Today, I feel like sharing some of the in-commons I found out about 2 kinds of languages!

With an IT background in my education and a huuuge interest in Korean culture, I have always been surrounding myself with foreign "languages". So in IT, we talk through programming languages. I know it's not really a "language" per se, but hear me out. Have you ever wondered why coding is called "programming languages"?

IT talk!

To create some kind of application, I have to know at least 2 of the programming languages. For example, HTML (web language) and SQL (database language). And mind you, they are very DIFFERENT in syntax but quite similar in concepts. Let's say I'm trying to capitalize a word while I'm coding. These are the ways to do them in 4 different programming languages:

1) PHP

strtoUpper(value)

2) JavaScript & jQuery

toUppercase(value)

3) HTML

style="text-transform: uppercase;"

4) MySQL

UPPER(value)

Like... this is just to accomplish ONE SIMPLE THING - capitalizing a word. Can you imagine having to do it for more complicated functions? And mind you, you can be using all of these in one file at a time. *laughs in pain*

To put it simply, it's like how you would use grammar. Like Malay and English have pretty similar grammar structure. However, Korean or even Chinese, have different grammar patterns to construct sentences. This is how the syntax differ. 

The concept for programming is quiet easy to understand. Once you get it, you can literally learn any languages. But the struggle doesn't stop there. There's also different kinds of elements for different programming languages like object-oriented versus functional programming. This differentiates the way to code and how to structure your data.

It's like how words are formed. In Malay, we uses remuneration (imbuhan) a lot to add to stem words, similar to English. For example, rasa is feel and perasaan is feeling. In Korean, they reuse characters to mean different things. For example, 금요일 (geumyoil) is Friday. 금 (geum) alone can mean metal/gold, and 요일 (yoil) when paired with 6 other things would represent other days. Interesting, right?

So, the only way to be good at syntax is understanding. You need to understand placement of subject, predicate and verb. The only way to be good at structures is lots of exposure to the language, so you need a lot of "vocabularies" to use them since they're basics. The latter usually takes a long time to master and familiarise because they can seem never-ending. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut to it. It's not something you can get better by just memorising. It involves too many complicated things especially in coding. Object-oriented or OOP, needs objects, classes and methods. To create objects, you need to have classes. Classes can be created with other existing classes. Methods are made from classes as well. It's just a case of reproduction of data tbh.

What I enjoy about languages is the way they make you think. You don't squeeze your brain to find the things you've memorised - which I honestly despise, instead you need to fulfill the connections between your findings. As you progress, you would encounter lots of connections with what you already know. 

It takes you long before you realise little details that actually causes a big impact on the language. For programming it may be semicolons or brackets, and for spoken languages, it may be the one syllable like "요" (yo), which are crucial to have and may make or break the usage.

I hope you find it interesting as much as I do! If you're in the process of learning any languages, I wish you good luck and have fun learning!

Dropping by,

Melynn.