ZT：from http://www.jiulang.org/lang_0019.htm

 

Why am I writing in English?

- A story to share

文：Cogitatio

Language is not only a subject, but much more a habit. It's easy to "change your channel", but it's extremely difficult to change your habit.

　

One of my friends criticized me for speaking in Cantonese but writing in English, though I am a hundred-percent Chinese. He thought that I was trying to flaunt my English standard in front of other people. I replied with a smile and continued to go my own way. Frankly speaking, I write in English not because I want to show off --- this friend has done me a great wrong! Over my primary and secondary school years, it has become a habit to take notes and write in English. If you ask me to write in Chinese, I would have to take a long time to figure out what I am going to write.

I spent my kindergarten years on the Lantau Island with my parents and a younger sister. I couldn't remember what I learned about English at that point of time. All I knew were the twenty-six letters and some common English dialogues. My English results were quite good and I often got the top positions in class.

When the time came for me to enter primary school, I was sent to my grandmother's home on the Hong Kong Island and I attended a Chinese primary school in Causeway Bay. I saw my parents occasionally, and they always encouraged me to study English. My aunts helped me a lot in my homework and studies, in particular English. They spent much time each day checking my English exercises books, making sure that I learned the correct grammar. Gradually the values of learning English were inculcated in my mind. It is an honourable thing to be able to express myself in English. If I know English, I would be able to earn money. I would become a "high-class" person in the society. Only educated people can master English. If I want to prove my ability, I must master the English language.

My (and my parents') effort was finally rewarded. I got into an English secondary school. I was allocated into a class in which all the students were graduates from mother-tongue primary schools. The teachers didn't say so explicitly, but we all got the same idea --- we belonged to the "worst" class in Form One because we came from mother-tongue primary schools. We were, however, not disappointed. The class teacher, who also taught us English, helped us improve our English standard. I kept a vocabulary book which helped me build up my vocabulary. Now I am surprised when I remember that I had once struggled with words like "special" and "extraordinary".

My writing skills are particularly strong. In Form 3 I won the championship in an English creative-writing competition. By the end of the junior secondary school years, I had overcome most of the difficulties in learning English.

I went straight for the Arts stream. I chose subjects like History, English Literature and Music. All these subjects were taught in English, and this was how I developed my habit of taking notes in English. The only chance for me to get in touch with Chinese was the Chinese lessons. I managed to keep up my Chinese standard by joining Chinese writing competitions.

The four years of senior high school education passed by happily and quickly. I entered the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in Music. Under the curriculum, it is compulsory for all Music students to study at least three subjects about Chinese Music. I had a hard time struggling with the lectures and taking notes. At first, I forced myself to write in Chinese. But when I found that I couldn't follow the progress, I wrote in English again. One of the professors noticed my habit and he asked me, "Why are you taking notes in English when I am teaching in Cantonese? Don't you think that this is a really bad habit?" I even tried to ask for the professors' permission to answer in English the exam papers set in Chinese! Professor Lau Kwok Ying, whom I met in the Leadership Development Programme of the university, kindly explained that the exam papers were set in both English and Chinese, and I could answer in English. But he scolded me rather strongly afterwards, "If you know that you are not very good at your mother tongue, you should take the time in this university to improve!" From then on, Professor Lau always introduces me to his friends like this, "This girl spoke to me in English at the very first time we met. Now she speaks fluent Cantonese in front of me." Up till now, English is still my preference when I read and write; but I don't mind reading and writing in Chinese if the situation requires.

In view of the current controversy over English or mother tongue as the medium of instruction, I think that each teacher and student should be given the freedom to choose the language they want to use. I can't force my friend to learn in English if he prefers Chinese. I also hope, however, that my friends would understand my preference to read and write in English. Language is not only a subject, but much more a habit. It's easy to "change your channel", but it's extremely difficult to change your habit.

___________________

这篇文章挺有意思，特别是作为一个香港人，作者的前殖民地居民背景挺有启示性的 (相信他现在对中文表达应该更为自信了吧？）。我以前也和作者有过类似的心态。不太久以前也和朋友讨论过类似的问题。长话短说，1，我的英文表达永远不可能像中文表达那样流利。 2，对英语文化了解得越多，再对照中国文化来比较，你可以发现其中巨大的差异，以及自身实际所处的位置  3，事关身份和文化认同感；可能在国外的国人感觉更强烈点。就是西方社会就是西方社会，主流文化就是白人文化；作为一个东方人（对于我而言）你最多只能去尝试体验，而很难去融入（我也不想融入）。而且自大一点地说，现在中国大有同西方平起平坐之势，这样的自信更应该体现在国人对自己的母语和母语文化的珍视上面。 4， 我很愧疚以前没有好好学习中文，现在如果不用电脑的时候，写中文常常提笔忘字。 这也算是个时代的印记吧 （当然我不是拿时代来开脱~：））。5，语言还只是个表面的东西，现在中国社会西化到了什么程度你看看超女文化便知 （年前有老师告诉我这是民主进步的体现；我倒是比较悲观，民主如果真有短信投票那么容易，那中国也不至于走那么多弯路，而且现在还在弯  6， 这个话题其实也可以延伸到方言文化和普通话文化的对比 （重庆话 vs "北京话？" :)） ，或者方言和方言之间的对比 （重庆话 vs 广东话？）。这个也事关一个身份定位问题 （如果回忆一下我以前对广东话的态度和现在对普通话的态度）。当然这些又扯远了...不过欢迎留言讨论。

Yes, GUARDIAN again says soemthing BAD but TRUE , environmentally, of course...

