Thinking of Jamaican English, is mute English really that terrible?

I haven’t been in the United States for a long time, it’s been 9 months. During this period, I had the opportunity to communicate in English with various people in the school, as well as with neighbors, bank employees, and supermarket staff in the community. Nonsense, can you survive without communicating in English? But I discovered a problem. I heard English with various accents, some of which were simply extremely difficult to understand southern accents, such as yap, yap, dit yao. Sometimes I think Ask them, are you speaking English? I remember that in China, my classmates joked that he could speak English in many countries. It means laughing at each other for not knowing a foreign language. Now it seems that this is no longer a joke. The United States is a place where people speak multiple Englishes, which is what we call englishes. In such a society, do we still need to be crazy about English, and do we still need to be ashamed of our poor pronunciation? Do you want to say "My english is poor." again and again? Maybe your English is not good, but the American audience still thinks you are speaking English. (It’s not that I didn’t pay attention to the capitalization, it should be written like this.) From this, I began to wonder whether the sports-style English teaching in our country is still good. Make sense? I was a little disappointed when I saw that the postgraduate English courses in universities were shoddy and articles that could be searched on the Internet became course readings (not that there are no classics on the Internet). In fact, this is a very simple truth. Isn’t the role of language used to express thoughts? But in practice, everything changes! Many English learners will say that my pronunciation may not be good, and I may not hear clearly, but I can read and write well, but I am very depressed and "dumb" in English. As a result, experts and scholars began to criticize China’s English education as dumb English. The terrible thing about mute English is that you have no chance to understand the content behind the language, and thus lose another kind of communication pleasure. The result of focusing on language form is that our domestic readers do not have the opportunity to read good works written in English, so they read translated works. There are many outstanding works by translators. However, it seems that more readers will criticize the translation for being too heavy. , some are full of errors. On the one hand, there is an almost crazy promotion of English language applications, and on the other hand, there is the helplessness of not experiencing English classics. We English learners, lingering in the various accusations against "dumb" English, have lost the opportunity for spiritual experience and humanistic thought-in fact, reading is enough. How much of the literary classics are oral literature! Now, almost every university has an English department, and every middle school offers English education. However, American universities have a major called "Reading." The progress of thought and spiritual experience require people to obtain more through reading, rather than talking and debating loudly. In a society, you can often see people reading silently during flights, in libraries, and in the corner of coffee shops; when there are online libraries in almost every town; when people are not just decorating luxurious When restaurants and bars are shouting out drinking orders, this society is still progressing and there is still exchange and accumulation of ideas. However, it seems that more often than not, we don’t see such exciting scenarios. I think I'm lucky, at least I don't have to worry about those crazy English words that make people worship like religious people! (This approach may work, but this is an extreme example). In fact, there is a reason for this. I remember that when we were in college in the 1990s, our teachers often said that most English teaching and research now focuses on linguistics, and there are fewer scholars studying British and American literature. It is true that studying and studying literature is a bit hard work, but that kind of fascinating spiritual experience seems to be something we cannot find in our daily lives and in the traditional society we live in. Therefore, when I searched the graduate admissions catalogs of English departments in various universities, I saw that there were often fewer teachers teaching English and American literature than those teaching applied English language. Reflection in literature major. Let me go back to the topic of people speaking random English in various ways when communicating with each other in American society. In the office where I work part-time at the university, there is often a young man named Chris who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. He is not the talk show guy Chris Rock. He is a second-generation immigrant from Jamaica with dual nationality, and he speaks with a Jamaican accent. Sometimes I have a hard time listening, but it doesn't affect my communication. He studied very hard at an American university and can often be seen in the library and digital resource learning center. He was also very active and received the McNair Scholarship for American undergraduate students. By the end of this year, I will probably go to a graduate school in another state to continue my studies. There are too many examples of this in American universities. Some university professors even speak English with strange pronunciation, but so what? Students with bad accents still achieve academic success. We have never denied the academic achievements of professors, and we still respect their contributions to social civilization and ideological progress. Jamaican writer Jamaican Kincaid from Emory University in the United States wrote a wonderful novel A Small Place, which expresses in English the situation of Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean, in the post-colonial era. It is very touching and wonderful to read.

In addition, Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe, a writer describing Nigeria’s colonial era, is also very thought-provoking. The author himself has won many literary awards for his writing in English, and of course it has become one of the classic works of literary criticism in the post-colonial era in American universities. When I chatted with my black professor Johnson, she was also surprised by the crazy English situation I described in China. She said that that era has long ceased to exist in some non-English-speaking countries. The "Rote" teaching method has long been abandoned. On the contrary, our country lacks experts who can express thoughts and create in English. This is also the reason why the classics we keep behind closed doors are not familiar to the world. The rich and delicate emotional world of our Chinese people and the traditional civilization of reciprocity cannot benefit the world. We miss the era when hundreds of schools of thought contended in the Spring and Autumn Period, when poetry in the Tang Dynasty was popular, and when lyrics and music were popular in the Song and Yuan Dynasties. But today, we are all learning English crazily. It is really impossible for every learner to speak fluent English and talk eloquently. It's not necessary either. After all, language is still used to express and communicate ideas. There is nothing to be afraid of when speaking "dumb" English, nor is there anything to fear about poor pronunciation. Old Americans are already like this, so why are we still working so hard? After all, the exchange of ideas is the purpose of learning a language, I think. I also hope that more English learners will get out of trouble as soon as possible and more English educators will take some responsibility. Mute English learners, starting today, let’s read together and become a happy English learner.