Humanity in Globalization ended on a high note in all regards. The final I felt I did quite well on, having used the entire two hours to compose two solid essays. There is one service here at HKU where you can pull up old examinations from previous terms, but being that the first time this class was taught, this particular resource became more approximate than anything else. For part of the course content, our professor said to look up exams from a different class, Human Security, to get a good idea of what that will look like. Some questions were almost exactly, if not entirely, word for word the same.
To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.
Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.
For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.
We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.
The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.
The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.
The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.
They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.
One more final to go now!
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Class Roundup: Phonetics
Here I sit in the medical library—three exams down, three to go, and that’s it to the semester. I think I did well enough on my last final, that being for Phonetics, one class which I’m glad to have taken abroad. It’s not so much that it’s bad back home, because it’s not; it’s more because I get to study phonetics in light of other languages here, and the best part is that instruction is still in English.
I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).
So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.
The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.
For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.
What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.
In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.
Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.
As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.
In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).
So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.
The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.
For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.
What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.
In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.
Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.
As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.
In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Phonetics
I figure that I’m probably the first student in the UC system to take Phonetics here at the University of Hong Kong. Whereas the other classes I’m taking (with the exception of Humanity in Globalization which is a new class) were all listed on the EAP catalog of classes for HKU, Phonetics wasn’t. The database is a guide and unofficial, because it gathers data based on classes former students have taken, and now, Phonetics is listed with the other HKU classes.
In the class of probably seventy-something (though half that many show up with any regular frequency), I am but a handful of students. The professor, a white American, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin in addition to English, and the tutor/TA at the beginning of the quarter would make all announcements in Cantonese, which I would then have her repeat in Cantonese.
Other than the obvious reasons for taking Phonetics here rather than back home, namely that I’m here and I need to take Phonetics as a required class for my major in Linguistics, I enrolled in this class because whereas back home the class is all about English, probably only American English, this class here focuses on American and British English as well as Cantonese and to a lesser extent Mandarin.
This fact is ultimately why I chose to take this class here and not here, and for the most part I feel like—1. It’s given me some insight into the one language that through my childhood had given me the worst time learning; 2. It’s helping me learn Cantonese more accurately and more efficiently now.
There’s one problem for me though—most of my classmates are native Cantonese speakers. Whereas back home most of my classmates would be native English speakers, with my classmates being mostly native English speakers, and with the class being in English, here, everything’s the opposite except that the class is taught in English as set by school policy. Whereas back home we analyze our English intuition and transcribe the way we ourselves speak, here we’ve analyzed British and American English, lightly touching on Australian and New Zealand English a bit, and then analyze our (or their) Cantonese intuition and learn how to transcribe that.
This has manifested in a couple of ways. First off, when I voiced my opinion about American English intuition, it was replied to by saying that I don’t speak standard American English—which I would admit to, but then again no one truly speaks a standard form of a language. On the other hand, the Cantonese speakers in the class when they voice an opinion on Cantonese intuition, it gets replied to in the way that I felt like I should have been replied to. “Well, that’s how you speak and linguists aren’t here to correct your language, but observe it,” or something along those line.
I guess it’s fair, and I’d never complain to the professor or the tutor about it. I have to learn about Cantonese sound systems without the aid of intuition and they have to learn about English sound systems without the aid of intuition.
What might not be so fair is that I don’t know too many colloquial Cantonese characters. See, he the last homework assignment he gave us two big assignments, neither of which I could do without the help of a native Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong. If I understand correctly, Hong Kong Cantonese writers use a lot of colloquial characters to write down what cannot be directly written down in Mandarin in informal contexts but write in standard Chinese in formal contexts. In addition, some words in Hong Kong Cantonese are so new that there are no characters for that syllable, so they write out the sounds in English letters.
The assignment was in two sections: the first gave Chinese characters (many of which colloquial Cantonese ones), of which you were to transcribe the sounds into the International Phonetic Alphabet (which was designed to be able to use to write down all human languages); the second was to take IPA transcriptions devoid of tone which we had to write the Chinese characters for. I don’t mind asking for help on assignments if people don’t mind helping me—and they don’t so I don’t mind. But, after all my help, I only completed about three quarters of the assignment. Don’t worry, though—he went over all the answers before we had to turn it in.
Later he said that there will be similarly structured questions on the final examination (styled quiz). The professor knows though that I, along with a few other students, can’t easily do that without sufficient aide, and with this being an English-medium class, I’m confident that he’ll do his best to accommodate me.
Now that Monday’s over, I only have two weeks of instruction left. Next week I’ve got two finals ace, for which I’m bringing study materials this weekend to Thailand. Au revoir!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
In the class of probably seventy-something (though half that many show up with any regular frequency), I am but a handful of students. The professor, a white American, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin in addition to English, and the tutor/TA at the beginning of the quarter would make all announcements in Cantonese, which I would then have her repeat in Cantonese.
Other than the obvious reasons for taking Phonetics here rather than back home, namely that I’m here and I need to take Phonetics as a required class for my major in Linguistics, I enrolled in this class because whereas back home the class is all about English, probably only American English, this class here focuses on American and British English as well as Cantonese and to a lesser extent Mandarin.
This fact is ultimately why I chose to take this class here and not here, and for the most part I feel like—1. It’s given me some insight into the one language that through my childhood had given me the worst time learning; 2. It’s helping me learn Cantonese more accurately and more efficiently now.
There’s one problem for me though—most of my classmates are native Cantonese speakers. Whereas back home most of my classmates would be native English speakers, with my classmates being mostly native English speakers, and with the class being in English, here, everything’s the opposite except that the class is taught in English as set by school policy. Whereas back home we analyze our English intuition and transcribe the way we ourselves speak, here we’ve analyzed British and American English, lightly touching on Australian and New Zealand English a bit, and then analyze our (or their) Cantonese intuition and learn how to transcribe that.
This has manifested in a couple of ways. First off, when I voiced my opinion about American English intuition, it was replied to by saying that I don’t speak standard American English—which I would admit to, but then again no one truly speaks a standard form of a language. On the other hand, the Cantonese speakers in the class when they voice an opinion on Cantonese intuition, it gets replied to in the way that I felt like I should have been replied to. “Well, that’s how you speak and linguists aren’t here to correct your language, but observe it,” or something along those line.
I guess it’s fair, and I’d never complain to the professor or the tutor about it. I have to learn about Cantonese sound systems without the aid of intuition and they have to learn about English sound systems without the aid of intuition.
What might not be so fair is that I don’t know too many colloquial Cantonese characters. See, he the last homework assignment he gave us two big assignments, neither of which I could do without the help of a native Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong. If I understand correctly, Hong Kong Cantonese writers use a lot of colloquial characters to write down what cannot be directly written down in Mandarin in informal contexts but write in standard Chinese in formal contexts. In addition, some words in Hong Kong Cantonese are so new that there are no characters for that syllable, so they write out the sounds in English letters.
The assignment was in two sections: the first gave Chinese characters (many of which colloquial Cantonese ones), of which you were to transcribe the sounds into the International Phonetic Alphabet (which was designed to be able to use to write down all human languages); the second was to take IPA transcriptions devoid of tone which we had to write the Chinese characters for. I don’t mind asking for help on assignments if people don’t mind helping me—and they don’t so I don’t mind. But, after all my help, I only completed about three quarters of the assignment. Don’t worry, though—he went over all the answers before we had to turn it in.
Later he said that there will be similarly structured questions on the final examination (styled quiz). The professor knows though that I, along with a few other students, can’t easily do that without sufficient aide, and with this being an English-medium class, I’m confident that he’ll do his best to accommodate me.
Now that Monday’s over, I only have two weeks of instruction left. Next week I’ve got two finals ace, for which I’m bringing study materials this weekend to Thailand. Au revoir!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
我咳香港大學嘅學生。
Right after presenting my self-introduction speech to the class, I jetted of to Taipei. That day was made thoroughly busy with the addition of a term-paper project proposal and a Phonetics midterm examination.
But back to the topic of this post, my Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1 class, I have a few more assessments to deal with. Besides the self-introduction speech, there is a group presentation in which we perform a dialogue on any topic we’d like, as well as two reading assessments in which we record ourselves reading a passage and email it to the professor, and a midterm and a final examination.
Like I said, I think I did relatively well on my self-introduction. I believe I hit almost all the tones and got all of the consonants and vowels close to perfect. Especially in comparison to my classmates (who I believe tried dearly), I have reason to believe that I got something in the range of an A on my presentation.
The midterm, which we took the class before the self-introduction presentations I did better than expected on. Using the Jyutping system of Romanization for Cantonese, we have to write either tone marks or tone numbers alongside each individual syllable. While I am confident that I can say words so that they are understood, by direct knowledge of what tone it is wavers with my mood, I suppose.
