Shannon Costello

I just learned how to say ‘culture shock’ in Spanish this morning, thus the title.

My favorite new words, which I think I forgot to mention earlier are words for speed bumps:  ‘muertos’ or ‘policia durmiente’.

I’m struggling through my thinking on the relationship between culture and language, so this may not be very organized.

Some things I do not like about the way of life here:  cold showers and hard rain every afternoon.  Things that get wet do not readily dry.  The skirt that got soaked last Sunday was still damp in spots yesterday.  Of course it was really soaked.

Language is a way to express a culture, but I am more interested in how the culture influences the language.  Why are language teachers supposed to teach culture too?  My best metaphor for this so far is a Costa Rican road metaphor.  Imagine a road in an area that has gotten so much rain that bed under the pavement has eroded away so that it won’t take much for the road to crumble away.  (I think the central american highway is closed in at least two spots because the road is destroyed.)  So, while I cannot explain this as I’d like to (just don’t have the words yet), I think learning a foreign language without studying the culture is like that heavily undermined road.

I was looking at the words to a song from a CD I purchased yesterday.  The title of the song is ‘Soy Tico’ (Tico is the word Costa Ricans use to describe themselves).  But part of the song talks about how the speaker is Tico because the rain acts on him as it would on a seed…that has a lot more meaning when one knows about the (very) rainy season.