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Comment on lolcat Bible by Recent Faves Tagged With "lolcatbible" : MyNetFaves

Recent Faves Tagged With "lolcatbible" : MyNetFaves — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:20:06 +0000

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Comment on “Crazy English” in China by sean

sean — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:28:42 +0000

Y.O. Steve,
Appreciate your comments here – would have liked to hear more about your experiences (linguistic and other) in China. Re your observation:

“Also, in class there were times where there was talk of English becoming a lingua franca in China. This is very, very unlikely, has Mandarin has been quite effectively pushed upon everyone in China, making me fairly confident that English will continue to exist only as a sign of prestige and a way to interact with the west.”

Agreed that it seems unlikely: but not altogether impossible to the extent that English will be a kind of economic tool or piece of infrastructure – who’s to say what other uses will be made of it in China and elsewhere? If I were in England in 1150, I would have bet the farm that English was basically dead as a language of law, theology, commerce and literature. Two hundred years later, English (albeit radically different) is back on top, or at least vying for supremacy with French (and Latin).

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by Ye Olde Steve

Ye Olde Steve — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:27:33 +0000

Have to agree with Judith on this one. In China, learning English is only secondarily a cultural pursuit, as, on a whole, China is very in to blowing its own cultural horn (as expressed in me being told about 10,000 times about the 5000 years of continuous Chinese history while I was there). I think that learning English is much more a method of national conquest over the once dominant Westerners who should be pitied for not speaking the Chinese language. That being said, I have no plans to change my course in studying Chinese, as I believe it will be difficult to be looked upon as an equal with out it.
Also, in class there were times where there was talk of English becoming a lingua franca in China. This is very, very unlikely, has Mandarin has been quite effectively pushed upon everyone in China, making me fairly confident that English will continue to exist only as a sign of prestige and a way to interact with the west.
Finally, I think in class someone said that 1/3 of the Chinese population was illiterate. Since I’m adamantly against blurting out statistics without backing I decided to investigate a little bit, and it turns out that according to the CIA world factbook the literacy rate is in fact 90.9% as opposed to 66%, so there is certainly an attachment to written language in most parts of China.

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by Judith

Judith — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:23:09 +0000

Hmm…after reading this article, and thinking about what could enable such a cult mentality and fervant following toward English learning, it really made me think about language in a couple of different senses. The first is language as economic capital. It seemed that most of the Chinese speakers they asked entered the program to converse with American businessmen or customers. Learning English became an initial investment for future profit and entrepreneurial success. Also, it seems the language takes on a characteristic of national property. Not only is English a cultural mode of communication in much of the Western world, but it is a national possession that can be “conquered.” In Li’s view, it’s similar to land or cities that can be taken over by a superior nation. Learning English, then, is not an expression of admiration or conformity to Western culture, but the dominance of a greater nation which can acquire the language of another. I think viewing language in these two ways, as nationalism and economic capital, can help explain the strong drive toward English learning in China.

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by Offenbarung Futhorc McGee

Offenbarung Futhorc McGee — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:10:09 +0000

My first thought was that this guy kind of reminds me of Richard Simmons – the wild overenthusiasm, the emphasis on “craziness,” the group calisthenics-like behavior (I think it was probably the phrase “unleash your international muscles” that got my attention). And he talks about a business venture that would be like a “language gym.”

I suppose you could make a case that the phenomenon of Li Yang’s Crazy English is similar to the frenzy of diet or exercise crazes. It is tapping into a belief that doing something difficult but image-improving like learning English (or losing weight) can make you a better person. In both cases there is the danger that a harmful obsession can develop.

Here’s the best clip I could find of him online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XQFsXtFcJE&NR=1

Li Yang comes in about a minute into the video.

~ Luke

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by Stephanie

Stephanie — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:52:20 +0000

When I first read this, I instantly thought of the zany, often cult-like energy that goes with pyramid schemes in the U.S. I don’t know how useful the “Crazy English” instruction materials really are, but it strikes me that these giant rallies have nothing to do with learning English and everything to do with making people believe they can.

For a country that has China’s history with English, as the article mentions, perhaps it’s not surprising that they want to feel nationalistically motivated in order to learn English. When it’s cast in the light of “taking over” the language, it doesn’t seem so much like conforming to the system of the historical oppressor.

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by amelia

amelia — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:35:06 +0000

One of the articles I found in writing my paper commented on some cultural-linguistic peculiarities of Japanese. Apparently head nods and “aizuchis,” phrases roughly equivalent to uh-huh and yeah, are much more common in Japanese conversation than in English or Mandarin. Mandarin and English speaking students of Japanese are often confused by the frequency and seemingly random distribution of these affirmations. The authors seemed to think that the use of aizuchis reflected Japanese social ideology. (the article was “Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships” by Sotaro Kita and Sachiko Ide, published in the Journal of Pragmatics in July 2007).

Comment on Spelling Variation by amelia

amelia — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:21:58 +0000

Shouldn’t British spelling influence American spelling as much as the other way around? What factors would create an imbalance in spelling clout? Also, does anyone else tend to not notice diffeances like -ize vs. -ise or grey vs. gray unless they are forcibly pointed out?

Comment on Old-Fashioned Usage by amelia

amelia — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:16:17 +0000

One grammatical formulation that seems particularly prevalent in modern English is the progressive, i.e. “we are going,” or “they were talking.” This structure doesn’t seem to have been as popular in the early modern English period. In the letter of Jane Austen’s in chapter 18, she writes “he offers” where a today we would be more likely to use “he is offering” to describe the action of her publisher. My Spanish instructors always scold us for over-using this construction: apparently, it’s an obvious anglicism. Where English speakers want to say “it is raining,” native Spanish speakers use the equivalent of “it rains,” just like Keats. I wonder when the progressive began to be so widespread in English and if it occured in any other languages.

Comment on “Crazy English” in China by K_eng

K_eng — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:15:56 +0000

My initial reaction? “Wow, a person could really exploit these individuals’ desperation to learn English and make a lot of money!” It’s unclear if Li Yang is really doing that, but one thing is certain, his program is doing something unique in terms of teaching English. His methodology makes it apparent to me that cultural practices are an integral part of a language. In order to properly learn to speak English, the Chinese are finding that they not only have to comprehend proper pronunciation; they have to learn to grasp the behavioral nuances.
Having from experience tutored Vietnamese speaking (A language similar in grammar form and in cultural background to Chinese) children and adults in English, I can say that most of their problems stems from the lack of understanding of sentence construction. There are the strictly grammatical reasons. For example, in Vietnamese, there is minimal use of the article which feeds into their English sentence construction. But more importantly, and more difficult to change, is the cultural attitude, the more subdued, stoic or perhaps even submissive nature of the people, which is mirrored in their language. Attitudes are highly ingrained, and thus very hard to alter. This leads to a struggle for new English learners to comprehend various verb tenses and perhaps even the social situations that many ESL books use as examples. Sometimes when a family member inquires about a specific word he’s heard on the news, I have trouble translating it to Vietnamese with the full nuances intact. Often it simply can’t be done.
I’m uncertain if that is solely the case in Chinese, since I don’t speak the language. Does anyone who can speak know the differences in their verb forms and ours and how much of it is socially based?