doodles~

wow! i did not know that there was no word class for adjectives in Arabic writing. Also, the rhythmical balance in their sentences was interesting, must have been difficult for an outsider to understand why they write in such a way but I guess it comes naturally to them. It was definitely interesting to learnt that in class as well as the historical background (religious writing) in understanding why parallelism is present in their writing. I guess that is culture for you; people with the same values coming together and that is why different culture is unique and different.

Like the because - therefore used in Chinese sentences, if used in Chinese will seem perfectly fine but translated, it becomes weird. I had a personal experience with using although and but in the same sentence, for example, "Although population growth is necessary but with the current growth rate, there will be 8 billion people in a hundred years time."

I think it has got something to do with the Chinese words of sui ran (although) and dan shi (but) that is used in the Chinese writing and I sort of used the same structure directly when I am writing English essays. If my memory does not fail me, we are able to use although and but together, but when we switched to English, it will sound weird. Besides Chinese complex sentences, I think Chinese writing in general, when translated into English sounds weird.... like the You before I case in English; I remembered in Primary school, Chinese pupils will tend to sort of mixed up when to put I because in Chinese we must put "I" first, for example "I and my friends" or "I and my family" (sounds really weird right?) and for English its the opposite way, like "my family and I". My teachers (Chinese and English) had a hard time correcting some of our errors, heh~ 
 

The doodles of Kaplan was real cool! Seeing how Kaplan visualizes writings into doodles, i think the doodles are still debatable because not all english essays are linear, and not all oriental essays are circular (or what i call beat around the bush for me to remember more easily). Imagine if I want to do a study to dispute or back up Kaplan's claims, wonder how many essays I have to read to really stake my claim on my findings, hahaha. =P I do not know much about the romantic, Arabic or Russian essays, but if i were to include the Russian, romantic and Arabic essays, wonder how many years will that research gonna take?

Alright, i guess its Happy recess week to all and to the malay classmates, Selamat Hari Raya!!  

see ya all in week 7!! =)=)=)

To cut the long story short ...

was sorting out worksheets to pass on to the new coordinator tomorrow, and I came across these two primary school comprehension passages.

one was about UK Shyam (an athlete who broke the C. Kunalan's (a retired sprinter) 100M record), the passage mentioned the problems he had faced and the obstacles he overcame, as well as the support and help he had gotten from other sportsmen (like swimmer Ang Peng Siong). And at the end of the passage, the last paragraph, it was stated that "The story shows that within the sporting arena, there is encouragement and support between older sportsmen and the new ones. This fact alone should make any Singaporean proud."

The other passage was talking about bees - the queen bee, the worker bee and the (laziest bee) drone, whose only purpose is to mate with the queen bee. Also mentioned was the process of making honey and how honey and pollen is "bee bread". Coming to the last sentence, the author wrote, "The challenge to individuals like us is to protect these amazing animals by making our gardens bee-friendly."

and ... ta-da!! the L. L. Lim authored the book, or rather, the assessment book; its safe to assume the Lim is a Chinese writer according to the name as well as the way two of the passages were written. I think its interesting to compare the different writing styles of English and Chinese writers. I haven not really given much thought to this comparison before but after Wednesday's class, I found it to be quite true when I think back of books/novels written by English authors. Especially the part regarding giving background information and details. I recalled this book, To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper, a wonderful book but when the first few chapters were quite hard to get through because of the immense details and background given by Harper for the main characters in the story, I almost gave up on the book because the background details made the first few chapters so dry =P. I have not read a lot English books written by Chinese authors, but it will be interesting to see how Catherine Lim writes her books and even Goh Sin Tub's narrative style. I guess their books will be on my radar when the next holiday comes round? =) 

This is just my view, but I think Asian authors generally do not give as much details as their English counterparts, remembering Kahled Hossein's The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, sometimes certain details are not given which leaves questions hanging and this drives me nuts, haha, I guess I think too much. I don't know if this has been done but it will be interesting to compare and contast Asian and English writers, wouldn't it? 

