Saw this on Live Journal.
Our family is from San Diego, so we’re all familiar with the correct Spanish pronunciation, especially when reading a menu. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant when my 12-year-old son proudly sounded out all the listings on the children’s menu, stumbling over just one.
“Mom, what’s hey-yo?”
Click here
to read the punchline
I’m always curious about the Asian-american experience (being one myself).
I stumbled across two different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that
have viewed a different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that have
put their experiences on the web. I found both interesting to read.
It’s also great that the web has become an excellent source of information
for finding information like this. Traditionally you either had to spend
lots and lots of time in an academic library digging up some rather dry
reading on multiculturalism issues or scan through the bookstore and get the
latest “My Experience” book.
One of them seems to have experienced more outright racism in his
experiences in the U.S. Although the U.S. has made a bit of progress
in trying to deal with multi-culturalism it is interesting to read other
people’s stories to keep in mind that acceptance among many different
types of people takes a long time. C.N. Le (call him Dr. now he just got
his PhD w00t!) also set up a website called
Asian Nation which looks like an invaluable resource for topics on
Asian-americans for the curious.
Check out Tuan Tran’s website
Check out Cuong Nguyen Le’s website
Check out Asian Nation
Just stumble across a website that puts out a monthly online journal (yay!
for online) devoted to the languages of the Indian sub-continent. It seems
many of the papers are written in English from a glance but it might be a
good way to get a stronger grasp on the languages of India from a linguistic
viewpoint.
One thing I always find interesting about academic discourse from a
linguistic standpoint on language learning and actually learning a foreign
language is that they can be quite different. About the same difference
as someone who can pick out and see great sports players but have no ability
themselves to excel in that sport.
Which one do I prefer? I’d prefer to actually interact in a foreign language,
play a sport, etc etc rather than just be able to talk about it.
I have a bit to write on this topic but for now I just want to point
out some links to others who are struggling with the same problem.
Oliver
Wrede on multilingual blogs
Topic Exchange
coverage on multilingual blogs
Climb to the Stars entry on a multilingual blog
Same problem but the mechanisms can be really different depending on
what languages you are trying to accomodate. One quick note is that
blogging in Japanese isn’t that bad however I don’t think it helps with
remembering to write kanji which is a bad thing. So I’ve reverted to
using pen and paper to force myself to write Japanese by hand. The
appropriate technologies for Chinese and Japanese from a language learner
standpoint are still not there yet in my opinion.
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