I got most of the tones right through direct memorization, but when I couldn’t remember, I’d try to remember how I’ve heard the professor say it in my head, and then try to assign a tone number to it. This worked about half the time. Lucky for me though, the professor only marked off like half or a quarter of a percent for each wrong tone. So since I got the actual sounds right on almost everything, I ended up with 91% correct on the midterm.
The class session before the midterm, the first reading assignment was due. I did it in my room while my roommate was away to Macau. I read it over about four times and then proceeded to ask my Cantonese-speaking friend to critique my pronunciation. I probably would’ve asked my mother to critique it as well had it not been for the inconvenience of time zones.
Handing it back, the teacher printed out the dialogue for each of us, circling parts of individual words that we had trouble with. On my sheet, she only marked two tones that I executed poorly, both of which fourth tone (low falling). I ended up with a letter grade A on that assignment.
Half the assignments are done with half to go. My second Cantonese reading assignment is due in her email inbox next Monday and the group presentation script is due the Monday after that with my final examination taking place the Thursday right after that.
So, off to rehearsing for the second reading assignment!
Oh, and by the way, the title is colloquial written Cantonese for the title of my previous Cantonese class post.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
But back to the topic of this post, my Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1 class, I have a few more assessments to deal with. Besides the self-introduction speech, there is a group presentation in which we perform a dialogue on any topic we’d like, as well as two reading assessments in which we record ourselves reading a passage and email it to the professor, and a midterm and a final examination.
Like I said, I think I did relatively well on my self-introduction. I believe I hit almost all the tones and got all of the consonants and vowels close to perfect. Especially in comparison to my classmates (who I believe tried dearly), I have reason to believe that I got something in the range of an A on my presentation.
The midterm, which we took the class before the self-introduction presentations I did better than expected on. Using the Jyutping system of Romanization for Cantonese, we have to write either tone marks or tone numbers alongside each individual syllable. While I am confident that I can say words so that they are understood, by direct knowledge of what tone it is wavers with my mood, I suppose.
I got most of the tones right through direct memorization, but when I couldn’t remember, I’d try to remember how I’ve heard the professor say it in my head, and then try to assign a tone number to it. This worked about half the time. Lucky for me though, the professor only marked off like half or a quarter of a percent for each wrong tone. So since I got the actual sounds right on almost everything, I ended up with 91% correct on the midterm.
The class session before the midterm, the first reading assignment was due. I did it in my room while my roommate was away to Macau. I read it over about four times and then proceeded to ask my Cantonese-speaking friend to critique my pronunciation. I probably would’ve asked my mother to critique it as well had it not been for the inconvenience of time zones.
Handing it back, the teacher printed out the dialogue for each of us, circling parts of individual words that we had trouble with. On my sheet, she only marked two tones that I executed poorly, both of which fourth tone (low falling). I ended up with a letter grade A on that assignment.
Half the assignments are done with half to go. My second Cantonese reading assignment is due in her email inbox next Monday and the group presentation script is due the Monday after that with my final examination taking place the Thursday right after that.
So, off to rehearsing for the second reading assignment!
Oh, and by the way, the title is colloquial written Cantonese for the title of my previous Cantonese class post.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A World English
Last year, I was in a social anthropology class called Language, Identity, and Community at UCSD. Taught by an academic (whose name I have chosen to omit), who has done plenty of research regarding the use of Spanish and Catalan in the Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain), the class aimed to give us an understanding about the role language plays in creating and enforcing identities among individuals and communities among groups of individuals. Though that was a very interesting class (albeit I got my lowest college grade in that class), that’s not what this is about.
The professor shared with us a story that I feel can be related with by one of my friends here. This professor was from the western side of New York State. Unlike a “standard” American accent, which many purport to be like that of Chicago newscasters, she had a regionalized Midwest accent that many people unfortunately could not understand.
And it’s really not that uncommon. Though I would be quick to point out several differences between a more standard Midwest accent and a Californian accent, in many ways characteristics of the two have converged with spoken media (such as Hollywood productions) becoming widespread, and as such, neutral. The logic of which is as follows: there is no one natural way of speaking. As such, everyone has an accent in the language(s) that he or she speaks, though some may be seen as more neutral than others due to exposure and proliferation.
This means that accents that aren’t heard on widespread media are generally understood less. So a regionalized accent such as Cajun, Scottish, or Southern, is often stigmatized as not being the norm. With such speakers’ non-standard pronunciation (and often grammatical forms as well as lexicon), they tend to stand apart from the crowd.
Such problems are made worse as students learning English as a second language are taught British Received Pronunciation or Standard American English. When learning a second language, students are taught what is wrong and what is right, and sometimes things are just different.
This story that she shared took place in Spain, with an audience from all around the world. It consisted of a guest lecture taking place in English by a German scholar. At the end of this scholar’s lecture, she asked a question, which received an answer. Afterwards, she heard people trying to figure out in hushed tones who “that woman who asked the question” was, because they could not understand her. These people were speakers of English as a second language, and in her experience she realized that being a native speaker of English did not automatically give her the ability to be understood in English-language settings. On top of that, she found that those people who spoke English as a second language felt they spoke better than her because they could not understand her regional accent.
Like I said, HKU is an English-language institution, which makes it arguably more attractive to a wider range of students over a different Chinese university where they would teach classes in Mandarin. As such, and possibly to my disadvantage, I rarely have to speak any form of Chinese here as most of the exchange students appear to converse to each other in English.
But this isn’t to talk about Cantonese again. Improperly so, this is to talk about English. I heart English, and as a student of linguistics, I’ve made a point of noticing all the different varieties I’ve heard.
To start, there are the people who’ve learned English as a second language. In that range, I’ve met and heard people from the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Norway.
Native English varieties I’ve heard are Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, Californian, and Midwestern American. Some that I’ve mentioned I cannot be more specific about because I do not have enough experience with such varieties to the point where I could narrow it down further.
In particular, my friend from Scotland finds herself having trouble being understood the most. Except on the phone, I have little trouble understanding her. Though she is a native English speaker, the lack of understanding of her variety really shows how English is a world language of sorts.
So what have I seen?
Well, English speakers overall use most of the same words, so we can understand almost all of what we’re saying if we speak clearly. There are several words that I’ve not heard of and many more that have different meanings. The majority of the differences are in drastically different sounds.
So how do we cope?
Well we explain things to each other of course. We often make fun of each other though for the particular words that we use. It’s all in good fun. Part of learning about other people is being accepting and understanding.
I don’t have an accent, right?
Well no one thinks they really have an accent, because everyone feels like they speak naturally. So how has my speech changed since coming here?
Well for one, I’ve never really used California slang. I’d be hard-pressed to say there’s ever been a point in my life when I’ve used “dude” excessively, in say every sentence. Beach Boys-slang I’ve never used. Terms like “wipeout” never made it to me, though I know where all the places in their songs are. The thing I used the most that regionalized me is “like.”
Like though I’ve like learned how to, well, like monitor my use of “like” so if I like don’t want to say “like” so much, I like can.
So here I don’t use “like” very much at all. I’ve heard more “hella” here than I’d like from people from Northern California, and have come to terms with it here. Luckily I haven’t incorporated that particular term into my lexicon yet.
The biggest change in my speech is my intonation of questions. Whereas as home I would ask something like “Have you eaten yet?” Like, I find myself making questions sound more like . Whether or not you get what I mean by this, I’m sure I’ll still sound like this for a while after I get back home.
Speaking of returning, I just got back from my reading week trip to Beijing. Stay tuned for all the juicy details and awesome pictures!
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
The professor shared with us a story that I feel can be related with by one of my friends here. This professor was from the western side of New York State. Unlike a “standard” American accent, which many purport to be like that of Chicago newscasters, she had a regionalized Midwest accent that many people unfortunately could not understand.
And it’s really not that uncommon. Though I would be quick to point out several differences between a more standard Midwest accent and a Californian accent, in many ways characteristics of the two have converged with spoken media (such as Hollywood productions) becoming widespread, and as such, neutral. The logic of which is as follows: there is no one natural way of speaking. As such, everyone has an accent in the language(s) that he or she speaks, though some may be seen as more neutral than others due to exposure and proliferation.
This means that accents that aren’t heard on widespread media are generally understood less. So a regionalized accent such as Cajun, Scottish, or Southern, is often stigmatized as not being the norm. With such speakers’ non-standard pronunciation (and often grammatical forms as well as lexicon), they tend to stand apart from the crowd.
Such problems are made worse as students learning English as a second language are taught British Received Pronunciation or Standard American English. When learning a second language, students are taught what is wrong and what is right, and sometimes things are just different.
This story that she shared took place in Spain, with an audience from all around the world. It consisted of a guest lecture taking place in English by a German scholar. At the end of this scholar’s lecture, she asked a question, which received an answer. Afterwards, she heard people trying to figure out in hushed tones who “that woman who asked the question” was, because they could not understand her. These people were speakers of English as a second language, and in her experience she realized that being a native speaker of English did not automatically give her the ability to be understood in English-language settings. On top of that, she found that those people who spoke English as a second language felt they spoke better than her because they could not understand her regional accent.
