Harry Wang’s experiences with Chinese and English directly help us investigate how languages interact with each other in communication. From the interview, Wang notes that he has a hard time relaying his thoughts and ideas because his English mindset gets in the way of his Chinese one. Having lived in Chengdu for 20 years, he has always thought and spoken in Chinese outside of his weekly English classes. Since coming to Emory, Wang has had to adjust to a new form of communication in a very short amount of time, noting that transiting between his English and Chinese mindset often confuses him. He attributes the confusion to the extensive difference in grammatical structure in speaking and writing. He has had to develop a new style of thought processing upon coming to the United States. Although this change has helped him slowly adjust to the American lifestyle, the new thinking pattern has affected the patterns of cognition that he has constructed in Chinese for twenty years of his life. This is why he never speaks to his parents in English when he chats via video with them because he would be lost in how to communicate with his parents since English interferes with his Chinese mindset. By categorically separating the people with whom he must speak in Chinese from those with whom he must speak in English, he removes any unnecessary transiting from the two different mindsets. Similar to the experiences of Jason Seo and Julia Lee, the experiences Harry relates in the video help support the observation that languages can interfere with each other and hinder communication.
Although Harry’s multilingual experiences primarily concern the social interaction aspect of languages, his story helps in further analyzing the argument Aneta Pavlenko makes in her essay, Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages. Pavlenko theorizes that bilinguals think with greater complexity because the two languages they utilize cooperate to allow the person to process and communicate new ideas between the dialects (Pavlenko 246). Wang's narrative partially contradicts this theory posed by Pavlenko. Wang explicitly describes how his newly developed English mindset impedes every instance of communication in Chinese. As shown by his stumbling and pauses in his speech throughout the interview, it is evident that the two different languages conflict with each other and that Wang is not able to produce a coherent and fluent response. On the other hand, Wang's experiences also extend the point that Pavelenko makes about the complementation that how two languages can help each other (Pavlenko 246). At the end of the interview, Wang iterates that if he were given the chance to learn another language he would choose Japanese because his experiences with English and Chinese would help him grasp the language quickly. In this way, Wang suggests that two languages can work together--not necessarily in communication--by giving him the experience and training he needs to learn another language. He can utilize and look back on the ways he incorporated English into his already existing Chinese mindset to understand how he needs to approach learning Japanese.
However, as we attempt to understand multilingual communication, we must keep in mind that cognitive transitions are unique to each person. Although Wang found translingualism detrimental to his communication, others may found it beneficial. For further research, we could investigate the similarities with in the people who find multilingualism conflicting and with in those who find multilingualism beneficial.
By Abheek Ghosh
(Edited by Jonathan Park)
Although Harry’s multilingual experiences primarily concern the social interaction aspect of languages, his story helps in further analyzing the argument Aneta Pavlenko makes in her essay, Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages. Pavlenko theorizes that bilinguals think with greater complexity because the two languages they utilize cooperate to allow the person to process and communicate new ideas between the dialects (Pavlenko 246). Wang's narrative partially contradicts this theory posed by Pavlenko. Wang explicitly describes how his newly developed English mindset impedes every instance of communication in Chinese. As shown by his stumbling and pauses in his speech throughout the interview, it is evident that the two different languages conflict with each other and that Wang is not able to produce a coherent and fluent response. On the other hand, Wang's experiences also extend the point that Pavelenko makes about the complementation that how two languages can help each other (Pavlenko 246). At the end of the interview, Wang iterates that if he were given the chance to learn another language he would choose Japanese because his experiences with English and Chinese would help him grasp the language quickly. In this way, Wang suggests that two languages can work together--not necessarily in communication--by giving him the experience and training he needs to learn another language. He can utilize and look back on the ways he incorporated English into his already existing Chinese mindset to understand how he needs to approach learning Japanese.
However, as we attempt to understand multilingual communication, we must keep in mind that cognitive transitions are unique to each person. Although Wang found translingualism detrimental to his communication, others may found it beneficial. For further research, we could investigate the similarities with in the people who find multilingualism conflicting and with in those who find multilingualism beneficial.
By Abheek Ghosh
(Edited by Jonathan Park)