How to Tame a Wild Tongue

In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, the author’s main idea is to teach us that be who we are. At first, the author was ashamed that she did not speak good American because of her Spanish accent. However later she just let go of her shame because she was able to understand it was more important to be who you are. She even used new invented dialects. These languages were neither proper Spanish nor standard English. There are mixed with English and Spanish. Using this new language, the author embraced her culture. To the author, being Mexican is a frame of mind; it is culture which is in your soul, not the birth place or nationality.
This essay gives me a great lesson. Now though I live in America, eat American food and speak English, I should not forget my culture but more I should take pride of it. It is our culture shapes who we are.

Oracle Bone Script

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cang Jie. Chinese scholars have devoted themselves to discovering the origin of the Chinese characters since several thousand years ago. But modern scholars Chinese character system cannot be created by only one person completely, after all it is a legend.
Until recent 100 year, the oldest Chinese characters were found in Henan Province written on oracle bones so this kind of writing is called Oracle bone script. Comparing it with the Mixtec and Aztec script, I think Oracle bone script had developed for a period to the appearance now we see. In another word, the characters on the oracle bones discovered are not what they originally were and they had changed. I think Oracle bone script might be like the Mixtec and Aztec script that contained a high proportion of visual description. However this is only my own opinion which has no scientific foundation.
Unlike the Mixtec and Aztec recordkeeping systems which are highly pictorial. Oracle bone script is a combination of logograms representing whole words, phonetic signs and semantic qualifiers. Oracle bone script is hieroglyphic like Maya script. For example “明”, the left part of it “日” means the sun; the right part of it “月” means the moon; the whole means bright. Many Chinese characters consist of affixes. Some of those affixes indicate the pronunciations of the specific character, and some indicate the meanings of them, which act as carriers of phonetic information.
In the Pictograms of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Oracle bone script was used to representing 35 events.

Myself As A Audience

Among all the media types, only TV can be continuous and paged, visual and aural, interactive and static. Otherwise media like the media of aural can only be continuous and static. For me the media of TV impresses me most.

In media of TV, there are some methods people usually use to report news, stories and so on. For example, people would not only tell the audience a piece of news as aural does. TV will play what the cameraman took at the scene, which is a method I find persuasive. When reporting a crime case, TV station prefers to display a video of the crime scene to persuade the audience in which there is blood of victims or a mass of people crowded in the street.

Another media type impresses me is print. Especially when I was a kid, I felt everything written in books was right. Why I thought so? I think it is because the audience like children is always given something true to read such as comic of scientists’ autobiography and inventions they made. Also children like to read fairy tales which always have good ends. Both kinds of print works are persuasive to them because the materials are positive and interesting. And young audience believes that those positive and interesting things are right and negative and boring things are wrong which cannot persuade them. As a result, at most time children prefer to read the two kind of print works.

Slangs and Idioms

Ability to speak is recognized as a most fundamental element of literacy by the public. You may even not be able to read or write in the language. In the area whose literacy rate is low people can speak at least.
Knowing large numbers of slangs and idiom could definitely be considered as an asset of literacy. Slangs and idioms make spoken language vivid, fluent and exaggerated. When people speak in an informal occasion they prefer to use slangs. In daily life, I often use slangs and idioms when talking with my friends and families in Chinese and I manage to use quite a lot. There are some examples.
1. People mountain people sea (a large crowd of people) When it is Thanksgiving, I always describe the malls as people mountain people sea.
2. You ask me, I ask who? (How should I know?) Any when others ask a question know do not know you could say the expression.
3. Good good study, day day up! (Work hard, and someday it will pay back.) This expression is used to encourage students to study hard.
After all Chinese are my mother tongue, so I am at home in Chinese. There is still pretty much to improve in oral English. And later I will work on rich slangs and idioms in English.

A Blooming Tree

In my Chinese class in high school, my teacher said, “poetry is the most ancient form and most essential constituent of literature and poetry is full of emotion. If you are capable of judging poetry and interpret poetry, then you do get the essence of literature and have high literacy skills.” From then on, I have done a lot work to practice. Among all the poems I read, following is my favorite one and my interpretation:
A Blooming Tree (translated edition)
How to let you meet me
At my most beautiful moment
For this I prayed Buddha for 500 hundred years
To be bestowed a relationship with you on this earth .
So Buddha makes me a tree
Growing by the road you bound to take
Blossoming cautiously and flourishing under sun lignt.
Each blossom an expectation of my previous life
When you approach
Please listen
The trembling leaves are the passion of my waiting.
But when at last you walk past unseeing
What scattered on the ground behind you
Oh, my friend
It is not petals But my withered heart
This poem is about a young lady who falls in love with a man. Just at the very beginning the young lady expresses her emotion and feeling. Love is a kind of feeling which you cannot force to have or cast away. To love or not to love is not a choice. It is a spark in an instant which you cannot choose to see it or not. Eventually, the man evidently says no to the girl. Those petals scattered on the ground are like the girl’s heart. Although he heart is hurt, the love is rather pure, vivid and eternal.

This Saturday, instead of doing sports outside or watching TV at dorm I became a Chinese teacher once.
In the community where my aunt and uncle live, there are a few Chinese American kids who were born in America. Although their parents are Chinese for what reason they ought to speak Chinese quite well, the result is actually disappointing. Those children feel weird to speak a different language when they contact residents in the community. They do not know how useful a second language can be and refuse to use it. As a result, their Chinese are poor. To make a change, a Chinese class is set up.
On Saturday, my aunt who is the teacher of the class took me to join into the class and teach them how to pronounce correctly and speak fast. The day before Saturday I chose to teach them a tongue twister. Because in tongue twister many words sounds alike and saying tongue twister can practice the clearance and speed of people. In the class I wrote down the tongue twister and added phonetic symbols on the blackboard and taught them to pronounce words one by one. With practice time after time, eventually most of the students can say this tongue twister clearly and fast.
I never thought about teaching somebody a language. It is interesting but also challenging. It is pretty much like a test to test my own literacy in this language.

My Math Literacy

When I was in China, I did not find my literacy in computing is so outstanding. Before coming here, I was impressed the first time when I took Math Placement Exam of MSU. At first I imagined that this exam was so important for placement so it must be rather difficult. I even spent two days to prepare for it. Finally the exam turned out to be quite easy that most materials it covered were learned before 7th grade and it only took me 15 minutes to finish it.
Just a few days before class began, I left home for the school. After check in, I went to different stores to buy things for daily use and books for the classes. I remembered that all the purchases cost $29.41 in total. I handed the cashier 30 dollars. When I was looking for one penny, the cashier already typed 30 in the computer, and it computed then showed 59 cents back. At the same time I found one penny and gave to him, he took it and looked at the computer screen thinking for quite a few second. I realized that he was doing calculation. It was so easy to find how many cents he should give me back—I gave him one more penny and he should give one more cent and that is 60 cents. Eventually he got the answer and gave me change. I was impressed the second time.
The third time occurred in MTH132 class. When the teacher congratulate me on high scores in the first exam, students seated around me felt it unbelievable and all looked at me and it was uncomfortable.
No matter when and where, math literacy is such an important ability and I am proud I have it.