Like I said, HKU is an English-language institution, which makes it arguably more attractive to a wider range of students over a different Chinese university where they would teach classes in Mandarin. As such, and possibly to my disadvantage, I rarely have to speak any form of Chinese here as most of the exchange students appear to converse to each other in English.
But this isn’t to talk about Cantonese again. Improperly so, this is to talk about English. I heart English, and as a student of linguistics, I’ve made a point of noticing all the different varieties I’ve heard.
To start, there are the people who’ve learned English as a second language. In that range, I’ve met and heard people from the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Norway.
Native English varieties I’ve heard are Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, Californian, and Midwestern American. Some that I’ve mentioned I cannot be more specific about because I do not have enough experience with such varieties to the point where I could narrow it down further.
In particular, my friend from Scotland finds herself having trouble being understood the most. Except on the phone, I have little trouble understanding her. Though she is a native English speaker, the lack of understanding of her variety really shows how English is a world language of sorts.
So what have I seen?
Well, English speakers overall use most of the same words, so we can understand almost all of what we’re saying if we speak clearly. There are several words that I’ve not heard of and many more that have different meanings. The majority of the differences are in drastically different sounds.
So how do we cope?
Well we explain things to each other of course. We often make fun of each other though for the particular words that we use. It’s all in good fun. Part of learning about other people is being accepting and understanding.
I don’t have an accent, right?
Well no one thinks they really have an accent, because everyone feels like they speak naturally. So how has my speech changed since coming here?
Well for one, I’ve never really used California slang. I’d be hard-pressed to say there’s ever been a point in my life when I’ve used “dude” excessively, in say every sentence. Beach Boys-slang I’ve never used. Terms like “wipeout” never made it to me, though I know where all the places in their songs are. The thing I used the most that regionalized me is “like.”
Like though I’ve like learned how to, well, like monitor my use of “like” so if I like don’t want to say “like” so much, I like can.
So here I don’t use “like” very much at all. I’ve heard more “hella” here than I’d like from people from Northern California, and have come to terms with it here. Luckily I haven’t incorporated that particular term into my lexicon yet.
The biggest change in my speech is my intonation of questions. Whereas as home I would ask something like “Have you eaten yet?” Like
Speaking of returning, I just got back from my reading week trip to Beijing. Stay tuned for all the juicy details and awesome pictures!
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Shopping for Classes, Part 2
The add/drop period for class registration ended September 14. For the Faculty of Social Sciences, September 15 was when we had to turn in a signed finalization of those classes. Though I met both deadlines, making sure that classes will be approved for meeting requirements for general education and my majors and minor has been a little more difficult.
With shopping for classes done and over with, I ended up with five six-unit classes and one three-unit class, Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. That class may actually contain the majority of the fun I have on campus. Organized to give us conversational knowledge of Cantonese, the class is simple and entertaining. For the fifty minutes, twice a week that it’s worth, I can tell that the teacher is really enthusiastic about what she does. What makes it more fun is that, since I cannot apply this class to any graduation requirement back home, I’m going to take the class pass/no pass, I can enjoy myself and the content of the class without feeling to bothered about what grade I get.
The three five-unit classes that I plan to apply to requirements back at UCSD are Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present, Traditional Chinese Society, Hong Kong and the World, Humanity in Globalization, and Phonetics.
To be rephrased as Introduction to Asian Art on my University of California transcript, this is the other class that I think I’ll take pass/no pass. This is to fulfill the non-western fine arts class for Eleanor Roosevelt College’s general education requirements. Being in Asia, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do so.
The class is very interesting to say the least. As of yet we’ve been discussion Buddhist art and just last lecture we were discussing how Buddhism’s arrival to Japan reflected the native Shinto way of life and its reflection in art and architecture, particularly the design of temples. It was further related to the present day, in which reflecting the older works we went over selected contemporary works by such notables as Yoko Ono.
Traditional Chinese Society is an ethnographic, anthropologic class that deals more with contemporary Chinese society in light of traditional Chinese society. Right now, I’m trying to get it preapproved for my minor in the Study of Religion, with my case being that the class focuses on way of life, which is true religion in its essential form. Concretely, similar classes have been approved for the Study of Religion at UCSD, namely Chinese Society (a sociology class) and Traditional Chinese Society (an anthropology class). Here at HKU there is not an anthropology department, so this class is listed under Sociology. In crossing classes with UCSD, the description of my class here at HKU is in between the two UCSD classes, leaning more towards the anthropological one.
If the Study of Religion program refuses to see my logic, I plan to make my case to apply this as an anthropology class to the secondary focus of my International Studies-Political Science major. Unfortunately, UC transfers this course over as a sociology class by default, so I would have to prove its anthropological content through the syllabus and explaining the ethnographic methods used in analysis.
As of right now, we’ve been dealing with what it means to be Chinese (a topic which I have addressed and will address again personally in a later post). Last lecture we talked about creation stories as an aspect of Chinese culture and contrasted the shear view of culture to that of Christianity. Next week we focus on the body and the traditional Chinese view of it.
This class’s tutorial is also the only one I’ve been to so far. With such a small class, there is no teacher’s assistant and the tutorials, called sections at UCSD, are run by the professor himself. It was set up as an informal environment in which we could discuss the readings and the current class materials. In that tutorial, I had to make my case for why I call myself American, but more on that later.
Hong Kong and the World is another favorite class of mine. It is listed under politics and public administration, and rightly so. The professor doesn’t have a PhD but work experience, having a consulting firm with such clients as the William Clinton Foundation. I plan to apply this class to my International Studies-Political Science major.
In light of Hong Kong’s political situation as a highly autonomous part of the People’s Republic of China, we look at why Hong Kong as been such an economic success and evaluate its future competitiveness in light of rising Chinese cities and Hong Kong’s eventual return of full sovereignty back to China.
This particular professor organizes his classes with many guests. Our first is the current director of the InvestHK, and described his job as attracting and retaining foreign investment in Hong Kong. This was followed by an intense question-and-answer section which he handled like a seasoned politician.
Humanity in Globalization is another political science class taught by the same professor as Hong Kong and the World. This actually ended up being a substitute class for me, as I meant to take International Relations of East Asia, but was troubled by the lack of oratory skills of the professor. I opted for the more interesting, more grounded class (for IR talks about countries practically as sentient beings whereas Humanity in Globalization talks about individual people in relation to the world.
So far, we’ve talked about modern-day slavery (which most people don’t know about) with one source claiming that there are more slaves today than there have ever been before. (Though I wonder if you cast that data as a percent of the population whether the numbers would seem less dire.)
My last class is Phonetics, which at first I was really excited about, but now I’m questioning the content. With my second major being a specialization in linguistics, Phonetics is a core class for me, and deciding to take it here I thought would be a good experience.
At UCSD, Phonetics is taught in light of English, introducing anatomical features of producing speech, and focusing hardly at all at the International Phonetic Alphabet Chart. Regarding linguistics, I actually prefer phonetics and phonology over semantics and morphology because there is a quantifiable reality to the study. Semantics for me seemed a little soft because it seemed less logical than other linguistics sub-disciplines.
At HKU, Phonetics is taught much the same, with the exception that we go over sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to American English (I don’t know why we don’t go over British Received Pronunciation). It sounded good and all, but for the second lecture, we went over sounds of American English, and being that many local students (most all local students) don’t speak American English, he taught it more like a let’s-learn-how-to-speak-properly class.
This was problematic in my head because at UCSD a resounding message in my linguistics classes is that linguists (and social scientists) for that matter, being researchers, work to the effect of description and not prescription. That means that Linguists don’t dictate how we should speak, they just analyze how we do speak.
Being a native American English speaker, I had no problem, but as we have to go over that again in Mandarin and Cantonese, I hope he doesn’t continue in the same manner.
To make matters worse, the TA for the class makes all the announcements in Cantonese. I always end up raising my hand to request her to repeat what she said in English.
Though I hoped to write this post after I settled into a routine, I figured that I should get out my sentiments about my classes and reveal the results of my shopping before going any further.
With shopping for classes done and over with, I ended up with five six-unit classes and one three-unit class, Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. That class may actually contain the majority of the fun I have on campus. Organized to give us conversational knowledge of Cantonese, the class is simple and entertaining. For the fifty minutes, twice a week that it’s worth, I can tell that the teacher is really enthusiastic about what she does. What makes it more fun is that, since I cannot apply this class to any graduation requirement back home, I’m going to take the class pass/no pass, I can enjoy myself and the content of the class without feeling to bothered about what grade I get.
The three five-unit classes that I plan to apply to requirements back at UCSD are Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present, Traditional Chinese Society, Hong Kong and the World, Humanity in Globalization, and Phonetics.
To be rephrased as Introduction to Asian Art on my University of California transcript, this is the other class that I think I’ll take pass/no pass. This is to fulfill the non-western fine arts class for Eleanor Roosevelt College’s general education requirements. Being in Asia, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do so.
