2009年9月26日星期六

Blog Assignment 4

Part 1:
I think it's the huge culture differences with emotional great highs and deep lows and the big language difficulty that make Liu needs to be with other Chinese. Even though they don't know each other before, as they all look, act, thought and speak Chinese, they can be very familiar friends fastly. The feeling that going to a totally different country which is far away from his own homeland cannot be imagined. Only if one experiences this himself, he can feel the deeply homesick pain and loneliness. Besides, he has his wife and child in China, think of the feeling being seperated from your dear lover and your little baby, getting though the tough time by himself, at least I think it's really hard to bear. So maybe with the same people, speaking the same hometongue could be better for him.

Part 2:
humble:
adj. it means having or showing a low estimate of one's own importance

delegation:
n. it means a body of delegates, a deputation; the act or process of delegating or being delegated

complacent:
adj. it means smugly self-satisfied or calmly content




Yike Yu
9/25/2009
Professor Tillman
English 110 121

2009年9月19日星期六

Nonverbal Communication

During the past three weeks I've been in America I noticed that there are many differences in gestures, eye contact and body space between this country and my homeland.
In China girls hold each other's hands to show they are very good friends. In America, however, people consider the girls who hold hands lesbians or they are in a relationship.
As Chinese is a implicit nation, when people expresss the meaning of "I love you" they do not look straightly at the other one's eyes, but American guys are very outgoing and open-minded, they prefer the more straight way.
As I know, in America the empolyer and the employee stand close to each other when they talk and the atmosphere is very comfy, however, in China people consider "the boss is the boss", and the employees usually keep some feet away from their employer to show their respect.
I think why these differences appear is that the different traditional culture of two countries. Chinese are more gentle and implicit than Americans, and Americans prefer showing their feelings and emotions more straight and fast. Like the example of "holding hands" in the second paragraph, girls in China are depended on friends, so they choose this way to show friendship, but girls in US are independent, they are living theirselves' lives. So even though they consider friendship important too, they don't hold hands to show how close they are.
What's more, there are also some similarities between these two ways of nonverbal communication. For example, people shake hands when they meet each other the first time and they hug their long-time-no-see friends to express how much they missed their friends.

2009年9月12日星期六

First Four minutes

Option 2:

I'm from China and people in my culture stand on the implicit way of expressing emotions, for we have a five-thousand-year history. We just carry forward the customs from our predecessors. Although the young people from China are becoming more and more open, but our blood is from the Chinese root, we are different from the western countries to some extents. And Chinese people do care about our faces, so we don't often show our emotions quickly and easily, but choose to hide the real emotions especially the negative ones. However, I don't think it's a good way for people should tell each other what we are thinking about, then life will not be that complicated, so I prefer to tell my emotions directly. And speaking to the demonstrative thing, for it's easier for teenagers to accept the new things from the outside, like kissing, hugging, holding hands in public, but the old may think such things are very private, so they maybe can accept hugging, but the kiss thing should be absolutely in the private, but not shown to people.

Interview Essay-Kelin Chen.

A man of middle stature, he is about 178cm tall. His Chinese heritage is evident by his pure black hair, yellow skin, and middle size body type with irregular trimmed bangs adorning his upper forehead. His name is Kelin Chen, one of our ENGL110 classmates.

