Whether you are smart or stupid,
Insignificant or great,
How can we be really sure?
If a word you never said.
Saadi, 13th century
It is well known that human culture, social behavior and thinking cannot exist without language. Being a social and national identity, and a means of human communication, language cannot help bearing imprints of ethnic and cultural values as well as the norms of behavior of a given language community.
I have been studying English for 6 years. And, despite this fact I still have some difficulties in understanding native speakers. It is very strange. Even if we have a wide vocabulary, possess excellent grammar, it does not always help us to understand English. Speaking with English friends, I have repeatedly come to misunderstanding of the interlocutor
I believe that this is because the mastery of a foreign language is closely connected with the understanding of a foreign culture, which involves readiness to understand the mentality of the native speakers. And I got interested in the fact how people's mentality affects human thought and how people express their ideas through the language. In my opinion this topic is very relevant today.
Working on this problem we put forward the following hypothesis: the mastery of a foreign language is closely connected with the understanding of a foreign culture, which involves not only mastering of cultural knowledge, but also forming ability and willingness to understand the mentality of the native speakers and their identity.
The object of our study is the Russian and English language reality.
The subject of our investigation is the influence of mentality and traditions of the Russian-and English-speaking people on their language.
The aim is to find out how mentality of the Russian - and English-speaking people influences the languages and why does misunderstanding take place?
To achieve this goal we have set the following objectives:
To characterize the concept of "mentality".
To explore, analyze and compare the English and Russian mentality.
To compare the grammatical structure of English and Russian languages.
To carry out a survey among students of our school to find out how much they know about mentality of the British.
Like all other creations of the human mind my work is primarily based on the observation of facts and generalization of experience. In my research paper I used the following methods: analysis of literature on the topic, questioning and a comparative analysis. The practical significance of the work is in the possibility to use the materials of the investigation at the lessons in humanitarian classes.
Notion of mentality
What is mentality? Dictionaries define the term 'mentality' as:
"person's habitual way of thinking" (Longman Dictionary, 1992: 652);
In our research we understand mentality as the inner, subconscious readiness of the individual to certain mental and physical actions and point out three mentality components as mentality set, perception and expression.
Mentality
set
Perception Expression
Mentality set is the subconscious readiness of an individual to behave according to social norms. Under perception we mean comprehension of the environment. We see expression as role-play and self-expression.
Mentality is formed by traditions, customs and culture. We can observe a direct dependence of mentality on education, mass media, as well as other factors of social life. In my opinion, even country’s geographical position affects people’s outlook. In our work we focus on the position of finding similarities and differences between two languages, as well as Russian and Western mentality as these are two ways of thinking and you have to understand from the very beginning into which area you would like to interfere.