Yes and No

After reading Yes and No by Amy Tan, I couldn't help but agree with the statements or rather her observations that Americans tend to think that the Chinese are modest and polite. It is a stereotype that I have heard and know that many people hold. In my opinion anybody who is learning a new language and hasn't gained linguistic performance can fall into this generalization of being polite and modest. I know many Hispanics who know English solo para defenderse (only to defend themselves) and they manage to get through situations by being polite due to their limited vocabulary and/or their lack of comfort with the English language. Similarly, I have a habit of being overly polite in Spanish due to the fact that most of my interactions in Spanish while I was growing up were with adults and because of my limited vocabulary. It's hard to be rude or assertive if you can't find the right words. For me English is a very informal language and even though we might clean up our speech in formal settings English loses out by not having both formal and informal pronouns which affect our behavior and I feel is a part of culture.


We as people tend to make generalizations about other cultures. I've heard people say that Arabic is a harsh sounding language or that Hindi is ugly based off of how people are represented in the media or because of their "funny" accents when they speak English. I feel that exposure plays a huge role in how we perceive others through language. I think Arabic is beautiful once you develop an ear for it and Hindi can be very romantic.

When comparing languages, (p30) language difficulty and complexity is relative to the person making the comparison. Sometimes I wonder what English sounds like to foreigners and I've even asked my friends who don't know Spanish to describe what it sounds like to them. Even though we might not know a language we usually have the capacity to label it by recognizing the sounds as belonging to a specific group or language.

raul mɛndozə

raul mɛndozə

raul- voiced alveolar liquid

mɛndozə- voiced bilabial nasal

A lot of people have trouble saying my first name. Some common mispronunciations I've been called are "Rawl", "Ravu", and "Raoo". South Asians tend to call me Rahul and one elementary school gym teacher even called me Rowland. (Don't ask me how). In Spanish where my name comes from the "r" is rolled unlike in English.

As for my last name, the letter z is pronounced [z] in English, [s] in Latin American Spanish, and [θ] in Spain.

Based on what I've learned about phonetics people pronounce my name using the sounds with which they are most comfortable pronouncing and which exist in their native language. For example, most Americans have trouble rolling there r's.

When it comes to pronouncing words in new languages such as Arabic, the difference between the sounds represented by the letters ﻙ ,ﻕ where hard for me to distinguish. Other sounds in Arabic were hard to pronounce but luckily my professor and most Arabic speakers are pretty forgiving and were able to understand my best attempts at Arabic pronunciation.

An approach that I use when learning new languages is trying to mimic the sounds of a native speaker and it has worked fairly well.

Response to "The sound patterns of language"

Chapter 5 in The Study of Language by George Yule was about how sounds change when we speak and which sounds are allowed to follow each other in any given language (phonotactics). Since no one talks like robots and articulates every single sound in a word, this chapter is a more accurate description of spoken language. Topics covered included phones and allophones and minimal pairs and sets. Allophones are varieties of a single sound or phoneme which only affect the pronunciation of a word and not its meaning whereas minimal pairs are words that are almost the same except that they have different phonemes occurring in the same position. The chapter also talks about syllables and consonant clusters and my favorites: assimilation and elision (p48-49).

I tend to speak really fast sometimes and depending with whom I am speaking I'll leave out certain letters without realizing it(elision) and slur certain sounds together (assimilation). When in school or in a new place, I'll be more conscious of the way I speak and I try to articulate my words more. But when I'm around friends and family I take a more laid-back tone and my pronunciation changes. A good example for elision would be how words that end in "ing" tend to lose the g and for assimilation the pronunciation of you and me (p49).

My Language Story

Growing up in Queens, I have been fortunate enough to have been exposed to many different languages. Junior high was when I first started to really appreciate the variety and beauty of language. I had friends who represented all the corners of the globe and each one proudly carried and shared their heritage with me, through language. By the end of eighth grade I had already learned phrases in over ten languages, not to mention the numbers one to a hundred in Cantonese. (My friends got a real kick out of this when they heard me counting.) Language for me became my identity and I began to use language to define my culture and as a medium to learn about other cultures.

As a child I was raised bilingual. The first realization of this was when I was in kindergarten. I remember using an anglicized pronunciation of the Spanish word frisa for blanket as an English word. Now I can make the distinction between English and Spanish and even Spanglish. Interestingly enough, although I am bilingual, I speak only English at home. My mother came to New York when she was 4 years old and is fluent in both Spanish and English. At times she’ll speak to my sisters and me in both languages but we answer in one; English. I became fluent in Spanish through a combination of personal interest, school, my grandparents and exposure to a large and varied Hispanic community.

My personal interest in Spanish and all languages have helped mold me into the person I am today. Through my contact with different languages I can now say I enjoy watching foreign films, listening to Italian music and a multitude of other hobbies that involve language. Joining my interest in language with my interest in history I have read a lot about Spanish and how it has evolved throughout history. Through my research I have come to understand that language and history go hand in hand. Every time I would research a language I inevitably would come across pages and pages on the history and culture of the speakers of that language.

After taking Spanish in school I decided to take other Romance languages. I love seeing the connections they all share and I took classes in both French and Italian in high school. I already know Spanish and contrary to what people thought about taking two languages at once, I feel that they actually improved my Spanish and my knowledge of Spanish helped me to excel in my language classes.

My love and passion for language has grown so great that I "google" languages on my spare time but my search doesn't end there. From that initial curiosity I learn volumes about different cultures, their histories, traditions and the evolution of their language through time. Language for me is everything. To put it simply I am fascinated by language and I look forward to studying more languages in the future.