The class is very interesting to say the least. As of yet we’ve been discussion Buddhist art and just last lecture we were discussing how Buddhism’s arrival to Japan reflected the native Shinto way of life and its reflection in art and architecture, particularly the design of temples. It was further related to the present day, in which reflecting the older works we went over selected contemporary works by such notables as Yoko Ono.
Traditional Chinese Society is an ethnographic, anthropologic class that deals more with contemporary Chinese society in light of traditional Chinese society. Right now, I’m trying to get it preapproved for my minor in the Study of Religion, with my case being that the class focuses on way of life, which is true religion in its essential form. Concretely, similar classes have been approved for the Study of Religion at UCSD, namely Chinese Society (a sociology class) and Traditional Chinese Society (an anthropology class). Here at HKU there is not an anthropology department, so this class is listed under Sociology. In crossing classes with UCSD, the description of my class here at HKU is in between the two UCSD classes, leaning more towards the anthropological one.
If the Study of Religion program refuses to see my logic, I plan to make my case to apply this as an anthropology class to the secondary focus of my International Studies-Political Science major. Unfortunately, UC transfers this course over as a sociology class by default, so I would have to prove its anthropological content through the syllabus and explaining the ethnographic methods used in analysis.
As of right now, we’ve been dealing with what it means to be Chinese (a topic which I have addressed and will address again personally in a later post). Last lecture we talked about creation stories as an aspect of Chinese culture and contrasted the shear view of culture to that of Christianity. Next week we focus on the body and the traditional Chinese view of it.
This class’s tutorial is also the only one I’ve been to so far. With such a small class, there is no teacher’s assistant and the tutorials, called sections at UCSD, are run by the professor himself. It was set up as an informal environment in which we could discuss the readings and the current class materials. In that tutorial, I had to make my case for why I call myself American, but more on that later.
Hong Kong and the World is another favorite class of mine. It is listed under politics and public administration, and rightly so. The professor doesn’t have a PhD but work experience, having a consulting firm with such clients as the William Clinton Foundation. I plan to apply this class to my International Studies-Political Science major.
In light of Hong Kong’s political situation as a highly autonomous part of the People’s Republic of China, we look at why Hong Kong as been such an economic success and evaluate its future competitiveness in light of rising Chinese cities and Hong Kong’s eventual return of full sovereignty back to China.
This particular professor organizes his classes with many guests. Our first is the current director of the InvestHK, and described his job as attracting and retaining foreign investment in Hong Kong. This was followed by an intense question-and-answer section which he handled like a seasoned politician.
Humanity in Globalization is another political science class taught by the same professor as Hong Kong and the World. This actually ended up being a substitute class for me, as I meant to take International Relations of East Asia, but was troubled by the lack of oratory skills of the professor. I opted for the more interesting, more grounded class (for IR talks about countries practically as sentient beings whereas Humanity in Globalization talks about individual people in relation to the world.
So far, we’ve talked about modern-day slavery (which most people don’t know about) with one source claiming that there are more slaves today than there have ever been before. (Though I wonder if you cast that data as a percent of the population whether the numbers would seem less dire.)
My last class is Phonetics, which at first I was really excited about, but now I’m questioning the content. With my second major being a specialization in linguistics, Phonetics is a core class for me, and deciding to take it here I thought would be a good experience.
At UCSD, Phonetics is taught in light of English, introducing anatomical features of producing speech, and focusing hardly at all at the International Phonetic Alphabet Chart. Regarding linguistics, I actually prefer phonetics and phonology over semantics and morphology because there is a quantifiable reality to the study. Semantics for me seemed a little soft because it seemed less logical than other linguistics sub-disciplines.
At HKU, Phonetics is taught much the same, with the exception that we go over sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to American English (I don’t know why we don’t go over British Received Pronunciation). It sounded good and all, but for the second lecture, we went over sounds of American English, and being that many local students (most all local students) don’t speak American English, he taught it more like a let’s-learn-how-to-speak-properly class.
This was problematic in my head because at UCSD a resounding message in my linguistics classes is that linguists (and social scientists) for that matter, being researchers, work to the effect of description and not prescription. That means that Linguists don’t dictate how we should speak, they just analyze how we do speak.
Being a native American English speaker, I had no problem, but as we have to go over that again in Mandarin and Cantonese, I hope he doesn’t continue in the same manner.
To make matters worse, the TA for the class makes all the announcements in Cantonese. I always end up raising my hand to request her to repeat what she said in English.
Though I hoped to write this post after I settled into a routine, I figured that I should get out my sentiments about my classes and reveal the results of my shopping before going any further.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Applying to Go Abroad
Now is when I get into the nitty gritties of my application. I’ve already told my reasons for going abroad and my reasons for choosing Hong Kong of all places. So now I will explain the Education Abroad Program (EAP) through which I am going and why I chose it.
There was a lot of lead-time involved in the application process. I had to submit my application on January 5, almost a full eight months before the start of the program. Programs to Hong Kong had one of the earliest application due dates I believe, but the latest one that I knew of was the program to Vietnam, to which a friend (and fellow International Studies major) of mine is going. For technical reasons, I could not turn in my application any earlier than January 5, which was risky since the my EAP website was down nearly all of winter break, with January 5 being the first day of classes for winter quarter. One copy of the application had to be submitted electronically through the website and one had to be submitted in person to the Programs Abroad Office, here on campus.
Before then, I had to meet up with country advisors. Mine was Tonia and she oversaw most of the East Asia programs. She looked over the basics with me, informed me of the dates, and laid out the scholarships (of which I was qualified for two). She said until further notice, I would not need letters of recommendation.
There, I decided to apply through EAP for a couple of reasons. First, I would pay tuition to the Regents of the University of California, so I would not have to deal more than I had to in HKU’s unfamiliar system. (It’s still unfamiliar). I would pay in United States Dollars and the EAP office would coordinate finances with my host university. If I had gone through a third party, I would still pay in USD, but to an organization that has no affiliation to UCSD. This way, I hope any problems that arise can be dealt with easier, as they would be with one bureaucracy than multiple ones.
And being affiliated with the University of California, I get direct UC credit for classes I take abroad. There are pros and cons to this set up, but I went with the pros. Advantages are that the classes count towards my GPA, so they have to potential to reflect my work abroad, and that credit is directly transferred without having to send transcripts to the UCSD Office of Admissions (and Relations with Schools). Recalling that I had to send transcripts from my high school, my community college, and the College Board (AP tests) there, the experience was not good. They had few people working, and they could not tell me if my transcripts arrived, even if they had not inputted the grades. Because of this, I sent multiple transcripts from each institution at different times to ensure that they did not lose my transcripts, nor could they say I did not meet deadlines.
Cons are that since the grades I earn abroad would be counted towards my UC GPA, if I do poorly, my GPA will reflect it. In addition, UCSD and HKU would not have a relationship in my interest, as I would have to go through a third party. In the end, I recommend, as I did, that if there is an EAP program going where you want to go, opt for that one rather than a third party.
From there, I had to go to a half-hour “First Steps” session, where we discussed the logistics of the application process. There we were given access to my EAP and reminded of due dates.
In mid-December I finished the bulk of my application. It consisted of a few essays, including questions asking, “Why did you choose this country and this school?” “What motivates you to do well abroad?” and “Why are you choosing to study abroad?” I had to also include my academic history and a list of classes that I was planning to take before I left.
Perhaps the most important part at the time was the pre-approval form. It had me list classes that I planned to take abroad based off of a database that EAP compiled of classes previously transferred. I chose classes such as “Hong Kong Politics” and “China and the World” for my first major (International Studies-Political Science) and Bilingualism for my second major (Linguistics). At the time of application, I had not yet taken on my minor in the Study of Religion, so I am not planning on taking any classes abroad to apply to it. I am also planning to take my non-western Fine Arts requirement class there. To this effect, I had to get department approval from my two (at the time) departments plus my college.
Unfortunately, my classes chosen were based on the database and not the listing of classes actually available (which is still not completely online). So I would later find out that I had to revise my class list and after that find out that I had only been accepted for two of those. Because of this, I am going to have to register for the rest of my classes when I arrive (during the first two weeks of class). But I’ll write more about that later.
So I turned in my application the morning of Monday, January 5. It was then that I was told that I needed a letter of recommendation. I had not been told earlier. It was not unreasonable, for there were 30+ applicants to the program at HKU for which there were eight available spots. However, as I had only been told then, Tonia gave me extra time to get those.
Scrambling through my coursework I decided on asking two TAs in hopes that one would give me one. They were both for classes that I had received my A+s in fall quarter. For MMW 1, I asked an anthropology graduate student, to which he graciously agreed, though the only writing samples of mine that he had were short answers and short essays on three exams. On the other hand, I asked my TA from INTL 101 Languages in Competition, a communication graduate student to write my second letter of recommendation, to which he also agreed. I figured he would know more about me and attest to my qualifications because I wrote a 4,700-word term paper on Hong Kong’s bilingual-trilingual society for that class, on which I earned an A.
