Reflection

At first, I would like to say, time flies. Within a wink of eye, our computer assistant language learning class has come to an end. It is short indeed, however, I learnt a lot from this class, not only in English learning, but computer techniques such as making our own websites and doing podcasts. Looking back the whole lessons, I would like to thank to all my professors in this class for all the hard work they made for us. They help me to read, write and do researches by providing us different projects step by step. They also help me to learn the right format of writing. Of all those projects, I like the photo collection most, because personally I love taking photos and it is interesting to develop my own photo collection, which I’ve never done before. This project provided me this chance and I also learnt expressing and writing at the same time. If I have to pick a project that I like least, I would say the creating podcast project. It’s a lot of fun to hear my own voices from a record, but to be honest, I think a conversation should be natural and smooth rather than two people acting around a mike, it is a little awkward to me. But anyway, this is simply my own problem, I think it is also a good project for us practice speaking, writing and learning the culture difference at the same time. I tried to find some ideas that I can help to improve those projects, but I couldn’t think of any. -) I like all those projects, thanks to them, I learnt a lot of culture things too.

Writing differences? Quick answers

Do you think that writing in Chinese is more "colorful?" That is to say, when you are writing in Chinese, what images do you form in your head?
--Yes, I think that writing in Chinese is more “colorful”. I don’t think I can conclude this difference in several words but it is one of the biggest differences indeed from my point of view. The “more colorful” thing is, generally we don’t have a certain fixed way or format in writing, in another word, we have more freedom to write as many ways and words as we like to express our opinions like using idioms, poems or a story of myth or some famous people’s stories would be great helpful to out writings. When we write, it doesn’t necessary has to be very supportive sentences to topic, maybe we just want to describe it and make our writing more elegant and beautiful.

Chinese characters are very beautiful - when writing with these characters, tell us what is going on in your mind.
--This is an interesting question -) what's going on in my mind when I am writing? To be honest, I don't actually know. Characters are just characters, they are just words, maybe all those strokes in Chinese characters look awesome and hard to write, but in fact, once we memorize them, they are just like English vocabulary. Probably a better way to understand is that the strokes of Chinese characters are likes English letters and those characters are like English vocabulary. Once you remember those characters and know how to use them, they will pop up when you need to think of some ideas.

China has a long, rich, history - how does this long, rich, history affect you as a writer when you are writing in Chinese?
--Oh, I think the history do influence my writing and it influences in the way of my writing. Throughout the whole studying years that I’ve been taking, I met so many articles, stories written by the people in the past, their ideas, their thinking and their ways of writings are definitely affect my way of writing. Sometimes I like to reference some wonderful sentences from those excellent writers. And I think, because of history, the Chinese language became extensive and profound. From the ancient dynasties to nowadays, the language has changed enormously. Meanwhile, the fortune of literature accumulated continuously over the history. So in my opinion, the history made it possible for me to see variety of literature and help to form my own way of writing.

How do you feel when you must write in American English?
--I have to say that it made me a little uncomfortable when I start to write in American English, after all it is another language which I still don’t quite familiar with. The thing that I don’t like writing in American English most is that the standard of format is so strict, I have to spend so much time to write a acceptable reference.

In ENGL 396, many of your projects have involved the use of images, photos, and/or videos. Did using these items help you to express your ideas better in English? Why or why not?
--Yes, I think they are helpful. Learning English in a single way of reading vocabulary would be monotonously and boring. However, the use of image, photos and video help to motivate myself to express, and also help me to gain interests to express in English. Those images, photos and videos can be strongly supportive to my topics and they help me to explain my ideas. As many people would like to say, “A image is more than thousands of words”. That’s the power of those visual things. That's how they help me to express in English.

difference in writing

The way of the writing in China and the United States are quite different. Briefly, they are mainly different in the formats. Compared with American writing requirements, the standard of format of writing is much lower in China. Of course, every professor wants to see a paper with excellent format. However they don't pay much attention to format requirement as long as the format we present is acceptable, because in Chinese education, most people believe content values more than the format, no matter how beautiful or professional-looking your papers are, your writing abilities and ideas and the way you express them are the main elements that they concern. Therefore, we don't divide the sources into so many categories, and we don't have so many distinct ways to site the reference. we do paraphrase or summarize in China, but in most cases, we don't consider the use of a few same words from the source as a plagiarism, because people may think these words are the best to describe their ideas, and probably you got the same idea before you read the source, so they may think: why should I have to do so much to avoid the so-called plagiarism, that's not a big deal. However, it's such a big deal in America. You will not be allowed to simply rephrase the ideas with your own words. All you got do is "Work Sited" with a standard format-MLA or APA. At the beginning, I don't know how to do the reference, which troubled me a lot when I write essays. However with the help of teachers I learned to do it well. and I think I need to learn it and it's important to learn because plagiarism is so bad indeed, if I can't show it's my work, then what's the point? and if I did it on my own and people feel impressed by my work then I can be proud to say: yeah, that's my work.