I'm such an advance nerd, getting excited over books =S, but I have a good friend who had been calling me a nerd ever since I got to know her, grrr.... haha 

a vegetable event

(translated conversation)

Neighbour: Thanks for the vegetables!

Grandmother: No problem

N: How much are the vegetables? (takes out some cash)

G: No no, no need to pay (me)

*pushes cash around, scuffle breaks out* (dramatizing here)

While during class when Dr Deng was going through the speech event notes, I was reminded of this incident when I was little. Grandmother (who grows her own vegetables) some times gives our neighbour or her closer friend some veg. When the “fight” broke out outside between the two grannies, the young me (locked inside the house) cried like nutter because I thought they were fighting for real. My crying broke up their scuffle and they came over to consoled me (haha); my grandma accepted the money in the end and the neighbour went home after laughing at me =S and chit-chatted a bit with my grandma.

Is this considered a speech event? I do think so, its something like a business event/transaction where my grandma sort of turned into the vendor and the neighbour, the customer. Although there was no intention of business when my grandma gives her the veg, but it sort of ended up like a business transaction.

This speech event has six phases (according to Robert Shuy); there were: -

1. Introduction: Greetings and small talk – neighbour comes over, starts the conversation thanking grandma for the veg
2. Present the problem: the veg were free! This is definitely not allowed in our culture – if we accept free things, feels like greediness (at least that’s what taught to me)
3. Presenting proposal to solve problem: neighbour wanting to pay for the veg
4. completion: grandma accepted the money (quite unreluctantly)
5. extension: no future deals agreed, but the norm that she will come back and buy the veg if grandma is selling and grandma will give her the veg if she has
6. closing: laughs at silly antics, says goodbye and goes home

Norms of interpretation:

1. giving food items (e.g. home grown veg, home made cookies and cakes) is the norm in the area I grew up
2. When giving gifts (in this case, the veggies), there is no intention of letting the receiver pay
3. offering money for the veg is the polite thing to do
4. only after a few rounds of bargaining only can grandma then accept the cash and after accepting, thanked the other party profusely. This is politeness =).

realize i'm always very naggy when it comes to reflection, must be the effect of 3yrs continuous writing of reflection journals in RP. =)

wk 2 - speech acts

well, feels like I'm back into poly days =) having to do reflection after every class. was still telling a good friend that I missed the RJs back in poly.

alright, speech acts, I really have not given much thought about the different kinds of speech acts before the class but after the class i realized there were different kinds of speech act and the different ways of studying speech acts as well as the different ways one accepting compliments. Equally surprising was the ways that I would reply to compliments in different situations. Although I might say Thank you and accept the compliment, say about my jacket in english, when it comes to speaking in chinese, my response will be a totally different one as I would reject the compliment and go "no lah". I have no idea why I would react differently, but I guess that if a very close friend who compliments me in english, I will also go "no lah" and go on joking about the state of my jacket; when I was answering the tutorial worksheet, I am thinking of the "more politically correct" answers, instead of other situations =P.

I think Laura Trice's video makes a lot of sense that praise, admiration and thank you and having to be specific and genuine. Who doesn't love that? I love compliments but sometimes i feel so embarrassed about receiving them, very contradictory huh? And about thank yous, I try to say thank you as much as I can, be it to the cashier returning me my change or someone who had just served me kuehs (like the lady yesterday) except those rude ones because I appreciate every thank you and I think that people would appreciate it too.
But I also find it weird that Trice's suggests that we ask for compliments and praises because in our society, if we ask for praises or compliments to be showered to us, the reaction would be "wah, so BHB (thick-skinned in hokkien, I think) ah?!" Haha...

Lastly, to note the about the field observation and recordings, don't we have to think about the ethical issues revolving the subjects, like privacy issues or what if we overheard some things we shouldn't have? And the presence of a recorder might alter the way the respondents response no matter how natural the other settings are and if we are to record the conversations, shouldn't we need to be getting permission from the people who are talking? But then again, I am thinking in terms of sociological research but this might not apply in this area.

Whoa, its getting too long, see u in class next week! =) peace out, and have a good wkend!! =]