Hey Classmates,How are you doing?
We are thankful that Candy Chang did the good jobs to help us reunite to each other via blogs, emails, MSN, Skype and alumni conferences. May we remember his gracious efforts.
For my primary email is Gmail account, I can start to post the articles on our blogs. It's probably the best ways for me to contact with you though we are in different continents. My time zones, Pacific & Mountain Time, are 15-16 hours later than you if you live in Taiwan or Mainland China. However, someone told me that he couldn't fully understand what I posted in English!
It's for we had seldom opportunities to practice, enhance our English after our graduation in 1996. As you knew, my English was not good while I was the college student especially my Taiwanese was worst. However, I hope we could pick up our English for we are living in the globalizing environments and English is the most popular language in the world currently. I am still learning my English even I have relocated to America for almost seven years. For the past couple years, I studied some other foreign languages like Greek, Hebrew and some dialects like Cantonese, Taiwanese also for my specialty.
Excuse me if you can't fully realize what I mean in my blog articles. However, could we encourage each other to enhance our foreign language abilities as well as try to contact to each other in English?
I am the student consulant at The University of Arizona now mostly in charge of the Asian students. I saw lots of foregin students from Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macao, Southeastern Asia, Southern Asia, Middle East, even East Europe. While I told to them, I found the students from Hong Kong, Macao, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Romania and South America are more fluent in English than from Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea and so on. It means probably they would be more competitive in current ages. What's your thought? Do you have any idea of it?
To share two pictures with you. The upper one was in front of the White House, Washington D.C. taken in 2001 and the other one was in San Antonio, Texas taken at the end of 2004. You can see I am still skinny as before. Now I am starting to compose in Chinese as below.
我收到幾位同學的反應,他們說他們看我之前用英文寫的文章有點...,甚至比較期望我能夠用中文撰寫張貼.我想我當然可以用中文書寫啊,而且我的中文打字速度應該也不慢吧!
但是我更希望能與各位用英文來溝通,畢竟,我們在東海"熬"了好幾年的英文,許多痛苦的歲月都已經經歷了,重拾一些我們曾經學過的英文不也是增進我們語文競爭力的一種管道嗎?畢竟我們活在全球化的大環境下,若有好的語文能力,或許就能更有機會.
我想我的英語,尤其是台語,在進東海時幾乎是全班最差的!但是東海的老師幫助我試著用英文來學習新的知識,東海的同學幫助我用台語來嘗試與人溝通,這些都是我內心值得感恩的!我七年前剛到美國來的時候,有如鴨子聽雷,覺得適應新的語言跟文化真的很困難,而且那時我已經27歲了.但是學校的老師考核我的英語水平,或許他們覺得我的閱讀能力還可以吧!勉強不要求我從頭唸起.那時,我常常私下與一些台灣來的同學"廝混",一是為了解鄉愁,二是英文實在開不了口,當時語文與文化適應的煎熬可想而知.
但是我現在很感恩的是,我還到了一個新的環境--亞利桑那州,在這邊幾乎沒有什麼亞裔人,逼得我非得面對幾近全英語的環境,我的同事全是美國人,我的上司要求我每個星期給他一份工作報告,我的學生不會中文的很多.但這也讓我有更多的機會來操練外語.現在,我似乎只能上網窺視一些中文的網站或打打電話來"緩衝"一下吧!
我希望我能起個頭彼此激勵大家能重新拾起英文吧!也謝謝您們往日教我許多台語.
祝 康安!
Chris T. Chien in Tucson, Arizona
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