LIFE

It took me some time to look through all Life magazine images, most of them were quite impressive because i found they reflected many significant things or problems that happened in our life. I would like to show you this image on my page, because I was very impressed at the first sight I saw it. It was a sad picture actually. A little boy was walking towards with accompany of a soildier while we can only see his back. What's the worst thing, he was walking with a pair of crutch and obviously the crutches are so long compared with his short body. and look at his clothes, so poor, he even only wear one shoe! I felt so sorry to that boy. War sucks! why don't people like peace? Do you armies know how many innocent people are suffering because of war. It's not unusual to see a picture like this, but everytime I look at these pictures, I feel very bad.
Give our world a liitle peace!

Technology

undoubtfully, technology today is playing an significant role in our life. It is everywhere, from the pen we use to the car we drive; from the computer we work on to the rocket we launch. None of anthropic achievements could happen without technology. Living in this rapid changing information era, every individuals of us is directly or indirectly influced by technology. Take myself as an example. As a student, I have to use computer everyday, writing essays, typing articles, checking emails, or reading online news. These are the procedures that I almost have to do everyday. At home, I use microwave and other cooking equipments to make meals, and besides, I have a TV set to watch movies and TV shows. I also equipped my desk of my bedroom with a 60Watt reading lamp, which is used for reading books, and a laptop with two small speakers, which are mainly used for listening to music. They make my life easy and convenient. and I know it clearly that technology has made me so dependent on him. Without technology, my life must be incredibly terrible; Without technology, I can hardly imagine I will be able to survive.

Food

Food is a simple but vital word to human beings, nobody can survive without food. Since the ancient time, people have regarded food as the most important thing. while nowadays, as people's life's getting better, food has become one of a country's cultures and they are various from place to place.

China is a big country with long eating culture, and as a Chinese, i am proud to take about Chinese food. in China, we mainlt concern about three aspects of food- color, flavor, tasture. So at a family's table, usually you can see differnt colors of food with different tastes. Food like Green vegetables, Braised meats, boiled fish, grilled chicken wings,etc, they are all cooked in different ways. with different materials, we also have different cuisines. Take pork as an example, we make sliced pork, shredded pork, and of course, meatball, cutlet etc, depending on what other materials you cook with.

However, American foods are quite different -I've been in America for only a month, so i'm not quite familiar with American food- but as far as i see, American people don't have much cuisine, the foods in the supurmaket is so few and most of them are all packaged storing in cold place,I don't know it's fresh or not. Besides,we can see lots of fastfood and canned food, and deserts are so popular! Many people like to eat sweet food!

Maybe I am still not getting used to eat American food, but personally, I don't like American food! Especially I don't like pizza. It's just so not to my taste. Cheese, vegetable, flour...all mixed together, er... I love Chinese cuisine! I miss my mum's cooking at home so much now, she is really a excellent cooker, all my family admit that.

Family

When talking about family, I don’t come up with any words to describe it except nice or sweet. Because since the day I came to the world, my parents have been giving me their unconditional loves, they provide everything to me and raise me up to be a adult.

Many people say that our generation is growing in honey pot which I think is true. Nowadays, most of us don’t have eating or dressing problems at all and I am one of them. In my family, my mother is the strictest one to me but she loves me most and I always know that. My dad speaks the least in the family, but he doesn't talk less on teaching me the way to study. When I have some problems in study, my father can always help me figure out the right direction and I love my parents so much. of course, I love my grandparents too. Although they are not living with us, we always go to their house and have dinner with them which I enjoyed a lot. Maybe foreigners cannot understand this, because people may prefer to be living on their own, they want have their own life even when they are old. But I don't like that. I think family means a beautiful place where all your most intimate persons should be living in the same world and sharing both happiness and sorrows. Even though we are not living together, regular contacting is necessary. That's family to me.