What I speak, why do I speak
My mom used to tell me that how good her english is when she was in school. However, it spends me a whole week for me to try to teach her how to say “hello” in English right now because she forgot what she learned. Sounds ridiculous? It is a true story though. I had the same situation as my mom does few years after I went to United States that I started losing my ability to speak my homeland dialect (There are many special terms that are different from mandarin, and I used to know how to use them, yet I speak them as the terms I would speak in mandarin but sounds like I am speaking my dialect. For example, we say “chuquwan” in mandarin which means hanging out, but we say “kaoweier” in my homeland dialect. I used to say “kaoweier,” but I say “chuquwan” in dialect way now because I forget these terms constantly). Although a dialect is not quite considered as a language, it seems a language to me because people next to me speak it, and it is different from what people speak from other region. What’s more, it is a part of my memory which makes me who I am, and if I don’t use that much often, I would forget some of it even though I don’t mean to do this.
Language ties with culture too. As I mentioned above, I believe that a dialect can be considered as a language because it makes me who I am. In China, different region has different dialect, and the interesting thing is that regions close to each other have similar dialects. There was one time that I communicated with my high school roommate in our own dialects and the conversation lasted for about half hour because our homeland is very close. There was another time that I called my grandparents using my dialect during english class with teacher’s permission, and my teacher asked other chinese students right next to me what I was saying, but they had no clue because they all come from Northern China while I was talking a southern dialect. What’s more, when I was in first grade, there was a policy in China that everyone needs to use mandarin so that people from different region can understand each other. Therefore, many kids in my age do not know how to speak a dialect but only understand what people saying. I, luckily, was raised in a family with full of my homeland dialect because my grandparent’s generation can hardly speak mandarin. There were a lot of memory being with my grandparents learning my homeland dialect by watching “Aliutou daily reports” (a daily news show that reports news near my hometown), and my grandparents used to express their opinions which formed my point of view of the society.
In addition, after I went to U.S. and started being able to read in english, I realized how bad the translation of books are even though there is no mistake in it. Sometimes the feelings of the specific sentence structures or the purpose of the word choices can not be that easily understood unless there is a little knowledge of the background information. For example, when I was in middle school in China, I watched TWO BROKE GIRLS with chinese subtitles, and there are many explanations appears on the top when the korean boss said some phrases. Moreover, I still don’t quite understand the laughting point even though there are explanations. However, after I studied in U.S. and I revisit the TV show, I started to get the points because I started to get to know this country, people in there, and phrases they use.
Language is a beautiful thing that can help you to communicate with other people, it can also help people to understand other culture.
