, Ingsoc. In the year, 1984, there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only carried out by specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English language, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. 

Meanwhile, Newspeak gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The purpose of Newspeak was not only provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought it dependent on words. 

Its vocabulary was constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

Let us see an example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politicaly free" or "intellectually free", since political in intellectual freedom are no longer existed even as concepts, and therefore it is necessity nameless. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. 

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories. 

A vocabulary : words are simple, concept word.

There are two outstanding peculiarities, 1. almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. 2. Regularity.

Number 1 is for example, speedful meant "rapid" and the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise as in speedwise meant "quickly". Goodful, goodwise and so on. Other examples, could be negative by adding the affix- un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold." Given the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --indeed better-- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

I will continue with B vocabulary and C vocabulary, plus duckspeak and more.

Read this first and be good okay, do not be ungood.

Assalamualaikum WBT

Ref : 'The Principle of Newspeak' written by George Orwell 1948. 

p/s: Need to read more.

Introduction to Psycholinguistics.

Assalamualaikum WBT,

Hi, we are here again. Well, I am so sorry for not writing here, I have a lot of works needed to be done, so, since I have got the time, now I can write. In my uni life, I had a few subjects that I love learning, one of those subjects is Psycholinguistics. Yes, I love learning it.

They say, Psycholinguistics is not an easy subject to be learned. I do not know that, as long as we are interested in something, obviously, nothing could stop us right? *drama much? Please. Well, before we go any further, it is better for me to tell you a bit what psycholinguistics in brief. 

Language in general is important not only because it distinguishes human beings from all other animals on the earth but because, directly or indirectly, it makes possible the elaborate organisation of civilised society... and language in general is interesting because, although everyone knows and uses a specific language, few people understand what they know. Becoming self0-consiciously aware of what is known unself-consiciously carries a special brand of excitement. - George A. Miller

There are few main points that need to be in our minds are, 

1. Psycholinguistics is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce, and acquire language.

2. The study of psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. Cognitive science reflects the insights of psychology, linguists, and to a lesser extent, fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy.

3. Psycholinguistics stresses the knowledge of language and the cognitive processes involved on ordinary language use.

4. Psycholinguistics are also interested in the social rules involved in language use and the brain mechanism associated with language. 

5. Contemporary interest in psycholinguistics began in the 1950s, although important precursors existed in the 20th century.

The psychological study of language is called psycholinguistics. The diversity of how we use language is daunting for psychologists who wish to study language. How can something so widespread and far-reaching as language be examined psychologically? An important consideration is that although language is intrinsically  a social phenomenon, psychology is principally the study of individuals. They psychology of language deals with the mental processes that are involved in language use. There are three sets of processes needs to be remembered which are, language comprehension (how we perceive and understand speech and written language), language production ( how we construct an utterance for idea to completed sentence), and language acquisition (how children acquire language).

The Scope of Psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics is part of the emerging field of study called cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary venture that draws upon the insights of psychologists, linguists, computer scientist, neuroscientists , and philosophers to study the mind and mental processes. As the name implies, psycholinguistics, is principally a integration of the fields pf psychology and linguistics. Linguistics is the branch of science that studies the origin, structure, and use of language. Like most interdisciplinary fields, however, psycholinguistics has a rich heritage that includes contributions from diverse intellectual traditions. 

Language Processes and Linguistic Knowledge

There are two questions that need to be answered in psycholinguistics, one would be What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? and other one is What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language?

In a usual sense, we know how to use a language but we are fully aware of this knowledge. A distinction may be drawn between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge of how to perform various acts, whereas, explicit knowledge refers to the knowledge of the processes or mechanism used in these acts. We may distinguish between knowing how to speak and knowing what process are involved in producing speech. Generally speaking, much of our linguistic knowledge is tacit rather then explicit. I could simply say that tacit is the surface and explicit is the deep under the sea type of knowledge. Meaning, explicit knowledge is where we need to look deep down to actually get the knowledge, we need to learn as much as we can to gain the knowledge. For example, we know how to smile, but we do not know how many muscles are needed to make us smile right? If you know how many muscles needed to make us smile than you obtain the explicit knowledge. Easy right?

The same information as my entry in here, there are four broad areas of language knowledge, which are, Semantics, Syntax, Phonology and Pragmatics. Let me give you the brief definition on this areas. Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangements of words within the sentences. Phonology concerns the system of sound in a language and last but not least, Pragmatics, it entails the social rules involved in language use. It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language. 

Well, I personally think that is quite enough to digest and I will write more on this introduction to Psycholinguistics. Love it. There are a few more topics need to be written here so, I will analyse it first then, I will write it. Okay? Wait for it eyh? Thank you.

Ref : Psychology of Language by David W. Carroll.

Assalamualaikum WBT

p/s: Need time to rest. Really. Ugh.