Everybody starts education with language; unfortunately, I start education with the most difficult language, and fortunately I start education with the most interesting language.  Chinese is a language has thousands of year’s history. In writing, Chinese has different performance between past and now.  In the past, people writing in a kind of old language what called “wenyan”, and they can use a little words to present a long story, and every word present a lot of meaning.  It’s very hard to learn wenyan, because you need to remember every word’s meaning in both now and past.

            Chinese in today is much easier than before, but it still has huge differences by different locations.  There are more than 55 nationalities in China, and every nationality has their own culture and language.  That’s the reason why there’re lots of local languages in China such as Mandarin. 

           Almost every child starts bilingual education when they are very young.  Although I accept bilingual education from 7 years old, I find lots of challenges in my American live.  In talking, when I communicate with some Americas I usually can’t have enough time to organize the words together and present my meaning correctly.  I also can’t catch every word when I listen to other, and I always guess the meaning just by catching some key words.  The biggest problems are that talk in phone or talk with some non-English sparkers.  To phone talking problem, it is very hard to communicate without any body language.  Another difficult thing is talking with non-English speaking people in English.  They use second language to communicate, and I use second language to communicate too.  That means language sets two barriers between two who both are non-English speakers.  On the other hand, talking is easily to present my emotion, because I can use body language to help my communication, and it is easily to talk English without caring the grammar problems.

            Compared with talking, writing in English is harder.  To a non-English speaker, I always think in Chinese, and then translate into English.  In this translation process, it exist a lot of problem to me.  For an example, every English word has a couple of different meanings, and for every meaning it has a lot of words you can use.  When I translate from Chinese to English, most of time I can’t always pick up one what fit the meanings I already have in Chinese.  Sometime I use some vocabularies what actually English speakers do not use, and that’s why I usually use some easy vocabularies.  Because of these easy vocabularies, my writing does not very like a professional academic writing.  The other issue in translation is that both the grammar and sentence structure are different from Chinese writing.  I need pay attention on the differences in grammar and sentence structure, so sometime I can’t translate correctly.  Another big problem is thinking style.  In my basic education, I know how to write a paper in Chinese thinking style, but now I need change entire thinking style.  Compared with Chinese writing style, English academic writing shows the main argument much directly, and need very close connection between each sentence.  Generally speaking I like English writing more than English talking; the main reason of it is that I have more time to organize what I want to say. An international student maybe has to spend ten times of working than Americans.  What I need to do is that read English much as I can, write much as I can and, and communicate as much as possible.