Text Reactions

Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages

While reading Jeffrey Kluger's article, I found some points that I related to. He mentions and points out the struggles that young children face when learning another language. I can relate to this , I grew up learning two languages, due to my family being split by the two languages. However it was difficult for me because my brain was always switching between them causing a lot of confusion in my thinking when I was younger but i slowely began to control it, but resulted in me using the second one less and less. 
I have heard many a time,that learning more than 1 language when growing up can be extremely usefull to your brain's development and health, as well as in your future but this article gave a lot of detail into how bilingualism can be a hurdle in a child's development but is a benefit to its learning and mental health in its future.

You Say Cup, I Say Mug

From what I've  I read, this one was the most informative. When discussing a similar topic to the one of this article in class, we talked about language being a tool to understanding literature and written works. After reading this article, I now know that there is a lot more to it. The article explains how language is not only the key to understanding literature and being able to communicate but also how we perceive the world around us including factors such as time and space and how we understand the world around us. One of the researchers, Lera Boroditskey explains this really well by giving an example of how "knocking over a cup" is processed differently in our brains based on our knowledge of a language.

Language is no Smart Chart

I personally found this article very interesting because it related to my way of thinking as well. The article is mainly  about stereotypes of intelligence being made based on accents and ways of speaking.If you have an accent you should not worry about it, and should not be judged. Accents define who we are and give a little background of our heratige, who we are and how we can turn out in the future. However the study mentioned in the article, generalizations are being made about ones intelligence based around their accent. My opinion is that this is not true, your accent may hinder you in some aspects but does not affect ones intelligence. In this past this was a common thought by all those people who were well educated, but in todays modern age this is no the case.This can be see  back to our work in class, when we looked at Amy Tan and her mother. Her mother was being discriminated and judged against due to her inability to speak English at a the same level as all of the native speakers, which is quite unethical.