As they were both kind enough to write letters, I walked into the Programs Abroad Office on Friday morning with two letters of recommendation, thereby completing my application.
Two or three weeks later (before many of my study abroad friends even had to submit their applications) I received my acceptance. To my shame, I let out a brief, high-pitched scream, but I was elated. I feel that I was accepted because I was to have senior standing by the time of the program, I submitted a 3.925 GPA (which was later adjusted to 4.0), and most of all because I submitted a letter of recommendation attesting to my knowledge and interest in Hong Kong itself.
To that effect, I owe much thanks to these two graduate students who so graciously aided my admission on such short notice. I also thank my departments and my college who support and encourage study abroad. My host country’s advisor, Tonia, was also extremely helpful and knowledgeable throughout the whole process. Of course the student workers, one of which my first roommate’s sister, at the Programs Abroad Office deserve mentioning for their work ensures the productivity and success of the entire operation. In fact, if one of them didn’t go over my application with me before I turned it in, I would have forgotten to sign a certain very important line.
Lastly I thank my family for their support in my endeavors. I know I spend a lot of their money (though with discretion), so I’ll be sure to do my best in this program in appreciation of their love of and faith in me. As it has now come to my attention that my mother is afraid of what I’ll do next, I’ll have to keep my future plans a secret from them (and most of you, the readers) for the next seven months (when my program ends) before unveiling the next chapter in my life.
What happens after I got accepted? That’ll be in a later post. Thanks for reading!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
There was a lot of lead-time involved in the application process. I had to submit my application on January 5, almost a full eight months before the start of the program. Programs to Hong Kong had one of the earliest application due dates I believe, but the latest one that I knew of was the program to Vietnam, to which a friend (and fellow International Studies major) of mine is going. For technical reasons, I could not turn in my application any earlier than January 5, which was risky since the my EAP website was down nearly all of winter break, with January 5 being the first day of classes for winter quarter. One copy of the application had to be submitted electronically through the website and one had to be submitted in person to the Programs Abroad Office, here on campus.
Before then, I had to meet up with country advisors. Mine was Tonia and she oversaw most of the East Asia programs. She looked over the basics with me, informed me of the dates, and laid out the scholarships (of which I was qualified for two). She said until further notice, I would not need letters of recommendation.
There, I decided to apply through EAP for a couple of reasons. First, I would pay tuition to the Regents of the University of California, so I would not have to deal more than I had to in HKU’s unfamiliar system. (It’s still unfamiliar). I would pay in United States Dollars and the EAP office would coordinate finances with my host university. If I had gone through a third party, I would still pay in USD, but to an organization that has no affiliation to UCSD. This way, I hope any problems that arise can be dealt with easier, as they would be with one bureaucracy than multiple ones.
And being affiliated with the University of California, I get direct UC credit for classes I take abroad. There are pros and cons to this set up, but I went with the pros. Advantages are that the classes count towards my GPA, so they have to potential to reflect my work abroad, and that credit is directly transferred without having to send transcripts to the UCSD Office of Admissions (and Relations with Schools). Recalling that I had to send transcripts from my high school, my community college, and the College Board (AP tests) there, the experience was not good. They had few people working, and they could not tell me if my transcripts arrived, even if they had not inputted the grades. Because of this, I sent multiple transcripts from each institution at different times to ensure that they did not lose my transcripts, nor could they say I did not meet deadlines.
Cons are that since the grades I earn abroad would be counted towards my UC GPA, if I do poorly, my GPA will reflect it. In addition, UCSD and HKU would not have a relationship in my interest, as I would have to go through a third party. In the end, I recommend, as I did, that if there is an EAP program going where you want to go, opt for that one rather than a third party.
From there, I had to go to a half-hour “First Steps” session, where we discussed the logistics of the application process. There we were given access to my EAP and reminded of due dates.
In mid-December I finished the bulk of my application. It consisted of a few essays, including questions asking, “Why did you choose this country and this school?” “What motivates you to do well abroad?” and “Why are you choosing to study abroad?” I had to also include my academic history and a list of classes that I was planning to take before I left.
Perhaps the most important part at the time was the pre-approval form. It had me list classes that I planned to take abroad based off of a database that EAP compiled of classes previously transferred. I chose classes such as “Hong Kong Politics” and “China and the World” for my first major (International Studies-Political Science) and Bilingualism for my second major (Linguistics). At the time of application, I had not yet taken on my minor in the Study of Religion, so I am not planning on taking any classes abroad to apply to it. I am also planning to take my non-western Fine Arts requirement class there. To this effect, I had to get department approval from my two (at the time) departments plus my college.
Unfortunately, my classes chosen were based on the database and not the listing of classes actually available (which is still not completely online). So I would later find out that I had to revise my class list and after that find out that I had only been accepted for two of those. Because of this, I am going to have to register for the rest of my classes when I arrive (during the first two weeks of class). But I’ll write more about that later.
So I turned in my application the morning of Monday, January 5. It was then that I was told that I needed a letter of recommendation. I had not been told earlier. It was not unreasonable, for there were 30+ applicants to the program at HKU for which there were eight available spots. However, as I had only been told then, Tonia gave me extra time to get those.
Scrambling through my coursework I decided on asking two TAs in hopes that one would give me one. They were both for classes that I had received my A+s in fall quarter. For MMW 1, I asked an anthropology graduate student, to which he graciously agreed, though the only writing samples of mine that he had were short answers and short essays on three exams. On the other hand, I asked my TA from INTL 101 Languages in Competition, a communication graduate student to write my second letter of recommendation, to which he also agreed. I figured he would know more about me and attest to my qualifications because I wrote a 4,700-word term paper on Hong Kong’s bilingual-trilingual society for that class, on which I earned an A.
As they were both kind enough to write letters, I walked into the Programs Abroad Office on Friday morning with two letters of recommendation, thereby completing my application.
Two or three weeks later (before many of my study abroad friends even had to submit their applications) I received my acceptance. To my shame, I let out a brief, high-pitched scream, but I was elated. I feel that I was accepted because I was to have senior standing by the time of the program, I submitted a 3.925 GPA (which was later adjusted to 4.0), and most of all because I submitted a letter of recommendation attesting to my knowledge and interest in Hong Kong itself.
To that effect, I owe much thanks to these two graduate students who so graciously aided my admission on such short notice. I also thank my departments and my college who support and encourage study abroad. My host country’s advisor, Tonia, was also extremely helpful and knowledgeable throughout the whole process. Of course the student workers, one of which my first roommate’s sister, at the Programs Abroad Office deserve mentioning for their work ensures the productivity and success of the entire operation. In fact, if one of them didn’t go over my application with me before I turned it in, I would have forgotten to sign a certain very important line.
Lastly I thank my family for their support in my endeavors. I know I spend a lot of their money (though with discretion), so I’ll be sure to do my best in this program in appreciation of their love of and faith in me. As it has now come to my attention that my mother is afraid of what I’ll do next, I’ll have to keep my future plans a secret from them (and most of you, the readers) for the next seven months (when my program ends) before unveiling the next chapter in my life.
What happens after I got accepted? That’ll be in a later post. Thanks for reading!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Career Plans
“What do you call 5,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?”
Most know the answer to this joke is “A good start.” It is commonly perceived that in the professional world, lawyers are sly and conniving, always looking for a reason to sue, exploiting people for their hard earned money. This is the stereotype played off of in television, movies, and other media; it is also what I had in mind up until I started college. I never wanted to be a lawyer, involved in corporate politics, drowning in the multiplicity of personalities. It wasn’t appealing.
There are lawyers who exist like this, of course. But most lawyers supposedly have never been on the inside of a courtroom and are low-profile men and women who are hardworking and live middle-class lifestyles. So less lawyers are as exploitative as is commonly thought.
On the other hand, physicians are thought of as lifesavers. And I suppose it is true for the most part. After all, they do receive much more education that lawyers. A mistake by a doctor could cost a life but a mistake by a lawyer could lose some money. Alternatively, a skilled doctor can maintain life where wanted whereas a skilled lawyer can get settlements or the accused exonerated. However, I have reason to believe that proportionally speaking there are just as many bad doctors as bad lawyers.
So when people tell me this joke like it’s new news I chuckle a little. But when I decided that I wanted to be an international law attorney (hopefully humanitarian or human rights) it took awhile because of the stigma surrounding it. When I was younger, I absolutely hated politics. It looked like backstabbing and corruption to me. However, I now realize that politics, while seemingly superficial on the surface, is the main way for the government to make changes for the people. For the last couple years, I have been really interested in international affairs, and for that reason I have my first major International Studies-Political Science.
Because of my interest in learning languages and the mechanics involved in language acquisition and language itself, I found myself with my second major in Linguistics, To tailor it to my other major so that I could use skills more easily from both in the same context, I chose the Language and Society specialization, which is basically a mix of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Hence, my second major in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society).