The place Kelin has mostly enjoyed living is Chengdu China. As I'm a person from Chengdu myself, we love the climate, the wonderful food and the cozy life there, and he wants to go back to Chengdu no sooner than his graduation. Besides, the person who has influenced him the most is in Chengdu too. That's one of his middle school teachers, a nice middle-aged woman with an oval face and glowing eyes. She was his main teacher during all his adolescence, and taught him not only knowledge, but also how to grow to be a responsible, aspiring and outgoing big boy.
Kelin's parents, friends and favorite teacher are all in Chengdu, however, his idol is in Britain--the MUSE, a popular rock band. This is his favourite, as well as playing pool. He's very into psychology too. His educational goal is to get a psychology master degree and if he could, he would like to pursue the career of psychologist.
He also has a very good sense of humor, and nowadays he even becomes more and more interesting--he can always make us laugh. Speaking to this, a recent funny experience that has left a deep impression in his mind is that one day, when he was brushing his teeth in the male bathroom, a girl walked in to use the bathroom as like he did not exist. Maybe it's normal in US but it's really a huge shock to him because he grew up in the traditional Chinese culture.
We are now very good friends, and we know each other because we both came to University of Delaware. During the interview, I knew that he applied for three schools, MSU, UW and UD. If he didn't come here, he may have gone to MSU. He chose UD because it has a good range of researches, oppotunities and wonderful environment, besides, UD is beside the sea and is snowy in the winter. Now he believes that UD is capable of giving him what we want, the knowledge and a wonderful college life.
Kelin's also very talented. He can do many magical tricks and mostly with cards. Anytime when we are bored, or we want to get familiar with our new friends, we let him do magical tricks. Sometimes even we--who have seen him playing many times, are still surprised that why the cards can be god knows what status by god knows how.

Up to now, I believe that my essay has helped you guys get more to be acquainted with me, this "little boy" Kelin Chen. By the way he's really a little boy because his was born December 1991, so he's still 17 years old--may be the youngest one in our class.

2009年9月8日星期二

Responses to "Mother Tongue"

Human life is inseparable from language. With language, we may exchange ideas and knowledge, while the language implies that behind which there is much rich culture and spirit of the times. Language is not only a sign of human civilization, but also can rid humanity of many separate individual modes. So that thousands of people who are thousand miles or thousand years from each other can be a group. And the subsequent people can continue to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, thus becoming a giant.

Before Reading "Mother Tongue", I've never thought of that language can make such a big sense. Since I came to UD, I felt the big power of language too. My parents, my family and I are definitely born Chinese. We began to learn and speak Chinese since we were babies and didn't know English until we got into middle schools, so there is some inevitable so-called "Chinglish" in our English. And it is the Chinglish that makes us feel the sort of same obstacle as the mother in the article felt, like being upset, frustrated and unable to tell our points clearly.

However, languages are changing from generation to generation. Maybe our parents are not that good at English, but as the time is passing by, and the world is more open-minded, we can touch the really orthodox English. So we can use English more practically than our parents, though it's not our mother tougne.
Also, mother tougne is changing too. Now more and more teenagers are into creating our own new words. Like when we type, we use OMG to express Oh My God, and BTW for By The Way, and many other examples like these. And as Jiong was an ancient Chinese word, but now Chinese teenagers like to use Jiong to express the feeling of "rediculous" or "shocked" or "awkward". But if you say "Jiong" to your parents and use this to tell your opinion, they won't catch you at all.

The "Mother Tongue" gives us inspiration, letting us jumping out of the circle of "just live", and to learn and use the language from a historical perspective, understanding the language of the historical, social and cultural impact.

2009年9月4日星期五

This is Aileen.

Hi everyone, this Yike Yu from Chengdu China, which is the hometown of panda. You can just call me Aileen. I was born on 28th, June 1991, majoring in accounting now. It's really a honor to show myself to you guys. I am open-minded, willing, outgoing and have broad interests like swimming, dancing and especially in watching movies and TV series such as Kite Runner, Pulp Fiction, Desperate Housewives, Gossip Girl, etc. Speaking of my career goal I can't really give a description accounts for it may be too early for me to talk about this. However, my major is accounting and I'm really into the finance thing. I may do something about economics. Why I'm interested in business is that my father is running an education corporation, and my mother has been helping him doing this business for years. Because of this I began to oberserve how a firm runs and makes profits since I was in my childhood. Besides my three cousins are helping my father too. So my grandma is always keeping an eye on my family, and we can keep a balance between doing my father's career and taking care of our family. I guess now all of you may get a external knowing of me. And I believe in the rest of our UD time we can get along with each other and know more about our lovely classmates.