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.