Because of my love of humanities and Making of the Modern World, Eleanor Roosevelt College’s core course sequence, I’ve take up the Study of Religion as my minor.
If I get accepted into departmental honors programs and succeed, I will graduate with the following degree:
Bachelor of Arts in International Studies-Political Science with highest distinction, Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society) with highest distinction, with a minor in the Study of Religion.
Now is when most people would ask me what I plan on doing with my degree. Well, as said before, I would like to be an attorney in international law, hopefully humanitarian and or human rights. How I get there is a different story.
So currently I attend University of California, San Diego, and plan on graduating in winter or spring as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt College Class of ’11. During which time, I will study abroad for half a year in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong and hopefully find some governmental and or legal internships. (I’m currently eyeing the Department of State or the San Diego County or Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office).
When I graduate, I originally planned graduate school. This is the part where is gets confusing for some people. I personally appreciate specialization, so I hope to go to a top-ten law school whose parent school also offers a Ph.D. in Political Science. Many schools, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, offer joint programs to overlap courses and reduce time to achieve both degrees significantly. Northwestern in particular offers a combined six-year program as follows:
Year 1: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 2: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 3: Law School (L1) and advancement to C.Phil. status
Summer: graduate and law research
Year 2: Law School (L2)
Summer: submission of prospectus
Year 5: Research and Teaching Fellowship
Summer: dissertation research
Year 6: Completion of Dissertation
By this original plan, I would have my bachelor’s degree at age 20 and my J.D. and Ph.D. at 26—noticeably young and without much real-world experience, unfortunately. The positive side is that the program is fully funded for those six years, so I wouldn’t need to find employment (if I were to have time for outside work).
So after that, I would like to teach as a law or political science professor while practicing law on the side. I know it sounds corny but I hope I can do something good for the world in the future.
The reason I say "original" plan is because I have something in mind that would set graduate school back about two or three years. I have told just a few people what this is, but I'll be sure to go through this experience first before I affirm any other plans.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Most know the answer to this joke is “A good start.” It is commonly perceived that in the professional world, lawyers are sly and conniving, always looking for a reason to sue, exploiting people for their hard earned money. This is the stereotype played off of in television, movies, and other media; it is also what I had in mind up until I started college. I never wanted to be a lawyer, involved in corporate politics, drowning in the multiplicity of personalities. It wasn’t appealing.
There are lawyers who exist like this, of course. But most lawyers supposedly have never been on the inside of a courtroom and are low-profile men and women who are hardworking and live middle-class lifestyles. So less lawyers are as exploitative as is commonly thought.
On the other hand, physicians are thought of as lifesavers. And I suppose it is true for the most part. After all, they do receive much more education that lawyers. A mistake by a doctor could cost a life but a mistake by a lawyer could lose some money. Alternatively, a skilled doctor can maintain life where wanted whereas a skilled lawyer can get settlements or the accused exonerated. However, I have reason to believe that proportionally speaking there are just as many bad doctors as bad lawyers.
So when people tell me this joke like it’s new news I chuckle a little. But when I decided that I wanted to be an international law attorney (hopefully humanitarian or human rights) it took awhile because of the stigma surrounding it. When I was younger, I absolutely hated politics. It looked like backstabbing and corruption to me. However, I now realize that politics, while seemingly superficial on the surface, is the main way for the government to make changes for the people. For the last couple years, I have been really interested in international affairs, and for that reason I have my first major International Studies-Political Science.
Because of my interest in learning languages and the mechanics involved in language acquisition and language itself, I found myself with my second major in Linguistics, To tailor it to my other major so that I could use skills more easily from both in the same context, I chose the Language and Society specialization, which is basically a mix of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Hence, my second major in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society).
Because of my love of humanities and Making of the Modern World, Eleanor Roosevelt College’s core course sequence, I’ve take up the Study of Religion as my minor.
If I get accepted into departmental honors programs and succeed, I will graduate with the following degree:
Bachelor of Arts in International Studies-Political Science with highest distinction, Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society) with highest distinction, with a minor in the Study of Religion.
Now is when most people would ask me what I plan on doing with my degree. Well, as said before, I would like to be an attorney in international law, hopefully humanitarian and or human rights. How I get there is a different story.
So currently I attend University of California, San Diego, and plan on graduating in winter or spring as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt College Class of ’11. During which time, I will study abroad for half a year in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong and hopefully find some governmental and or legal internships. (I’m currently eyeing the Department of State or the San Diego County or Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office).
When I graduate, I originally planned graduate school. This is the part where is gets confusing for some people. I personally appreciate specialization, so I hope to go to a top-ten law school whose parent school also offers a Ph.D. in Political Science. Many schools, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, offer joint programs to overlap courses and reduce time to achieve both degrees significantly. Northwestern in particular offers a combined six-year program as follows:
Year 1: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 2: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 3: Law School (L1) and advancement to C.Phil. status
Summer: graduate and law research
Year 2: Law School (L2)
Summer: submission of prospectus
Year 5: Research and Teaching Fellowship
Summer: dissertation research
Year 6: Completion of Dissertation
By this original plan, I would have my bachelor’s degree at age 20 and my J.D. and Ph.D. at 26—noticeably young and without much real-world experience, unfortunately. The positive side is that the program is fully funded for those six years, so I wouldn’t need to find employment (if I were to have time for outside work).
So after that, I would like to teach as a law or political science professor while practicing law on the side. I know it sounds corny but I hope I can do something good for the world in the future.
The reason I say "original" plan is because I have something in mind that would set graduate school back about two or three years. I have told just a few people what this is, but I'll be sure to go through this experience first before I affirm any other plans.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Loss of Life, Limb, or Language
A major component of most study abroad experiences is the foreign language aspect. On one hand, the prospect of going to a place where no one speaks your language can be daunting. On the other hand, going overseas has the potential to provide the practice necessary for foreign-language learners as studying in that language (as opposed to just studying the language) improves the depth of practice, necessitating increased fluency on a higher register than mere conversational speech.
In my opinion, a major problem with American students is the lack of motivation to learn other languages, and according to the British Broadcasting Company, many British students feel similarly toward the discipline. (“A Point of View” by Lisa Jardine, May 9, 2006) Yeah, it makes rational sense. English is spoken by much of the world population, and some estimates put it in front of Mandarin as the most spoken language when counting second-language learners in addition to native speakers. A boatload of people spread over a good chunk of the world speak English, which is what I speak, so why should I learn a separate language? Before I entered high school, this was my opinion, so I guess I was not so different.
When I was little, I detested the idea of having to learn another language, and now I’m not so sure that I understood the concept of different languages and multilingualism back then. For me, English just seemed the natural way of communication because I came out my mouth so easily and so easily for those speaking to me as well. Other languages may have seemed just weird sound to me, odd and bizarre, containing sounds that I did not believe I could pronounce myself. Now I know better.
Chinese school was a burden, a waste of Saturday mornings. The program (teaching Mandarin) was largely ill structured and the teachers bored me dearly. Chinese confused me by notion of tones and quantifiers, and having left the program early, I came out confused about Chinese and thought the process of second language acquisition was boring and pointless.
In third grade, I picked up an American Sign Language book that I could not and did not put down for months. I learned to sign the English alphabet (which I still know) and independently learned some words. My teacher thought I had a knack for it and told my mother.
Today, learning languages is something of an addiction. I took Spanish 1 freshman year of high school and found acquiring it so easy that I studied to skip Spanish 2. I passed the final for Spanish 2 with flying colors, with the Foreign Language Department chair touting my abilities to inflect reflexive verbs with little direct experience. The following year I entered Spanish 3 and blew my teacher’s socks off with my near-native accent (I chose Colombian) that convinced some of my friends that I was half-Mexican.
The following year I continued in Spanish, as well as picking up college-level French and college-level Japanese, which I found fascinating, but the pace a little lackluster. My senior year of high school, I continued my French studies and maintained my Spanish competence, also picking up Latin and trying again at Mandarin in Chinese 2, after skipping Chinese 1 by studying (for the same reasons as why I skipped Spanish 2). That year, I also decided to start picking up Italian, and now I continue my efforts to become as fluent as possible in all aforementioned languages.
Many people, including my mother, believe I have a natural propensity for learning languages, which, while not necessarily untrue, is not the entire basis for my success. I’d rather think it was because of my effort and passion for language learning.
As I plan to discuss in a later post, my love of language, and consequently culture, has brought me to where I am today. With my Linguistics major, I get to study the principles of language and the role that it plays in society (my concentration in Language and Society). My interest in culture has brought me to find interest in international relations, a subset of political science, which brings me to my other major. While there is an International Relations major offered by the Political Science Department, I chose to study political science through the International Studies department because the interdisciplinary nature of the program allowed me to choose a secondary track that improved upon the breadth of my discipline.
