Differences in Language

Well after reading the two assigned essays I would have to say that there is a similarity between the two. That similarity is how a society uses the dialect of language as a basis of ranking one's class inside that culture. According to Min-Zhan he says that depending on what language you speak whether it be English, Standard Chinese or Shanghai will tell a person what class you are from. Mike rose is also trying to say the same thing but in a little different way, what he thinks is that depending on how well you understand your language in this case English will define how much respect you get from other people.

Lu's essay was very interesting because it really makes you think about how much language influences the way you are seen or how you see people in day to day life. When looking at how the young girl had to use different types of language dialect depending on the place she was in, well this is how people look at others everyday. What i am trying to say here is that if someone speaks differently then you or has a heavy accent would you say that they are different. That's why i found his reading very interesting, because it really does relate to our daily lives.

With Rose's essay it went into talking about how misunderstanding your own language gauges the amount of respect an individual will receive from others. The prime example given here was when children were misunderstanding what was being asked of them on a test. When they got it wrong they were seen as not being a smart as the others who did. Which is totally wrong to me because as it said in the article that sometimes the children just don't know what is being asked of them, so by just looking at that should not determine which child is going to smart and deserves the more respect.

I really think that both of these articles were trying to show us that literacy is very big determining factor on every one's lives. No matter what language you speak country you live in, literacy is taken as a big factor in determining your life.