 

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1832110,00.html)

 

Lessons for Beijing emerge from the Dickensian smog

 

China is paying the price of rapid urbanisation and would do well to learn from Britain's response in the 19th century

 

Tristram Hunt

Friday July 28, 2006

The Guardian

This is a tale of two cities. The first is Charles Dickens's Coketown: "It was a town of red brick, or of brick which would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever and never got uncoiled."

 

The second is the Chinese city of Chongqing as described by the Guardian's Jonathan Watts: "It is just after dawn, but the sun remains hidden behind a thick haze. The giant movement of humanity that is Chongqing is about to get into full swing, working, building, consuming, discarding, developing ... We head into the hills to see the biggest of the mega-city's rubbish mega-pits ... an awesome sight; a giant reservoir of garbage, more than 30m deep and stretching over 350,000 sq m."

 

After a decade of unprecedented urbanisation and industrialisation, China's cities now resemble the nightmare metropolises of mid-19th-century Britain. Accounts of the pollution, ill-health and overcrowding in Nanjing or Chengdu recall the worst excesses of 1840s Manchester or Glasgow. Last week the Chinese authorities finally began to face up to their urban problems with the announcement of a £95bn clean-up fund. But equally telling is Beijing's recent invitation to a British 19th-century historian, Gareth Stedman Jones, to tell them just how we managed the transition to a modern urban nation.

 

The similarities are striking. Between 1770 and 1840 Britain underwent one of the most dramatic urban migrations in world history. Hundreds of thousands left their villages and farmsteads for the workshops of Birmingham, docks of Liverpool and mills of Manchester. Sheffield and Bradford doubled their populations in a matter of years.

 

Today that history is repeating itself in China as families from the rural hinterland decamp for the coastal cities. Every year 8.5 million Chinese peasants make their way into the urban centres. By next year China is set to become a majority-urban nation, with more than 3.2 billion living in cities and suburbs.

 

With the influx of China's peasantry has come the inevitable accompaniment of low wages, exploitation and tension with the indigenous working class. In Victorian Manchester the Irish, in Glasgow the Highland crofters, and in London the Hampshire labourers, became victims of a savagely flexible labour market. In China the underemployed urban masses are known as "bangbang men": unskilled labourers hanging around docks and markets (as they used to in London and Liverpool) ready to do any work, however dangerous or dirty.

 

And it certainly is dirty work. From its construction sites, factories, sweatshops and car plants, China's cities have fermented a witches' brew of environmental pollution. "A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of 1830s Manchester. The same could be said of Xinghua or Shanghai today. China is currently home to 20 of the world's 30 most smog-choked cities. And its plans for ever more motorways and airports will only make it worse. Meanwhile, its rivers - even the once-mighty Yangtze - now resemble "the fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass" of De Tocqueville's Manchester.

 

This ever-present pollution causes chronic health problems. Just as the squalor of the Victorian city led to an explosion of cholera, typhus, typhoid and smallpox, the noxious cloud of China's cities has resulted in marked increases in lung cancer, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases. Only fears for the health of athletes competing in the 2008 Olympics has at last spurred municipalities to act in reducing levels of sulphur dioxide and dust.

The initial Victorian response to the state of their cities was equally lackadaisical. Pollution and inequality was the price of progress, and the middle classes solved their problems by simply moving upwind. But in the end a combination of religion, officialdom and civil society forced the cities to change.

 

Evangelical Christians assailed the white slavery of factory hands and demanded reforms to working hours and conditions. The growth of the state alongside the science of statistics led to a new awareness of the human cost of city living. In 1834 the Office of the Registrar-General was formed, and every year it issued mortality figures revealing the true horror of urban industrial life.

 

These official facts were marshalled by a new breed of interventionist civil servants, led by the public-health campaigner Edwin Chadwick, in their Whitehall campaign for state intervention. Assisting Chadwick in his struggle was a free press. The journalism of Henry Mayhew and WT Stead, alongside the novels of Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, helped to put pressure on politicians and industrialists to clean up their conurbations. The public voice of civil society produced the great social reforms of the mid-19th century, from sewerage to child labour and trade union rights.

 

But in modern China there exist few if any of these reforming tendencies. The Beijing authorities have handicapped free religious expression and the social movements that come with it. The state is notoriously secretive when it comes to the release of environment statistics. Rather than leading the fight for reform, China's provincial officialdom is notorious for its incompetence and corruption. Meanwhile the Communist leadership continues to take an aggressively Maoist approach to civil society: NGOs, an open internet and a free press are not at the top of their list of concerns.

