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Why do some people say "past" as in "bad" and other pronounce "past" as in "park"? Why do you say "Good morning" to some people, and "Hi" to others? What makes a text a text? Is there a standard English? Where do words in English come from? Linguistics can answer these questions and many more that you won't think of asking at the moment.
One thing you may surely ask at the outset: what use is linguistics for language learning? As learners of a language, we deal with meaning all the time. But what is meaning? We often ask "What's the meaning of ...?" and "What do you mean by saying ...?" These actually touch on two branches in linguistics: semantics and pragmatics.
With the help of linguistics we can determine the authenticity of documents, not only by features of handwriting, but also by the manner and frequency of grammatical features.
We not only use language to do seemingly trivial things such as greeting, gossiping and shopping, we also use it to shape reality. And to critically examine reality, we need the toolkits offered by linguistics. For instance, with the help of linguistics, we can watch out for loaded words as they can be hurting, insulting or even destructive.
We are not going to list all the possible applications of linguistics here, for we hope at the end of the book, you will reach a clearer view of them yourself.