Blog Assignment 1 Pt. 2

In the essay Mother tongue, Amy Tan points out an issue that we use different ways of speaking toward different people and also in different scenarios. That is definitely true. The essay reminds me of my high school life in China. I am very grateful to be blessed with the opportunity to study and live with a bunch of characteristic youngsters. During the two years of time along with my classmates, we as a whole gradually start to share some exceptional talking habits. Eventually, we developed a relatively unique way of speaking, sort like a word usage-wise dialect, we call it the language of Class Five. The dictionary of Class Five is built up by special idioms and funny sayings occurred in daily school life. For instance, one of my classmates quoted a Chinese proverb once during our Chinese class saying "the ocean of knowledge is endless, and only hard work is able to carry you through"; however, he said it wrong, what he said is "the ocean of knowledge is endless, but you should know the shore is right behind your back". Well, technically there is no grammatic flaw or any linguistic error in his sentence, but by saying that he changed the moral from encouraging scholars to work hard into encouraging scholars to quit striving when facing difficulties. Therefore, his word just cracked the entire class up. And for sure, this "meaningful" proverb was honored into the Class Five word bank. The Class Five way of speaking is not likely to be fully understood by people outside of our class, because even some regular words contain different meanings to me and my classmates. Thus, I speak differently to my classmates than to the others.

The major difference between formal and informal ways of speaking is that when you are speaking formally you will make the person, who you are having conversation with, feel that he or she is well respected; and that is a kind of feeling people usually do not get from having conversation in informal language. Personally, when I am talking to seniorities, I will slow down and try to speak as clearly as I can to make them catch the point that I treat them with reverence, I regard them as the ones who are at a higher position as I should. Hence, formal or not formal, it is all about attitude.

Different sorts of "language" is all around us, and mostly they differ in terms and pronunciations. About terms people use, there is the difference between the use of buddies, mates and dawgs. Also there is a saying, that reveals the difference in pronunciations, which is "you say your tomato, I say my tomato". To native speakers these puny differences are more seemingly to be affected by geographic variations. However, to a person who treats the language as a second language, is it more about personal choices.