Thinking back about all the lectures we had for UC256,
one of my favorite lectures was about the relation between language and games
because it made me realize how big a role language games play in my own life. I
will give you guys two examples that I thought about during and after the lecture.
When I heard we would get a lecture about the relation
of language and games, I wasn’t sure what to expect but link between language
and (board)games seemed obvious. Thinking about the subject makes me realize
that in fact speaking another language is also a huge game, one that I’m
playing right now! I’m an exchange student and since my first language isn’t
English, one of my goals of coming to America is to improve my English skills.
Because of the many writing assignments I get at this university and the house
with 50 American students that I’m living in, I’m forced to improve my
vocabulary and I learn more words every day. But I also challenge myself, for
example by trying to keep a conversation fluent without struggling to find the
right words and by writing not only in ‘simple English’ (which goes pretty ok.
now) but I challenge myself to learn and use synonyms that the English language
is full of. So instead of saying 5 times ‘my paper is about’ I learned myself
using different words saying exactly the same thing. For example; my paper;
concerns, deals with, refers to, regards and is touching).
Another example how language can be used as a game is
when we learned about slang and cockney that English man would use, so the
police wouldn’t find out where they would talk about. This particular story
made me think of something my parents would do, when I was younger. In Holland
we have a famous holiday on December 5th that is called Sinterklaas
(not be be confused with Santa Clause). Sinterklaas comes all the way from
Spain assisted by many
mischievous helpers who are black and wear colorful outfits. These helpers are
called 'Zwarte Pieten'. each year they dock in the
harbor of a different city or village in the Netherlands and give all the
children who have been ‘good’ presents. So as December 5th would
approach my parents always started talking in a weird language that I couldn’t
understand (now known as English). My parents used their language skills to
talk to each other about presents they would get me for Sinterklaas, right in
front of me, without me knowing what the hell they were talking about. Of
course now that I know (sadly enough) that Sinterklaas doesn’t really exist and
my English language skills are probably better than those of my parents, I’m
now part of the ‘adult group’ trying to keep Sinterklaas alive for my cousins
and talk in English about their present in their presence without them
realizing it. 
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