Advanced Essay #2 Chinlish

Generally, everyone learned their first word from their family. As I grew up learning English and Chinese, I remembered those days when I would run into people where I have a hard time speaking to in Chinese because of how I grew up learning it. One day, my mother was speaking to me about my Chinese. About how I only knew so little of it, and it was true.

Feeling helpless, my mother said jokingly, “You’re so useless, you can’t even speak Chinese that properly and if I were to ever take you to China you would be so lost.”

I never attended  Chinese school like the other kids did. So I didn’t expect myself to speak the “Chinese” like they do. Technically I did go to Chinese school for a year, but stopped, and it was terrible, I learned absolutely nothing. It’s like when you were in preschool and all you do is draw and run around and have fun. My parents would’ve taken me to Chinese school if they had the time to, and they didn’t, which is why I could only learn so much from my parents. When I started to learn English, I started to mix my Chinese with my English, so the words in Chinese I didn’t know would be substituted in English. I guess I can call it Chinlish. This was generally a family thing, I did it to most of my family and my siblings does too, except for the ones that didn’t understand English at all.

The way I speak with my families and close one are a lot different than how I would talk to another person in chinese. In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan points out how the way she speaks English and what that English they used has become: “It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with” (Tan, 1). In the way I speak Chinese to my family is typically another way of how I speak to my family. Just like in Mother Tongue, Tan can say her mother speaks broken English. And in my case, I can say I speak “broken Chinese,” or Chinlish(Chinese and English together). This is what you can consider a type of literacy, the different forms of languages you take on and if you dig a little deeper how you use these languages in a way you feel most comfortable. When I run into a Chinese person that doesn’t speak English, I would feel uncomfortable because I have to speak in a way I’m not used to or I’ll not know what to say. Which will make the person I’m talking to think I’m stupid or uneducated.

   In a place like China, people would expect you to speak and understand Chinese fully. And there are three languages that fall into the category of Chinese which is Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuzhounese. My parents knows how to speak all three, I only know a few words in each languages mainly the words my parents often used, which are pretty much consider foul words. But besides that, the language I grew up with I can barely speak one without throwing an english words in. So if I were to go to China one day, I would run into a lot of trouble and probably be considered out of place.

When I look at languages throughout the world I can see similar situations happening. A good example is Amy Tran in Mother Tongue, she has a similar situation but with english. It’s how she has a way of speaking english to her close ones. In anyone's case it all depends on what circumstances you are under. Everyone talks different in a environment they are in, and some talks the same too.

Overall, the way I speak Chinese will always be fine throughout my family, but I constantly have have to speak a certain way in the environment I am in. I cannot have a conversation with the way I speak to my family to other people who would not understand what I’m saying. I have to speak the language they are most comfortable with. It’s like how I talk to my friends and how I talk to strangers. Overall people will feel more comfortable with their friends than strangers. I can’t just talk to someone in a different language or way because they’ll just be confused and awkward. So I’ll have to switch the way I speak to where I am, even though it may be difficult, especially in Chinese, I’ll only fail a couple times.