HUMAN LANGUAGE IS NOT LIKE A COMPUTER LANGUAGE

In our quest to acquire foreign languages we must not lose sight of the fact that any language is part of a whole, and belongs to a climate, a historical background, a religion, or religions... that affected the way the language was cast and shaped through time. It is not, as Coetzee says below, like a computer language. Each tongue has a way of seeing the world. This is, I believe, the miracle and awe of language acquisition, to contemplate a new manner of interpreting our world, through different eyes. 

"A human language is not a neutral code like a computer language. To ‘be English’ is to be embedded in the English language and the English language’s way of seeing the world. If Hölderlin had ‘been English’ in any sense, he could not but have written a different poem." J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores, 2001.