 

Much to their relief, Gareth Stedman Jones argued that Britain held back the urban masses from rebellion in the early 19th century not with an immediate transfer to democracy but by cutting sales taxes, stamping on bureaucratic bribery and curbing the elite aristocracy.

But such reforms were only a holding point. Ultimately the urban masses had to be enfranchised. For at the forefront of politicians' minds was another story of rapid urbanisation. Across the Channel, France too was trying to cope with startling rates of immigration and industrialisation. But the consequence of its political fumbling was a Paris in flames in 1830, 1848 and 1871. That is a history the Chinese are all too keen to avoid.

· Tristram Hunt is the author of Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

_____________________

 

What a shame! I was actually born in the central area of Chongqing and have been living there ever since (except the last four years spent in Guangzhou and this year currently doing my Master's degree in Bath, UK) .

 

I have been well aware of the ecological and environmental changes going on in recent years, just like many other Chinese living in the cities can feel the change in the air and sky. I dont wanna describe in words how tough the evironmental issue the Chinese are faced with now, cos'I think Jonathan Watts has given very good account of this very issue in a short TV reportage on Channel 4
( http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/special-reports-storypage.jsp?id=1954 ), convering areas that are even very astonishing to me as a local resident in Chongqing (such as the huge waste disposal pit he visited).

 

To give a very straightforward idea of how environment deteriorates in the past decade, I'd just have to tell you that when I was 3 or 4 years old, as I can still remember now, I could see in the sky the sparce stars at night in Chongqing on many sunny summer nights (if my memory hasnt cheated me). But now I am 23, and I really CAN NOT remember when was the last time I could possibly see the mountains from afar across the Yangtze river in many sunny days in the summer of Chongqing (when the air condition is relatively better than in other seasons when fogs seem to dominate the whole city throughout the year), not to mention any stars in the sky.

 

Now I am studying in Bath, UK for almost a year. Only I myself know how ironic it is to be here as a Chongqing-ese, I mean, here in the UK, almost every city or town seems SURREAL to me cos' you can see the big white clouds floating in the sky during the day and lovely stars at night, and of course plenty of trees and parks around...How can that be true?

 

I must be dreaming or I was actually living in nightmare for too long....

 

And like most Chinese students studying in the UK, I might go back to China upon my graduation late this year, to face the REAL...

 

p.s. I was quite surprised to learn that Chengdu is also on the list, which is about a 4 hours' drive from Chongqing and supposedly considered an environmentally and ecologically friendly city thanks to its touristy orientation in West China) The last time I went to Chengdu was more than 10 years ago, I could be wrong, I must be wrong...

 

Or maybe Hangzhou in East China could still be considered an environmentally friendly city (I hope so) as it's ony one year since I last visited...But still I could be wrong...Who knows what's going on in China these days, I mean, other than the glamorous headlines on Economist or Financial Times.

 

短暂的远离尘嚣：很美的海岛，山川，湖泊；很率性单纯的人们。很想多留一下，去细细体会；不过也终究只是体会而已...

 

文字就不再赘述了，照片勉强可以捕捉到一些瞬间（或许是被美化放大了的）；也不知道算不算是种悲哀...

 

一定要亲身去过了才能体会；但是毕竟也只是游客而已...

 

人们都忙碌地活着...

 

p.s. 之前得知考试过了，想留言恭喜一下的原则上我也不反对...

（上帝之前还说：我要还意大利人12年来的一个公道）

 

上帝的密码大概是这样的：

 

（..FRANCE!!..ITALY!!!...!?.!?.....half time...F.!?..!?R..!?.A.!?.N.!?.C.!?.E.!?..!?..!?..Z!I!D!A!N!E!!!!($#%$#^^&)..ET......PK..F.R.A.X.X.X....I.T.A.L.Y!!!!）

 

于是上帝和齐达内开了球场上的最后也是最大的一个玩笑

 

于是最后特雷泽盖（偏偏是他~）把点球射丢了

 

于是经历了最令人诟病的过程，用了他们最不擅长的方式，意大利夺冠了

 

我想这肯定就是天意了吧

 

（我现在唯一很想知道的是：上帝让他的助手马特拉奇对齐达内说了做了些什么，就在那10多秒之内...）

Randal 生日快乐！

 

几个朋友在wetherspoon 边吃饭，边聊天，边看着没有声音的电视，一心三用；我只记得德国好几个机会看得我心发慌 （不过我当时也在想意大利这次真像九命猫了，又顺便想到以前和ZXX打游戏时他经常对自己错过机会的评价：这个球都不进，我有种不详的预感...) 最后120分钟要到了的时候我都准备看点球了，没有想到又是GROSSO立功了！太TM神奇了！！！而且喜上加喜再再喜的是PIERO也进球了，虽然那个球除了他不懈的跑动更应该归功于吉拉迪诺极其无私的传球--和之前PIRLO助攻GROSSO那个精致曼妙的传球异曲同工，一样可爱！

 

偷几张BBC和安莎社的图片贴上，酒吧的照片有空传上！

意大利的左后卫们确实至少很棒，如果还谈不上“伟大”的话 （我也要再次声明自己早已摒弃了对马尔蒂尼的成见）