My experience being bilingual

The number of the languages you can speak is never too big, I always believe in that. Speaking more than one language may not be a very practical skill, may not help you solve a specific problem. However, knowing another language means that you can communicate with another crowd of people, which may give you the chance to find the answer. One person can never know everything and different people are good at different things, so knowing different languages gives a chance to know many different people and gives you an access to countless new things. I have learned a lot about the American culture from my American friends.
On the other side, knowing another language may cause you trouble. Sometimes, you may speak another language while thinking in your mother tongue. In the first few years learning English, that condition was almost unavoidable. It is not a big deal when I am just speaking Chinglish or broken English. However, if I put English words in Chinese sequence (I cannot remember an exact example but it does happen sometime), it might have a totally opposite meaning. And speaking two languages at the same time will cause you mix the two languages together. Some people probably like that, however, I think that a language stands for a culture and only when you use a language long enough, you can feel and understand the culture in the language. When you mix the two languages together, you are seem using both of them, but you can touch the culture of neither.
I hope that I can have the time to learn a language till I can use it as well as my mother tongue and during that period of time, I will not be unfamiliar with my mother tongue. However, it will always be a dream. The benefits and difficulties of being bilingual can never be measured and compared clearly.

Pictures and diagrams

In the reading material, Elizabeth Hill Boone mentioned a pictorial and diagrammatic recording system which people use besides words. This system is used in many aspects of science and culture; and tells very complicated relationships between different items in a clear way. I find that I use this system a lot and rely on it very often. The author stressed the diagramming system’s use in chemistry and mathematics a lot; however, I am very familiar with its use in my life. 
Actually, my first impression of diagrams was not very good. When I began to learn writing, the first thing I was asked to write down is what story a picture told. A picture is easy to read but really hard to write out. I always feel like that I am missing some details when I am writing out a picture. And when I grew up a little, teachers loved to give me homework such as previewing the next chapter, find the relationships between the concepts introduced and put all the concepts in order. Explaining all the relationships in words was definitely a huge amount of writing; so I always chose to draw that out. However, it was hard to find out the relations; it was even harder to put the concepts in right positions where could show the relations clearly. Fortunately, I have a computer with Microsoft Office Word. The technology is really useful in making diagrams, using which I can arrange the positions of those concepts easily. 
Not only showing the complex relations, a diagram itself can contain an incredible amount of information. Taking a two-dimensional diagram as an example, we can see that its two axes have meanings and units, the diagram itself has a title, and the curve records the correlation between two items now and can tell the tendency in future. It contains so much information that I do not know how to convey it into written words. 
I learn cell’s structure using a picture taken by ultra microscope; I find my classroom using a map of MSU; and I learn the differences of memories in the old and the young using a bar graph telling the results. I use the diagramming system everyday, in every aspect of my life. 

How does literacy shape technology? & How does technology shape literacy?

I’d like to answer the easier one–“How does technology shape literacy” first. Baron gave lot examples on how the computer changes literacy, such as adding animation, video, and sound to texts, students’ dependence on spell-check program, and the World Wide Web. I think technology is making more texts more easily available to more and more people; so with the development of technology, people should have literacy much more easily. And literacy has also changed to fit technology. It is obvious that we read, write and speak in almost a different language to what people use several hundred years ago. Even people living in the same time sometimes fail to understand each other’s texts because of change in literacy caused by technology, for example, a parent may find his daughter text messaging in “the language of Mars”.
About the next question, how does literacy shape technology, I think the point is that literacy may change the original usage of technology. Just like pencils were first made for woodworkers and computers were intended to perform numerical calculations, people most of the time do not intend to invent a technology to change the literacy, actually, some people are afraid of changes in literacy. However, sometimes, when the new technology gets connected to literacy, literacy is so attractive that technology deviates from its original track.

