by Callia Chow
Callia is a first-year student who currently lives in Indonesia and who hopes to study Entrepreneurship in the College of Management. She has an interest in music and languages, and feels that this class was the first time she was “encouraged to think about the connections between her two passions and to create something in both writing and song.” Callia grew up speaking English and Chinese, and through the years she has spoken Indonesian and Korean; she also has learned German and Japanese. She has a great interest in learning new languages and hopes to become fluent in many more. Callia believes that “language comes in many different forms and it impacts our lives even when we seem oblivious to it.” She says that “this essay project made me realize how language has impacted my life and will continue to do so in the future.”
It was a whole new and different world. It seemed as though time had stopped and everything frozen in place. Reading books, fiction books in particular, was one of the things I really enjoyed as a little kid. I loved reading Chinese comics, novels and also English ones too. As I was starting to get caught up in the busyness of life, reading brought me to a world that only I was in and it provided me a space where I felt relaxed and calm. Reading has been my getaway therapy since I was a little girl. When I was in elementary school, whenever I had spare time during lunch breaks, I would always head to the school library to read books. It was one of the places in school that I would visit often, and it was a sort of getaway from all the studying too. The tranquil environment that I was immersed in, whenever I read books, was something that really gave me a source of comfort and quietness.
Even though reading was a source of comfort for me, I was not particularly good at writing. Perhaps due to my lack of creativity, it has always been fairly difficult for me to come up with ideas when writing essays. It amazes me whenever I read different sorts of fictional books; I always wonder how the author was able to express every single detail so meticulously and how they depicted the scenarios as though it was brought to life. I must say, I envy and admire those people who are unimaginably creative and have lots of great ideas. Everyone has a different way of looking at something and expressing themselves in the form of language, which I consider to be intriguing.
Being able to express ideas in different languages is also truly intriguing. Being a bilingual student, speaking both English and Chinese in a Singaporean household, I consider myself fortunate and thankful for this ability. I personally think that both languages are very powerful, and I certainly have great interest in both languages. I speak English primarily at home and at school and thus I did not have much difficulty in learning the language itself. However, English or any other language is much more than just knowing how to speak and write it. In the essay, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, the writer talks about her personal perspective of language and how it impacted her. Tan mentions in her essay, “I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.” (Tan, 3) Tan envisions her mother as her main reader and wanted to write books that were easy enough for her mother to understand. This is because she described the English that she grew up speaking to her mother as “simple”. In my opinion, we do not need to use difficult, complicated ideas or words to express our feelings and writings. Those complexities should not be a determiner to judge our level of language. I think that every single language has its own beautiful story to it, and being able to really relate and understand more about it is one of the things deemed meaningful when learning a language.
Speaking of languages having its beautiful story, my own language life became more interesting when I moved to Indonesia when I was around 10 years old. In the beginning, I had little knowledge about the Indonesian language. It was quite a challenge for me to communicate in the Indonesian language with people in daily life or even at school. There were some subjects in school that were taught in Indonesian and I would have difficulties catching up with the class because I was not good at reading and writing in Indonesian. However, I was grateful that the teachers were very helpful and supportive; they would slowly guide me along the way with patience. That was one of the reasons I was able to cope much easier with the classes.
Being in an environment where the native language was not a language that I was familiar with really brought me out of my comfort zone and pushed me to do better and try harder every time I struggled. I tried to improve my level of Indonesian by communicating more with native people, and it helped me improve my vocabularies as well. I believe that one of the most effective ways to learn a new language is to practice speaking with locals and it will slowly make you feel more comfortable and confident with the language. Malcolm X, in his short narrative called “Coming to an Awareness of Language”, talks about his experiences learning English during his time in prison, mainly through the use of a dictionary. He wanted to be able to express his ideas more easily through writing and to be more articulate in English as well. He stated in his narrative, “Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.” (X, 3) Malcolm X spent most of his time in prison improving on his reading and writing. He mentioned in the text that as his word-base broadened; he could understand things he did not understand before. We both had something in common, which was learning and improving on a language. I went from only knowing a few basic words in Indonesian to someone who can probably understand a lot more now and communicate. The feeling you get when you finally understand something you did not before, never fails to fascinate me. As someone who has great interest in different languages, I find myself continuing to explore more aspects of different languages and create meaningful learning experiences along the way.
Language is one of the essential tools we need to help us make sense of the world, it is important in communicating with people and building relationships with them. Language can influence and shape the way we look at things, how we connect with others, and make our experiences in life more fulfilling. It can also help people to understand more about each other’s cultures. Most importantly, language helps us express our feelings, desires and curiosity of the world. Having all these mixed feelings and experiences with languages, I would describe my current relationship with reading and writing to be a love and hate relationship. Love, because it guides me along the way to better improve myself as an individual, paving more opportunities in both social and work life. It allows me to create special connections with people in my everyday life. I find myself constantly exploring and learning new things through the power of language and it definitely shows me the many amazing opportunities life has to offer. I gain a great amount of knowledge through reading books which is helpful in improving my English skills and allowing me for a getaway time from the hectic part of life. However, at times I feel frustrated when I face problems writing in English. For example, writing an essay sometimes requires students to come up with interesting ideas or put our experiences in words, which I find myself struggling at times. I have many jumbled up ideas in my head, but in order to put them into words, I have to spend quite a bit of time pondering on it. I have to say, writing is not really my forte. Nonetheless, my experiences with reading and writing has given me many great insights into how powerful a language can be. Language has impacted my life in many various ways and provided a platform for me to learn more about the world and myself as an individual. I have also developed more curiosity and eagerness towards learning more about one of the most beautiful aspects in life, language.