I found issues surrounding gender biases within East Asian languages particularly interesting throughout the course because learning about how language has the potential to influence the beliefs and perceptions of females within East Asian societies has also taught me that language could be used as a powerful tool against certain groups of people. I had been aware of the difference in grammar between female and male Japanese speakers, and how most Japanese women typically spoke in a higher pitch than Western women prior to taking the course, but I was not fully aware of the social implications these language differences had on female Japanese speakers living in Japan. I also didn’t know about the gender biases rooted in Chinese language. I was surprised to learn from Kristof’s article that in Japan, women were pressured to raise their vocal pitch by both males and females. I was also surprised to learn about the underlying meaning about the use of the character ren (人) and female radical (女) from Moser’s article and class lectures.
While taking this course, I learned mostly through readings and quizzes, which was supplemented by information from class lectures and discussions. Currently, I wouldn’t say that I have a specific preferred learning style, but I found the course structure to be quite helpful toward my comprehension and retention of the material. This course has changed my sense of linguistics as a field because I now understand that both quantitative research data and qualitative research data are equally valued, through doing the research report assignments and reading about the different perspectives of linguistic experts, as well as thoroughly research experiments and articles