My most impressive medium-- book

Among all the variety of media, I like books most. I love the feeling of holding a paper book in hand and read it word by word, which can make me feel relaxed and peaceful. I am wondering why I believe in stories from a book ever easier than stories told by a video. As most people believe that what you have seen is more believable than what you have heard of, my more trust in books than videos is quite strange. However, I think that video can be just a part of the event. Many videos do not tell the event from the beginning to the end, or you can say that many events do not have a beginning or an end. An event without some parts can be a totally different story. But in books, the writers know the whole story and can tell it completely as possible. Another reason why I think book is the most impressive medium is that it makes me think a lot. If the writer wants to express some emotional things, the descriptive words will drag me into the situation, feeling like that I am the one experiencing the emotions. And if the writer wants to tell a story, I will make up the characters using imagination, which give me a deeper impression of the story. 

When I am reading a book, I usually focus more on the personality of the characters and the plots of the story instead of the appearance of the actors. However, when I am watching a video, it is so easy to get an incorrect first impression of the characters according to the actors’ appearances. Anyway, I think imagination is a kind of participating and participating is the easiest way to convince me; so I consider books to be the most impressive medium to me.

Literacy in My Life V

I was thinking about the definition of text; I think that it means a medium that carries a meaning and can transfer the meaning to some people. So I think that emotion is a kind of text. We talked about emotions in the psychology class; actually the curiosity of emotions is one of the reasons why I chose psychology as my major. People cannot tell the others’ emotions exactly but actually through their eyes and expressions, it is not so hard for us to tell how they are feeling. So I think facial expression is a special kind of literacy. 
I am always interested in watching people’s expressions, especially when watching movies. It is so funny that the bad guy pretends to smile warmly in front of others and smiles coldly when he turns back. I think that facial expressions do not cheat people; they do express what that person thinks and people do feel the emotions that the expressions represent. The reason why people cannot read each other’s mind is that we can control our facial expressions. People sometimes give fake facial expressions to cover their true emotions, which is just like telling lies. 

Literacy in My Life IV

Recently I watched a TV series called Moonlight Resonance. In the series, there is a dumb girl, whose parents always “sing” a song to cheer her up when she is unhappy. Or you can say that they “dance” the song. The warm and sweet scene touched me and reminded me of something about sign language. 

I have learned some Chinese Sign Language hoping to do some voluntary work in a school for the hearing-impaired. And when I came here, I found that one of my roommates whose major was education was learning American Sign Language and I learned some ASL from her. The first thing my roommate taught me was her name. And because there is a “t” in her name, so she taught me the word “toilet” by the way. It is a typical example of differences between CSL and ASL. In ASL, putting your thumb between index finger and middle finger means “t” and shaking that gesture means “toilet”. However, in CSL, the “OK” gesture with thumb and index finger not touching each other has the meaning of “toilet”. What’s interesting, the gesture actually stands for an English word—“W.C.” which means water closet. 

I think, sign language is really a miracle. It can even make dumb people "sing" and dance.

Literacy in My Life III

I went up early this morning to call my friends in China. It was always fun to talk to old friends. This time I called one of my high school friends, with whom I have been living in the same dorm for a year. She told me about a lot of things happened on our old friends. She is really lucky that she went to the university together with two high school classmates. They are really good friends now and as she said “living the same life as in high school”. After hanging up the phone, I felt quite pleased but there is something that is different from the feeling of talking with her in high school. I think for a while and came up with an answer that we were talking in different ways. She is talking like how we talk in high school, using some special words or ways of expression we invented and used often in three years school life. However, I am getting used to a new way of talking with Chinese friends here and sometimes I have to think for a second about how to answer her in her or my past expression pattern. The change of my expression pattern made me miss my high school life and amazed me by the rapidness. I think the expression pattern is an important part of literacy. Just like an American may not understand a British’s jokes even though they both speak English. The differences in expression patterns are due to different language environments where we live in. The change of expression pattern is a part of our adaptation to a new environment and sometimes it happens much more quickly than you expect.