{"id":4181,"date":"2016-04-11T08:15:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T12:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=4181"},"modified":"2020-10-01T14:05:23","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T18:05:23","slug":"language-and-body-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2016\/04\/11\/language-and-body-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Language and Body Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Itchy<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, this may come as some surprise to you, but I suppose everyone’s got to learn sometime, so here goes: languages come out of a person’s\u00a0mouth, and a person’s\u00a0mouth is attached to their\u00a0body.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, if you can believe it, the way the person poses and positions the various appendages and external parts of their body as a means to communicate (also known as\u00a0body language<\/em>), and their reasons for or intentions in doing so, are a direct result of the culture in which they were raised.<\/p>\n

Incredible, I know.<\/p>\n

Finally and therefore (if you haven’t already fainted from flabbergastery), a person’s spoken language and body language are tightly connected.<\/p>\n

Take a moment to collect your blown mind.<\/p>\n

I first realized this very important connection between the unspoken language of the human body and the spoken language of the human mouth when I first moved to France many years ago. It was my\u00a0first time living in a foreign country, and the first time I was having to speak a foreign language (aside from Spanish, which I’d learned for ten years in school – meaning, of course, that I couldn’t speak a word of it). More specifically, it was the first time I had to speak a foreign language to people who didn’t always understand that I didn’t speak their language fluently.<\/p>\n

Here’s what happened: my washing machine broke.\u00a0The landlord agreed to pay for a new one, but I would have to organize a time for the delivery guy to come by and drop off the new one. As is common with France, the company was closed for 99.9% of the week, so a phone conversation was required to sort out the exact time when his schedule and my schedule overlapped. At this point, I had only been learning French for a few months, so of course\u00a0the conversation was a complete disaster.\u00a0I ended the call prematurely after several minutes of being yelled at in French.<\/p>\n

I was upset – not for being bad at French, as I knew I was bad, but I didn’t think I was\u00a0that<\/em> bad. It was then that I realized I had just had the first conversation\u00a0without<\/em> the visual aid of body language.<\/p>\n

Every conversation I’d had in French previous to that phone conversation had been made with the visual aid of seeing the body language of the person to whom I was speaking. There’s so much silent communication going on with body language, which I only realized was missing when it wasn’t there. Without those very important clues in the eyes, mouth and limbs, I was missing a huge part of the conversation, and had to rely purely on words spoken and the tone of voice. In this case – the gruff tone of a washing machine delivery guy trying to talk sense into a bewildered Francophobe.<\/p>\n

To this day, I have the most trouble speaking in a foreign language over the phone. I no longer take body language for granted, but I have yet to find a good system for effectively communicating without it. Next time I’ll have to Skype the delivery company.<\/p>\n

Are there languages which require specific\u00a0knowledge of body language to effectively communicate? Italian’s an obvious one, are there others?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"Itchy

Now, this may come as some surprise to you, but I suppose everyone’s got to learn sometime, so here goes: languages come out of a person’s\u00a0mouth, and a person’s\u00a0mouth is attached to their\u00a0body. Furthermore, if you can believe it, the way the person poses and positions the various appendages and external parts of their body…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":4182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[542801],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4181","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archived-posts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4185,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions\/4185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}