Linguistic Institute - Update #1
I feel like the Linguistic Institute has just made it even harder to decide what to study. I don't think I want to go into academics as a career, but that doesn't make choosing a focus for my Master's much easier. All the Socio-Linguistics classes seem so interesting and it reminds me how much fun my minor in Sociology was.
Intro to Conversational Analysis this morning was pretty cool. It kind of opened my eyes to all the subtle little clues in dialogue that we never explicitly express. I think that class will help me with writing stories later on.
Language and Sexuality was also really cool and made me nostalgic for sociology. We talked about how different languages focus on different issues when it comes to interpersonal relations, and how before the 1800s, there wasn't such a thing as "homosexual" because the gender of your partner wasn't defined as part of your identity.
We had lunch then (with the group of people I ran into the first day - we keep adding new people and missing others so it's a very amorphous group right now) and afterwards I listened to Computational Lexical Semantics. I really like how people have put together these programs with all this data to let computers figure out what the most likely meaning of a sentence is. It's really interesting, but it's a pity I'm not a computer person or I might try to pursue a career in the programming aspect of that field.
Language, Gender, and Sexuality was the next class I sat in on and that was really cool too. It's a thrill that everything's so fascinating, but at the same time, how am I supposed to make a decision on my Master's now?
I suppose I could look into doing translating (degree/certificate) or a TESOL degree or certificate or something since I want to continue working with Japanese for a long time to come. I'm just not sure if I want to teach for the rest of my life. And I do like the sociological aspect of things an awful lot...
Amy also mentioned something about the "Sociology of Languages/Linguistics" (I can't remember which it was)...
And then there's pragmatics which I'm really curious about...
Intro to Conversational Analysis this morning was pretty cool. It kind of opened my eyes to all the subtle little clues in dialogue that we never explicitly express. I think that class will help me with writing stories later on.
Language and Sexuality was also really cool and made me nostalgic for sociology. We talked about how different languages focus on different issues when it comes to interpersonal relations, and how before the 1800s, there wasn't such a thing as "homosexual" because the gender of your partner wasn't defined as part of your identity.
We had lunch then (with the group of people I ran into the first day - we keep adding new people and missing others so it's a very amorphous group right now) and afterwards I listened to Computational Lexical Semantics. I really like how people have put together these programs with all this data to let computers figure out what the most likely meaning of a sentence is. It's really interesting, but it's a pity I'm not a computer person or I might try to pursue a career in the programming aspect of that field.
Language, Gender, and Sexuality was the next class I sat in on and that was really cool too. It's a thrill that everything's so fascinating, but at the same time, how am I supposed to make a decision on my Master's now?
I suppose I could look into doing translating (degree/certificate) or a TESOL degree or certificate or something since I want to continue working with Japanese for a long time to come. I'm just not sure if I want to teach for the rest of my life. And I do like the sociological aspect of things an awful lot...
Amy also mentioned something about the "Sociology of Languages/Linguistics" (I can't remember which it was)...
And then there's pragmatics which I'm really curious about...