In Julia Alvarez’s speech “Entre Lucas y Juan Mejia”, She start explaining the challenges we faced as an immigrant. She said, “As an immigrant, you leave behind an old world and enter into a new world in which the old ways no longer apply” (1). In my opinion as an immigrant I can related to this quote, because when I came to United States I felt that I entered in a completely new world. In which I had to start a new life with a different language and culture. Also, Julia Álvarez mentioned the challenges she had as a female writer in another country that has a different language.…
A gang is defined as a group of people who want to control some places in the cities. Every group has a leader, who gives his people any tasks. The group's activities are usually criminal or pose a threat to the community. However, they don't usually see themselves as the real threat but rather as a group that works to improve their community. They wear specific colored clothing, jewelry, make certain hand signals, use certain graffiti, and specific jargon. It's usually assumed that gangs are composed of only males who have most likely dropped out of school and are unemployed. Louis Rodriguez is the author of "La Vida Loca: Two Generations of Gang Members", and he writes about his and his son's gangbanging experiences.…
As Nordlinger describes, America nowadays faces a challenge of keeping English the only official language. Spanish has become a language that presents a challenge to English in America's “contemporary life." “I trust that Americanization will sometime kick in...But if it doesn't, we will lose a lot," said Nordlinger. His message was a warning to English speakers that other languages, Spanish in particular, are invading the Americans' mother tongue. He strongly suggests that construction workers should learn English instead of knowing only to speak Spanish between each other and their bosses. He believes that they signed up for that." The deal was, you came to America and you assimilated into the culture," said Nordlinger. But, as immigrants, do they have to adopt the American culture to learn its language?…
In the poem, “Child of the Americas,” Aurora Morales uses the literary element of repetition to illustrate how different cultures around the world can come together and become one as a whole.…
udwig Wittgenstein once said in his book Logico Tractatus Philosophicus ,“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” This quotation means language has no limit, it’s something that can be translated into a wide variety. Both Amy Tan in the essay, “Mother Tongue” and Richard Rodriguez in the essay, “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” write about their struggle with their identities not only because of their race, but also the language there families speak. Amy Tan and Richard Rodriguez both struggled with there families language conflicting with the need to speak the language of society. While children they share similarities with their struggles, and they differ in their perception of the importance of maintaining their families…
Living with Mexican or American people would be perfect if both of them knew one another’s language. School, jobs, and traveling are a big part in why people should know how to speak and understand more than one language. These three topics go well together because your start off with school to get a good job and then having money to travel to places you always dreamed of going to. The interesting thing about this paper is the fact that knowing more than one language has more advantages than disadvantages. Although some people would not be interested to learn, they should recognize the fact that when they do learn to speak a different language more opportunities come their way and they will feel proud for what they accomplish. To this end, hopefully if people read this essay it will convince them on why it is important to speak and understand different people from all races speaking another language when they are around them. They might be talking trash about them and they would not have a clue in how to respond back. Although, it is like learning anything new because it will take time and reflection until people master…
Picture that it is one sunny afternoon, as you walk around the University of California, Davis campus filled with thousands of students walking by. As you observe your surroundings, you notice that there are students of different colored skin, speaking a variety of languages. UC Davis is home to a diversity of students from different ethnic backgrounds, Asian, American Indian, and Hispanic, to list a few. International students in particular have sparked my interests. I wanted to learn more about them and hear about their life experiences here in America. In this paper, I will relate an observation made on my fieldwork to what it means to be a citizen and discuss the complexities of translations between two cultures.…
In today’s society, there are over thousands of different languages or dialects speak around the world. And because America is such a diverse country with many individuals capable of speaking two or more languages, they tend to forget the importance of speaking English in America. As an American living in America, it’s not important whether they speak English or not, but what’s important is which language they choose to represent themselves freely.…
