We will go over the 4 language skills

Listening, speaking, reading and writing

1) After watching the video write down 5 questions (do not answer them). Then describe it in a short paragraph (50 words).

2) Reading. Write down a summary of about 80 words. Describe what surprises you the most.

Vanishing voices

Linguistics has undergone two great revolutions in the past 60 years, on seemingly opposite ends of the discipline. In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky theorized that all languages were built on an underlying universal grammar embedded in human genes. A second shift in linguistics- an explosion of interest in small and threatened languages-has focused on the variety of linguistic experience. Field linguists like David Harrison are more interested in the idiosyncrasies that make each language unique and the ways that culture can influence a language's form. As Harrison points out, some 85 percent of languages have yet to be documented. Understanding them can only enrich our comprehension of what is universal to all languages.

Different languages highlight the varieties of human experience, revealing as mutable aspects of life that we tend to think of as settled and universal, such as our experience of time, number, or color. In Tuva, for example, the past is always spoken of as ahead of one, and the future is behind one's back. "We could never say, I'm looking forward to doing something," a Tuvan told me. Indeed, he might say, "I'm looking forward to the day before yesterday." It makes total sense if you think of it in a Tuvan sort of way: If the future were ahead of you, wouldn't it be in plain view?

Language shapes human experience-our very cognition-as it goes about classifying the world to make sense of the circumstances at hand. Those classifications may be broad-Aka divides the animal kingdom into animals that are eaten and those that are not-or exceedingly fine-tuned. The Todzhu reindeer herders of southern Siberia have an elaborate vocabulary for reindeer; an iyi düktüg myiys, for example, is a castrated former stud in its fourth year.

Continue reading the National Geographic article

3) Click on the button below to review some grammar