As a resident of Cantonese speaking area, the truth that I do not speak Cantonese at all has surprised many people. It was the biggest reason that I chose Cantonese as my self-directed learning language for this semester. And I had a lot of fun from this semester’s learning experience. 

I believed that the best way to learn a language is to learn it by ourselves. And this view came from my English learning experience. Language is special and learning a language is different from study other subjects such as math or accounting. Language study is a comprehensive process which includes the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills as well as communication skills. It also required the learners to have a well understanding of the background culture. So, usually everyone has a unique way of learning language and it can only work for him/her. 

At the beginning of this semester, I made a learning plan for myself which looked a little bit unrealistic now. I planned to watch an episode of a Cantonese television drama Forensic Heroes each day to practice listening, and I also planned to chat with my friend who speaks Cantonese at least once a week, but neither of them worked well. First, I cannot keep myself from watching the subtitle. Additional, since the plot was very intense and suspenseful, I was so addictive to it and spend a whole weekend on watching it and finished all the episodes. Later on, when I tried to talk to my friend, I found out that we could not communicate well since my pronunciations were so inaccurate, so my friend had no idea what I was trying to express. So she suggested me to start it from some fundamental lesson.    

I found that YouTube has a lot of good resources for Cantonese study. And this is a playlist which contains lots of Cantonese lessons. In that playlist, each video includes many vocabularies and grammars instructors. It taught me how to pronounce like a native speaker and how to naturally form sentences using the words we learned from each episode. I learned a lot of the most commonly used verbs and phrases. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL743EE265854E9969)

            To recognize more traditional Chinese characters, I also surf Hong Kong websites and read news there. Every time when I met a new character, I looked up the dictionary. Although the grammar of verbal Cantonese is different from Chinese, the grammars of writing are the same. And I also learned character by writing calligraphy.

            Studying language is a very interesting experience. Except the vocabulary and grammar, I also learned some interesting local culture. For example, the way Cantonese speaker says 3:40 PM is different with most of us while we used to say “three forty”. However, what Cantonese speakers usually say are “three 8 numbers” which means the minute hand had past 8 numbers.

It was really so interesting and I will continue on my study plan in the future!

In the article Why Bilinguals Are Smarter, the author stated that although the two language systems may obstruct each other in brain, the inference can also strengthen brain’s cognitive muscles through resolving the internal conflict. As a bilingual, I strongly agree with his idea. I am a Chinese speaker living in an English speaking country which means I speak, read, write and listen to my second language all the time. My brain has to translate both languages all the time. And I can feel that my brain runs fast while my I am speaking English. However, I do not think that children should begin learning second-languages before a certain age, especially before they know well about their first language. When I was five, my mom sent me to a cram school to learn English, and it turned out too difficult for me as five years old kid. I felt so frustrated and I began to hate English since then. So, I believe children should have interests to language before learning it. However, young kids usually are not interested in second languages.

After reading the article Tribe Revives Language on the Verge of Extinction, I began to think a question—that whether the languages we are speaking now will die out someday. Because a lot of major language had vanished and even the language we are using now had changed a lot and is quite different from what it was originally like. For example, just 100 years ago, we used to use classical Chinese, which, now, not many Chinese people can still understand it well without looking up dictionary. Classical Chinese is very obscure, and hard to understand. Although classical Chinese was a good reflection a Chinese culture and history, it actually not worked well and obstructed the transmission of knowledge since it was too difficult to learn and only well educated people could understand it at that time. After the adoption of modern language, illiteracy rate decreased dramatically. In this way, change made the language work better for us. So, if a language die out or changed so much that people barely understand the original text, that probably because of development.   

Culture Reflection

Culture shock is a feeling one experiences when living in a social environment which is different from familiar home culture. It is usually associated with going from a country to another country. It was the second time I watched the “culture shock” movie and it is quite interesting to watch it again. The first time I watched it was at the beginning of my first semester, and during these three years I experienced almost everything mentioned in the movie. I found lots of resonance when watch this movie and as an international student, I know exactly how culture shock feels like.

When I first came to America, I felt very exciting and fresh during the first couple weeks. However, not long after the semester began, I became to feel overwhelming. The language issue, the food, tons of homework and the way people made friend here, all of these made me feel homesick and isolated. Many people said that international students tend to group together. It is quite understandable because we usually feel more comfortable with international students since we share a lot of common ground. It was a kind of the comfort zone for us.  

It was very interesting when a Chinese student mentioned the “what’s up” greeting, because I had experienced the same situation and it took me a while to realize that there is no need to actually answer it, it is just a common greeting. Every country has its own way of greeting, so does China; in both mainland China and Hong Kong, we ask “Have you eaten yet?” instead of “How are you?” in here. However, what is different in mainland China is that, we do care about the answers, and the phrase is usually what we use to start a conversation. In China, people like to chat while eating, thus, if your answer is “No, I have not eaten yet”, we may invite you to have a lunch together, then we can have a talk!

