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.

Literacy in My Life II

Today I took a math quiz about integral, which I think is quite easy. Math is easy for most Chinese students. It is because that we have learned a lot in China, but the most important reason I think is that in math we use letters, numbers and graphs more than sentences. So we can understand and solve the problems even if we do not know much English. Isn’t it amazing that we use the same mathematic symbols all over the world. I have never thought about that before, math is just like music, which can get rid of the gap between different languages. I am always interested in things can jump over the gap between different languages. I think the reason why music can do that is because that it does not tell a particular story, instead of which it tells an emotion. But as mathematics does not tell emotions, how can it ignore the gap between the languages? My answer is that it usually discusses problems in a made up model not the true world. Math models are extreme situations of the true world, so everything in it is exact and especial. Even though we live in different countries, we are in the same and the only mathematic country.

Literacy in My Life I

I went with Wang Lin to visit her sister this spring break. I talked about the differences between Chinese and English with her sister’s husband, Mark and another guy. It was quite interesting. And we talked about misunderstandings caused by similar pronunciations in Chinese and English. At first, they learned hard to pronounce my Chinese name, Shuai. And then at the end of our talking, they told me that my name made them think of Shrek… I was speechless, but have to admit that joke does make some sense. And the other day, when Wang Lin and Mark were talking, Wang suddenly forgot what to say, so she said “nei ger” which in Chinese means “well, by the way” involuntarily. However, Mark heard that as “negro”. This coincidence may cause some problems in another situation. I think this kind of situations is quite interesting. Maybe it is because that we are so familiar to our own language and think in our language, so we just ignore how the others thinking in another language may understand our words and sometimes take some words in other languages in our own language. 

What does literacy mean to me?

The dictionary told me that "literacy" means the ability to read and write or the ability to use language proficiently. The first impression this definition gave me was a vague definition. How well a person can use language can be called proficiently? For example, I, I can read most of my textbooks and write some not short articles in English, can I say I have literacy? I cannot understand some awkward biological nouns in English and I cannot always express my feeling exactly, so I do not have literacy? It seems that there is not a gap between literacy and illiteracy. What is more confusing, I will confidently say that I have literacy, if I am asked in China; but I will ask for the clear standards before I can tell whether I am literacy or illiteracy, if I am asked in the US. I think, literacy also depends on which language you are talking about. Anyway, in my opinion, literacy is the ability to pass on your ideas to the others and to understand the others’ ideas.