Now, I believe that everybody should learn a second language because it is hypothesized that the nature of a particular language allows us to develop different ways of analyzing a situation that a rigid, monolingual mind would theoretically otherwise find incomprehensible. A basic and well-known example of this, though not analyzed as such, is the fact that when expressing age, English speakers are the age, whereas some other language speakers possess the age. “I am 18 years old” in English would be expressed as “J’ai 18 ans” in French or “Tengo 18 años” in Spanish—both of which literally mean “I have 18 years.” In short, my French professor Marie Agel at Moorpark Community College said, “Learning another language just makes us smarter and people who know more than one language are just smarter.”
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin is minimal at best. I know that I need to concentrate on my learning Cantonese because it’s the primary language of communication there. Whereas what little Mandarin I know was acquired formally, the way I acquired Cantonese is a different story.
Whereas Mandarin can be written down word for word, Cantonese does not have the formal ability to be formally written down exactly as uttered, with the exception of some common informalities, or Written Colloquial Cantonese, which is a recent advent. This confused me a lot. As an example of this, a phrase like “Why am I your friend?” would be uttered like “dinggai ngo hai neige pengyao” in spoken Cantonese, with proper tones of course, and written as “为什么我是你底朋友?” Now with Chinese having monosyllabic orthography, the discrepancy is clear that you just used nine characters to write down eight syllables. It’s like writing down in Latin what you say in Spanish. As such, when a Cantonese speaker would read that sentence, it would come out as “waiswomwo ngo si nei ge pengyao” with nine syllables and appropriate tones. As such, this means that there are effectively two kinds of Cantonese (and many other Chinese dialect-languages as well)—one for spoken speech and one for reading, which, as I understand, is basically Mandarin with Cantonese phonology.
This created a problem for me because a big key to learning language for me personally is the ability to write it down and study it independently. This is not the natural way of learning language, as evidenced by the facts that most languages are unwritten, and that children learn to speak before they learn (and most often must be taught) to write. This is compounded by the fact that the only person who I really learn Cantonese from is my mother. Both of our primary languages are English, so it’s difficult, at least for me, to not take the easy way out and just reply to her in English, which I inevitably end up doing to her dismay. In addition, my mother left Hong Kong when she was 11, and since Cantonese is a modern language, with the definition of a modern language being one that is changing as it is currently in use, the language changed without her, and as a result the Cantonese that I learn from her has a retro twist. Isn’t that groovy?
On the surface, this should not be a problem, because HKU, which I will be attending, officially teaches in English, as do most universities and colleges in Hong Kong, but after watching a documentary about codeswitching among university students and other Hong Kongers, I wonder how far English has permeated into daily life, and whether it is gaining or losing ground and how I will be treated if I try to hold on to my language in the face of another.
The documentary is titled Multilingual Hong Kong Present 一个 Project, and it is, in essence, a case study of several of my anthropology and linguistics classes. In INTL 101 Languages in Competition (for which I actually wrote a 4,700-word paper about the bilingual/trilingual government of Hong Kong), we focused a great deal on codeswitching, which is basically shifting between languages in certain situations among bilinguals. In LIGN 101 Introduction to Linguistics, we spent a little bit of time on bilingualism/multilingualism and phonotactic constraints. In ANSC 122 Language and Society and ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, we focused on codeswitching as a sociological force in creating personal and community identity.
The main feature of the documentary was the simple-yet-revealing sentence, “Today, I must present a project.” As a foray into the linguistic nature of Hong Kong, not a single subject on camera was able to say the complete sentence in Cantonese. The problem lied in the word “project,” for which many Hong Kongers could not find a Cantonese equivalent. When it was brought to their attention (for many fluent bilinguals do not realize that they codeswitch) they tried again, pausing before “project,” but inevitably finding that the most effective word in their vocabularies to express that which is a “project” was the English word “project.”
Certain English phrases were simply imbedded in Hong Kong Cantonese speech, and there was little that could be done to undo it. Not to say that codeswitching is a bad thing, but many “purists” believe that we must be pure of (a single) language in our speech and use one language or another and not switch mid-situation, or (oh my!) mid-sentence. People who have not consciously investigated and studied this phenomenon, including those who do it, often have this opinion.
Unfortunately for this school of thought, history is not on their side. English in its purist form is a prototypical mutt of a language. It is estimated that Modern English (existing sometime before Shakespeare on) consists of a full two thirds Latin largely via French, which is more than its namesake in Middle English (with an estimated less than one thirds contributing in some way to Modern English), itself with Germanic heritage. As a result of this heritage, in English we have many pairs of words that mean exactly the same thing, just with different connotations. Oversee and supervise, build and construct, deadly and fatal, eat and dine, forbid and prohibit, and mistake and error are just a few pairs. In general, the Latin-based words are more formal than their Germanic-based counterparts.
To compound this hybridity, there are borrowings from many other languages. Algebra comes from Arabic, yacht from Dutch, bungalow from Hindi, and brainwash from a direct translation of Chinese, to name a few. These words are so integrated that no speaker thinks about keeping English a pure language when speaking it. In addition, historical attempts by scholars to purify English by bringing it back to its Germanic roots proved ineffective.
In short, codeswitching and the borrowing of words is not a problem—rather it enhances the expressiveness of the speakers, serving as an innovative force. As with everything human, such phenomena have much deeper meaning than just the phenomena themselves (ergo anthropology!). Therein lies my issue. I know it seems like these past four posts, I haven’t been doing anything but whining, and I’m sorry. If you want to reconsider Rhinesmith, I’m still in the first stage, so bear with me, for I have knowledge to drop!
As we have examined in INTL 101 Languages in Competition and again in depth in ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, codeswitching serves as an identity-creating force, and the choice of language, often a subconscious decision, is used effectively to this point.
I understand that a large part of the study abroad experience is the foreign language aspect—don’t get me wrong, I do. But with Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown Colony and the fact that more than a third of the population has receptive competence of English, I would be lying to you and myself if I were to say that I am not going to take advantage of this. I’ll try not to, but I hardly think I’ll be able not to, at least in the first couple weeks if not the entire first month or more.
I have to admit that as a native English speaker, I thought I would be revered in a city full of aspiring English speakers who feel that their main connection to the world is through English. While I know that English is respected, people codeswitching with too much English in Hong Kong are often thought of arrogant as demonstrated in the documentary, and it’s not clear whether this applies equally to foreigners and locals. Being a foreigner, I would like to think that I will receive some acceptance in speaking English from the locals, but I also know that my heritage gives me the ability to look like a local, so I might not receive the same cushion that a white American might receive, per se.
This documentary, having used many university students as subjects of interviews, has brought about language as an object of contention in my mind. Most of the subjects of conversation were spoken in Cantonese, with an English word inserted here or there, which disrupts the preconception that I had that since the classes are in English, it would make sense that the students would speak English regularly as well. Since this documentary has brought to light the fact that this may very well not be true, I wonder if codeswitching goes on in class, because it seems that it is difficult to stick to one language or the other in Hong Kong.
All I can say is I can try to acquire Cantonese and use it to my advantage for “social profit.” Until then, I hope I can be given the benefit of the doubt in the intentions of my actions like an unseasoned beginner. I’ll be sure to practice ahead of time and see what comes of it.
*
In my opinion, a major problem with American students is the lack of motivation to learn other languages, and according to the British Broadcasting Company, many British students feel similarly toward the discipline. (“A Point of View” by Lisa Jardine, May 9, 2006) Yeah, it makes rational sense. English is spoken by much of the world population, and some estimates put it in front of Mandarin as the most spoken language when counting second-language learners in addition to native speakers. A boatload of people spread over a good chunk of the world speak English, which is what I speak, so why should I learn a separate language? Before I entered high school, this was my opinion, so I guess I was not so different.
When I was little, I detested the idea of having to learn another language, and now I’m not so sure that I understood the concept of different languages and multilingualism back then. For me, English just seemed the natural way of communication because I came out my mouth so easily and so easily for those speaking to me as well. Other languages may have seemed just weird sound to me, odd and bizarre, containing sounds that I did not believe I could pronounce myself. Now I know better.
Chinese school was a burden, a waste of Saturday mornings. The program (teaching Mandarin) was largely ill structured and the teachers bored me dearly. Chinese confused me by notion of tones and quantifiers, and having left the program early, I came out confused about Chinese and thought the process of second language acquisition was boring and pointless.
In third grade, I picked up an American Sign Language book that I could not and did not put down for months. I learned to sign the English alphabet (which I still know) and independently learned some words. My teacher thought I had a knack for it and told my mother.
Today, learning languages is something of an addiction. I took Spanish 1 freshman year of high school and found acquiring it so easy that I studied to skip Spanish 2. I passed the final for Spanish 2 with flying colors, with the Foreign Language Department chair touting my abilities to inflect reflexive verbs with little direct experience. The following year I entered Spanish 3 and blew my teacher’s socks off with my near-native accent (I chose Colombian) that convinced some of my friends that I was half-Mexican.