Gloria Anzaldua in How to Tame a Wild Tongue and Amy Tan in Mother Tongue both share a similar message in their essays, they argue that every single culture faces different language obstacles when learning the english language. Both struggle to develop the correct form of english, the one considered acceptable by society. Both Tan and Anzaldua teach us about their ethnic backgrounds, in an effort to better help us learn of their struggles. Amy Tan, is of asian descent, and tells us how growing up with a mother who spoke “broken english” influenced the person she became and how she approached the world. Gloria Anzaldua, considered herself a Mexican American but mainly Chicana, and she tells us of her struggle to accept her roots and to find a place where she belonged. Ultimately, this also influenced who Anzaldua came to be. The…
One of the greater struggles in life is having to gather your belongings and move across the state into a different house. Packing your bags and moving 5,000 miles away to a different country is a lot harder. When I was only eight years old, I bid a farewell to my family and hoped on a plane from Sao Paulo to New York City. There, my step-father greeted my mother and I with a warm welcome and a long drive to Indiana. Although the transition from a city lover to a small-town girl was difficult, the obstacle that set me back the most was the language barrier. As I started school in the United States, I found myself to be very excluded from others. Not knowing the Pledge of Allegiance or understand anything in my classroom made me feel very homesick and embarrassed.…
To lead a bilingual life, one must learn how to properly unite his feelings and chosen language, so it can create an accurate way of truly expressing himself or herself through their choice of words. In the preface of the book called Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development by Alice Wierzbicka, she accomplishes to describe veridically the life of a person who knows one more language than his mother tongue.…
Learning the language when migrating to another country is key. I can still remember the first day of fourth grade clearly. Like many non-English speaker kids in dekalb, I had to attend the International Center to learn English. Unfortunately, I did not go the first day so I had to stay in school and I hated it. As a 9-year-old I was so frustrated that the teacher’s words sounded like jibberish to me. My teacher mouthed words towards me and I sat paralyzed because I had no idea what she had said and some of the kids laughed because I could not comprehend. A…
Following my friend into her family’s house, I immediately perceived the fluidity of the Spanish tongue being spoken. For a week, I stayed with Kiara and her family, Peruvian natives who live in the United States. I was the only non-fluid Spanish speaker and it was a detail I was all too aware of. Thankfully, with my years of high school Spanish classes, I could understand and communicate to a certain extent. I was restricted to short conversations with her family, and English conversations only with Kiara. I felt uncomfortable and detached from the generous people that opened their home to me. The inability to verbally connect because of our different language skills lead to a physical separation us. Being forced into silence was very challenging…
Growing up in two worlds is essentially what it was, living in a country where English is the number one language and being raised by Mexican parents where Spanish is the only language used isn’t an easy task growing up. I would speak one language with my friends but a different one with my parents; I sometimes ask myself how the heck did I graduate high school? As a kid I confused words and sometimes my friends or family would look at me with confusion, only to find out that I was speaking “Spanglish” (a combination of Spanish and English). The hardest moment in my life was in third grade, the day I was placed in an all-English classroom. I spoke English perfectly but the obstacle was understanding what the teacher was talking about, I couldn’t comprehend the language as well as the other students in the class. For example I knew how to say things with no problem but If someone would say something to me I wouldn’t understand because they were ether talking to fast or I couldn’t understand they’re vocabulary.…
There have been linguistic studies prepared in order to understand the functions of multilingual countries. Ghana, being one of these multilingual countries, is very complex and complicated with many linguistic intricacies. It is also a highly multilingual country, with approximately fifty intelligible languages. Since the country is culturally and linguistically divided into two parts, Ghanaian languages are also divided into two subfamilies: Kwa and Gur. (Anyidoho & Kropp, 2008) This creates an interesting division between communities in Ghana; however, English has become their official language even though Ghana has been an independent nation for over forty years. So, the Ghanaian society has one language which unites them with each other and the rest of the world. English is the language used in Ghana for education, diplomacy, business, government and other technical matters.…