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- Herausgeber: Animedia Co.
- Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
- Sprache: Englisch
The only book you will need to successfully work in intercultural environment and get to know your customers’ needs. Advice from polyglot, memory sportsman, TEDx speaker Ekaterina Matveeva—the founder of Amolingua (EuropeOnline)—among the TOP 20 start-ups of the world of 2015. Her tips will fill the gaps in your intercultural communication and boost your international business. The author has worked and studied in over 15 countries and organised world international events at the level of G20 and WUDC. She masters 8 languages and understands another dozen.
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Seitenzahl: 71
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Ekaterina Matveeva
______________________
LANGUAGE
Alter Ego
Does your personality change when you speak another language?
______________________
Amolingua
Copyright © 2016 by Ekaterina Matveeva
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN-13: 978-1534841079
ISBN-10: 1534841075
Ekaterina Matveeva: Language Alter Ego. Does your personality change when you speak another language?
Editor-in-chief: Dan Holloway
Amolingua. London, 2016
The only book you will need to successfully work in intercultural environment and get to know your customers’ needs. Advice from polyglot, memory sportsman, TEDx speaker Ekaterina Matveeva—the founder of Amolingua (EuropeOnline)—among the TOP 20 start-ups of the world of 2015. Her tips will fill the gaps in your intercultural communication and boost your international business. The author has worked and studied in over 15 countries and organised world international events at the level of G20 and WUDC. She masters 8 languages and understands another dozen.
© Ekaterina Matveeva, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1534841079
ISBN-10: 1534841075
Contents
Introduction
My dear friend, you are holding this book as perhaps you are a bilingual, or multilingual, or an aspiring polyglot. Or, perhaps, you are about to move to another country or close a big deal with a foreign business partner.
Even if this book finds you in the state of the sad monolingual person I used to be a few years ago, I would like you to get ready for a life full of adventures and vivid colours. After reading this work from cover to cover you will be armed with everything you need to become successful in intercultural communication.
As the Russian writer Anton Chekhov once said: “How many languages you know—that many times you are a person”.
You will discover why culture is such an important aspect of language learning and how a language influences your mind and changes your perspective on the world, which is crucial if you are about to be translocated or expand your business.
Intrigued?
Let our journey begin!
Does Your Personality Change When You Speak Another Language?
Have you ever wondered if you have an alter ego? Perhaps, after watching “Fight Club” or “Me, Myself, and Irene”? Or, perhaps, if you are bilingual or multilingual since your childhood, have you ever felt some confusion or do you feel that you act the same regardless of the language you use?
I started wondering about it when I took up my first foreign language more than 10 years ago. At that time I thought that people were the same, no matter which language they spoke. However, years later science and my life experience made me change my mind and develop the idea that by learning other languages you can find or form not just a new identity (sense of belonging), but a new personality.
In Turkish there is a saying: Bir dil bir insan, iki dil iki insan. (One who speaks only one language is one person, but one who speaks two languages is two people.)
If you already speak other languages, you might have noticed this for yourself, or you might not.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean you’ll end up like the case of The Mind of Billy Milligan—the first person to ever be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.
Observe and play
How did it all start?
I used to play in the theatre when I was in high school, still being a sad monolingual person. That is when I discovered that I had to observe people in order to play a particular character. I was taught how to play objects and people with a wide spectrum of emotions and how to be in their shoes. This was the first time I realised that all people being the same, were utterly different.
When I was 15 I faced a hard choice. I was so emotionally involved in theatre that I gave serious thought to entering the Academy of Theatre in Moscow, inspired by the example of the Russian popular actor and singer Sergey Lazarev.
However, my plans were thwarted by my parents who couldn’t imagine their daughter acting on the stage. The same happened to me when I was 11 and declared that I would become a famous follower of Alexander Pushkin, the most celebrated Russian poet, as I had been composing since I was 4. They just laughed and told me to forget this idea.
In my turn I was utterly opposed to entering a standard teaching university as I had very vivid images of teachers who despite being called teachers couldn’t add any value beyond the curriculum.
I believe these images were embedded in my memory since my first German classes at pre-primary gymnasium where I was admitted instead of a kindergarten. I hated German and since then I had a wildly oscillating love-hate relationship with this language. However, in a nutshell the problem was not in the language itself. The hatred emerged due to the teaching style. Now I enjoy German and find its compound words incredibly fascinating, take for example, “Kuddelmuddel” or “Geborgenheit”—just one word and such a deep meaning!
Similarly at high school, I was again confronted with an unpleasant teaching style. As soon as I started acting while reciting poetry “Woe from Wit” in Russian literature class, our teacher was aghast by my creative initiative. It was then I began to notice how school was killing creativity without any regret. I was afraid of getting the same experience at university.
The aftermath of the vigorous dispute with my parents was taking the entrance exams to Moscow State Linguistic University, MSU and MGIMO. This was on the advice of my school English tutor. I participated in olympiads—special competitions for talented school students who could win an offer from the university. That’s how I got an offer from a newly formed faculty of Globalisation in MSU.
Is multilingual equal to multicultural?
To my horror after the offer there was another trial which consisted of 9 exams in diverse disciplines over the course of a single day. To tell the truth the idea of being first admitted into MSU college for “gifted” students and then going to university made me frown a lot. After that day of 9 exams I knew that I wouldn’t torture anyone like this if I wanted to help them to acquire new information.
I entered MSLU in order to find out that tortures could be of different kind but it was there during my modules on inter-cultural communication and the history of linguistics that I discovered my passion for languages, cultures and communication.
