Why My Story Is Not Interesting in English?
I am the kind of person who loves telling stories to my friends. When people are trying to tell a story, they prefer to tell it first in their mind with their first language, and then they will reorganize the words to make it sense in another language. At least that is how I do when I am telling something interesting to my foreign friends, but I always discover the story in another language will become less interesting than talking it in Chinese. It seems like the story in my first language has more dramatic plots in it.
There was one day that I tried to tell a stupid thing I did on that morning to my friends, both foreign and Chinese friends. When I was speaking to my Chinese friends, I fell it made more sense than when I was speaking to my foreign friends. It was a funny story, at least it successfully made my Chinese friends laugh, but the response of my foreign friends was below my expectation. It looked like she did not get the funny point in that story. Then I realized there was something different here. My story is full of funny jokes when I am talking it with Chinese, but when I change it to English, the story seems to be more unromantic. I get a little frustrated because I believe it is my language fluency problem, and then I realize that it may be not the main one.
Different languages usually have different logic to describe, depending on their own culture. The order of words in an English sentence is different from that in a Chinese sentence. As all my international friends have an idea in common: we get a different brain when we are speaking English. We are busy with reorganizing the words in our mind to make it sense in English. So, we may not have extra time to think about the word choice and the funny content in our story, and we may stop to give our foreign friends time to understand what do we mean. However, we are so familiar with Chinese, and we do not have to think about all those concerns. All we have to concern is how I can add something into the story to make it more interesting.
With that realization in mind, I tried for the second time to see whether this time it would be better. It did not change a lot. She looked like she understood my words, but she just simply thought it was not so funny. Then I discover that different people from different countries may have various laughing points. For the same thing happening, my Chinese friends and I may think it is funny, but my foreign friends may treat it just as normal. My roommates have the same feeling. She says sometimes when she is around the foreigners, she just cannot understand what they are laughing about because that looks so normal to her. After discussion, we all think it is because of our various culture. We are foreigners in the USA, so everything to us may be fresh and fancy, which makes us feel everything unfamiliar to be interesting. But, for my foreign friends, they grow up in the USA, they are used to the open atmosphere here, and they may not have novel ideas because they see those things every day!
Stories come from our life. A good story needs to put local culture in it to make the audience intimate to it. I have to admit that I need more time for the various laughing point problems to know more about the USA culture, but I believe as long as I can know people here better, I will one day tell a fantastic story to my foreign friends, making them “Wow” for it.
