This is a very eye opening understanding of languages and cultures. It definitely something i like to understand why memorization does not work well, I guess, it is the spirit of a culture to understand what they are expressing and why they express in these terms that we need to first understand. the link is at the bottom.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten. Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already usually much better than I did, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.
People’s ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors e.g., “The best is ahead of us,” “The worst is behind us”, whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time e.g., the next month is the “down month” and the last month is the “up month”. Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, “This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?” When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4
via Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky.