The following year I continued in Spanish, as well as picking up college-level French and college-level Japanese, which I found fascinating, but the pace a little lackluster. My senior year of high school, I continued my French studies and maintained my Spanish competence, also picking up Latin and trying again at Mandarin in Chinese 2, after skipping Chinese 1 by studying (for the same reasons as why I skipped Spanish 2). That year, I also decided to start picking up Italian, and now I continue my efforts to become as fluent as possible in all aforementioned languages.
Many people, including my mother, believe I have a natural propensity for learning languages, which, while not necessarily untrue, is not the entire basis for my success. I’d rather think it was because of my effort and passion for language learning.
As I plan to discuss in a later post, my love of language, and consequently culture, has brought me to where I am today. With my Linguistics major, I get to study the principles of language and the role that it plays in society (my concentration in Language and Society). My interest in culture has brought me to find interest in international relations, a subset of political science, which brings me to my other major. While there is an International Relations major offered by the Political Science Department, I chose to study political science through the International Studies department because the interdisciplinary nature of the program allowed me to choose a secondary track that improved upon the breadth of my discipline.
Now, I believe that everybody should learn a second language because it is hypothesized that the nature of a particular language allows us to develop different ways of analyzing a situation that a rigid, monolingual mind would theoretically otherwise find incomprehensible. A basic and well-known example of this, though not analyzed as such, is the fact that when expressing age, English speakers are the age, whereas some other language speakers possess the age. “I am 18 years old” in English would be expressed as “J’ai 18 ans” in French or “Tengo 18 años” in Spanish—both of which literally mean “I have 18 years.” In short, my French professor Marie Agel at Moorpark Community College said, “Learning another language just makes us smarter and people who know more than one language are just smarter.”
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin is minimal at best. I know that I need to concentrate on my learning Cantonese because it’s the primary language of communication there. Whereas what little Mandarin I know was acquired formally, the way I acquired Cantonese is a different story.
Whereas Mandarin can be written down word for word, Cantonese does not have the formal ability to be formally written down exactly as uttered, with the exception of some common informalities, or Written Colloquial Cantonese, which is a recent advent. This confused me a lot. As an example of this, a phrase like “Why am I your friend?” would be uttered like “dinggai ngo hai neige pengyao” in spoken Cantonese, with proper tones of course, and written as “为什么我是你底朋友?” Now with Chinese having monosyllabic orthography, the discrepancy is clear that you just used nine characters to write down eight syllables. It’s like writing down in Latin what you say in Spanish. As such, when a Cantonese speaker would read that sentence, it would come out as “waiswomwo ngo si nei ge pengyao” with nine syllables and appropriate tones. As such, this means that there are effectively two kinds of Cantonese (and many other Chinese dialect-languages as well)—one for spoken speech and one for reading, which, as I understand, is basically Mandarin with Cantonese phonology.
This created a problem for me because a big key to learning language for me personally is the ability to write it down and study it independently. This is not the natural way of learning language, as evidenced by the facts that most languages are unwritten, and that children learn to speak before they learn (and most often must be taught) to write. This is compounded by the fact that the only person who I really learn Cantonese from is my mother. Both of our primary languages are English, so it’s difficult, at least for me, to not take the easy way out and just reply to her in English, which I inevitably end up doing to her dismay. In addition, my mother left Hong Kong when she was 11, and since Cantonese is a modern language, with the definition of a modern language being one that is changing as it is currently in use, the language changed without her, and as a result the Cantonese that I learn from her has a retro twist. Isn’t that groovy?
On the surface, this should not be a problem, because HKU, which I will be attending, officially teaches in English, as do most universities and colleges in Hong Kong, but after watching a documentary about codeswitching among university students and other Hong Kongers, I wonder how far English has permeated into daily life, and whether it is gaining or losing ground and how I will be treated if I try to hold on to my language in the face of another.
The documentary is titled Multilingual Hong Kong Present 一个 Project, and it is, in essence, a case study of several of my anthropology and linguistics classes. In INTL 101 Languages in Competition (for which I actually wrote a 4,700-word paper about the bilingual/trilingual government of Hong Kong), we focused a great deal on codeswitching, which is basically shifting between languages in certain situations among bilinguals. In LIGN 101 Introduction to Linguistics, we spent a little bit of time on bilingualism/multilingualism and phonotactic constraints. In ANSC 122 Language and Society and ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, we focused on codeswitching as a sociological force in creating personal and community identity.
The main feature of the documentary was the simple-yet-revealing sentence, “Today, I must present a project.” As a foray into the linguistic nature of Hong Kong, not a single subject on camera was able to say the complete sentence in Cantonese. The problem lied in the word “project,” for which many Hong Kongers could not find a Cantonese equivalent. When it was brought to their attention (for many fluent bilinguals do not realize that they codeswitch) they tried again, pausing before “project,” but inevitably finding that the most effective word in their vocabularies to express that which is a “project” was the English word “project.”
Certain English phrases were simply imbedded in Hong Kong Cantonese speech, and there was little that could be done to undo it. Not to say that codeswitching is a bad thing, but many “purists” believe that we must be pure of (a single) language in our speech and use one language or another and not switch mid-situation, or (oh my!) mid-sentence. People who have not consciously investigated and studied this phenomenon, including those who do it, often have this opinion.
Unfortunately for this school of thought, history is not on their side. English in its purist form is a prototypical mutt of a language. It is estimated that Modern English (existing sometime before Shakespeare on) consists of a full two thirds Latin largely via French, which is more than its namesake in Middle English (with an estimated less than one thirds contributing in some way to Modern English), itself with Germanic heritage. As a result of this heritage, in English we have many pairs of words that mean exactly the same thing, just with different connotations. Oversee and supervise, build and construct, deadly and fatal, eat and dine, forbid and prohibit, and mistake and error are just a few pairs. In general, the Latin-based words are more formal than their Germanic-based counterparts.
To compound this hybridity, there are borrowings from many other languages. Algebra comes from Arabic, yacht from Dutch, bungalow from Hindi, and brainwash from a direct translation of Chinese, to name a few. These words are so integrated that no speaker thinks about keeping English a pure language when speaking it. In addition, historical attempts by scholars to purify English by bringing it back to its Germanic roots proved ineffective.
In short, codeswitching and the borrowing of words is not a problem—rather it enhances the expressiveness of the speakers, serving as an innovative force. As with everything human, such phenomena have much deeper meaning than just the phenomena themselves (ergo anthropology!). Therein lies my issue. I know it seems like these past four posts, I haven’t been doing anything but whining, and I’m sorry. If you want to reconsider Rhinesmith, I’m still in the first stage, so bear with me, for I have knowledge to drop!
As we have examined in INTL 101 Languages in Competition and again in depth in ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, codeswitching serves as an identity-creating force, and the choice of language, often a subconscious decision, is used effectively to this point.
I understand that a large part of the study abroad experience is the foreign language aspect—don’t get me wrong, I do. But with Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown Colony and the fact that more than a third of the population has receptive competence of English, I would be lying to you and myself if I were to say that I am not going to take advantage of this. I’ll try not to, but I hardly think I’ll be able not to, at least in the first couple weeks if not the entire first month or more.
I have to admit that as a native English speaker, I thought I would be revered in a city full of aspiring English speakers who feel that their main connection to the world is through English. While I know that English is respected, people codeswitching with too much English in Hong Kong are often thought of arrogant as demonstrated in the documentary, and it’s not clear whether this applies equally to foreigners and locals. Being a foreigner, I would like to think that I will receive some acceptance in speaking English from the locals, but I also know that my heritage gives me the ability to look like a local, so I might not receive the same cushion that a white American might receive, per se.
This documentary, having used many university students as subjects of interviews, has brought about language as an object of contention in my mind. Most of the subjects of conversation were spoken in Cantonese, with an English word inserted here or there, which disrupts the preconception that I had that since the classes are in English, it would make sense that the students would speak English regularly as well. Since this documentary has brought to light the fact that this may very well not be true, I wonder if codeswitching goes on in class, because it seems that it is difficult to stick to one language or the other in Hong Kong.
All I can say is I can try to acquire Cantonese and use it to my advantage for “social profit.” Until then, I hope I can be given the benefit of the doubt in the intentions of my actions like an unseasoned beginner. I’ll be sure to practice ahead of time and see what comes of it.
*
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Gist of It: General Orientation
The UCSD Programs Abroad Office held their mandatory general study abroad orientation for summer and fall departures this last Wednesday, and to my surprise it was more about cultural adjustment and health issues than anything else. As expected, the country-specific orientation focuses on our specific programs and the logistics of the whole thing. Hong Kong’s is set for May 16. Two things from this first orientation in particular that really stuck out were the “cultural iceberg” and Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment, both illustrated in the packets distributed at the meeting. Though out of the discussion I don’t believe I learned anything particularly new, the fact that it brought much possible elation about the whole experience back down to earth was probably necessary.
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
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