Throughout the all the lectures in the term, there are serval issues that have intrigued me the most. They are basic characteristics of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, new masculine gender identities in East Asia, different parenting styles between East Asian parents and Western parents. After the lectures for the basic characteristics of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, I have better understanding of the fundamental differences and similarities among these three languages. Although ancient Japanese and Korean people learned, wrote and used in old Chinese characters, they are really different in terms of word order typology and morphological typology. For example, Chinese has a word order subject-verb-object while Japanese and Korean have a word order subject-object-verb. For the topic of new masculine gender identities in East Asia, I feel like it is very interesting and new topic that I never notice before. Since today is male-dominated society, how females behavior in today’s society is often more controversial than how males act. As a Chinese, I do not even know there exists a new masculine gender in China called “City Jade Men” and why this new masculine identity arises. Therefore, it is very cool to see there are some changes in masculine gender identities right now. For the topic of the parenting style between East Asian parents and Western parents, one of the important reasons that cause the differences in parenting style is the way to understand the word “successful”. Parents in East Asia trend to make the connection between being successful and having high grades and outstanding jobs. On the other hand, Western parents believe that to be happy is the most important things to educate their children. It seems like that many people in the class have hard time to understand and accept the parenting style in East Asia. However, I want to argue that East Asian parents try to express their love to their children and they care their children although it is really strict and harsh to some people. Additionally, in modern days, East Asian parents have changed this traditional way of educating their children and no longer as harsh and strict as described from the article we read for the lecture.
The way that I have studied for this class is to read the assigned articles and finish the quizzes before class. Then, I will pay attention on the class and discuss the context of the lecture with my classmates after class. I think it is very helpful by doing that. Since I read the articles and did the quizzed before class, I have a brief idea for what we are going to learn in the lecture. Then I let where I can really focus on the lecture to get my questions solved in the next day’s lecture. Additionally, since I am making more and more friends in the class, we will discuss some of the topics from the lecture with each other after class. By doing so, I feel like that I get deeper understanding on what we have learned in the class. In addition, I will take notes with the lecture slides in order to list and summary the major points for each topic. Later on, I will use these notes to study for midterm and final exams.
This class is really changing your sense of “linguistics” as a field. Before this class, I basically know nothing about linguistics. I think linguistics is only about how to speak the languages. Therefore, all that you will do for linguistics is to memorize the words and grammars to speak the languages. However, linguistics is much more interesting than that. For example, we learn how languages are gendered in many different ways. We learn that how languages use to “scare” in North Korea, how languages reflect some social, cultural, and commercial phenomena in the use of oppa in South Korea and high pitch girls in Japan. Furthermore, it is nice that we get some guest lecture on both tea and traditional Chinese medicine. It provides a really cool introduction for more people to know more about China and Chinese culture.
I really like this class and thank you for making such enjoyable class. I am very glad that I take this class as one of my last classes in the University of Oregon.