The movie also talked about the “role of silence” which Americans usually feel very uncomfortable with. Professor Grove told us that in Turkey silence is a way to indicate “yes”. What a coincidence, in China, silence is agreement. For example, when you are buying coffee and the café assistant asks if you would like to add sugar? If you do not say anything, that will be considered “yes” and she will add sugar for your coffee.  Chinese people are usually very comfortable with silence and many people actually enjoy it very much.

Another interesting difference I have found between the US and China is the way people eat, including shape of dining table. Most of Chinese restaurants only have round table which allowing everyone engage equally in a conversation. Chinese people like to talk and share food while eating together. All the food dishes are placed in the center of the table and everyone can get as much as they want of each. In China, individuals do not order entrees for themselves; usually the host orders all the entrees and pay for them. Only in fast food restaurant such as McDonald’s individual orders and pays by him or herself.  Food is a good reflection of Chinese culture, and it can be divided into eight different cuisines by areas. Each cuisine well represents its area and is quite different with other areas. I lived in China for 18 years and was not very used to food other than Chinese food. So, during the first year my experience was opposite of “freshmen fifteen” which I dropped 15 pounds. 

Reflect on “Communicative competence”: the author stated that have a good understanding of the culture background is the same important as learning the grammatical concepts, because the communication is not only about the language but also the culture behind it. It was the same as what we discussed in class and I got the same feeling from my Cantonese learning experience. There is a lot of interesting two-part allegorical sayings Cantonese. For example, when a girl couldn't find a boyfriend, Cantonese speakers usually say “Yama’s daughter is getting married”. People living in Cantonese-speaking areas are usually strong believers of Buddhism. Yama is the King of the Hell in Buddhism, so Yama’s daughter can only marry a ghost since she is not a human being. Thus the next sentence of “Yama’s daughter is getting married” is “only ghosts want to marry her”, which means no one wants to marry her. As you can see, if you know nothing about Cantonese culture, it is hard to understand this. 

Chinese character is one of the most ancient written languages, and is the only one that still being used continually. It plays an important role in development of Chinese culture. According to the Chinese legend, the first Chinese character was created by Cangjie in 2650 BC. And the earliest evidence can be traced back to 1200 BC in an oracle bone. Chinese character was developed from hieroglyphic. Here is a image illustrated the development of written Chinese.

The top row are the characters “horse” from the most original writing to the one we are now using, second row are “fish” and the bottom are “vehicle”. From the image, we can see that the most original “vehicle” had three wheels. The development of Chinese characters is a well reflection of  how our life had changed.

In China, people glue couplets on wall to celebrate Chinese New Year. Couplet is written on red paper, and it has to be written in traditional Chinese. The text of couplet is usually traditional poem and contains best wishes and hope to the next year.  I glued this one on the door frame of my home. It was written by a family friend.

I also wrote some couplets by myself. Here is one.

I read news in Yahoo! Hong Kong website almost every week. I understand almost 80 percent of traditional Chinese characters but cannot write even one of them. The reason that Chinese people are using two different forms of written text was that the Chinese government believed that simplifying the writing method would encourage more people to become literate and the government decided to use Simplified Chinese in the 1950s. People in mainland China adopted it but the other Chinese speaking areas kept the traditional one till now. Basically, writing Simplified Chinese is much easier than writing traditional Chinese. Following is a comparison of the word “frighten” in both Simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese.

Traditional Chinese: 驚嚇

Simplified Chinese: 惊吓

Although Cantonese is only a dialect of southern part in China, its history was actually 1,200 years longer than official Chinese language Mandarin and it is spoken by more than 100 million people. Cantonese is a colloquial language and usually written in traditional Chinese characters. The grammar and structure of Cantonese are very similar to Mandarin but the pronunciation is completely different. 

My favorite singer Eason Chan comes from Hong Kong. Therefore almost all of his songs are sung in Cantonese. And I have learned a lot of Cantonese through the lyrics.

Language can represent the culture. So that one interesting part of learning a new language is to understand its culture background. And it is very important to understand its culture background when learning a new language. For example, now I am studying the traditional Chinese which is the writing language of Cantonese, and I found that all the traditional Chinese characters are meaningful and beautiful, such as the character “誌”. It means “magazines or journals” and it is actually composed by three individual characters which are “言”, “士” and “心”; and each of them has meaning by itself. “言” means “speak”, “士” was a specific way to address nobles (usually well educated people) a hundred years ago and “心” means “heart”. When the three characters were put together, it means “well educated people who follow their hearts speak out their opinions”. What a interesting explanation!

In chapter How Brain Handles Language, I found it was very interesting that the left hemisphere is usually dominant for language in right-handed people, but right hemisphere is not always dominant for language in left-hander. The reason I thought it was interesting is that I was a left-handed kid before age six. However, in China, left-handed people are usually found it difficult to live due to the fact that most of common tools are designed for right-handed people, so a lot of parents force their left-handed children to convert to right-handed. And so did my parents. Thus, I am both a right-handed person and a left-handed person. In the essay, Crystal mentioned that different hemispheres were specialized in different areas which might all be involved in language study. So, whether people like me, who are both left-hander and right-hander, have advantage in learning language?