Answer to Bill's Question

1. Reading this article immediately made me think of Chinese Characters. The way I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, is that they do not have an alphabet, but instead use characters to represent what they are saying. Individuals that learn from this kind of alphabet, or a similar one, do you feel that they are better able to handle the transition to our text books if they come to learn in the states, or anywhere else that uses the "western" form of writing. Basically which is easier going from theres to ours or ours to theres, and what would be some problems/implications in both?

I think it would be a lot easier for us to learn other peoples language because our English language is very difficult to learn because there are so many different syllables or meanings for each word. It may be hard to learn Chinese or any other language for that matter, but I think memorizing or seeing different Chinese characters will be easier to learn for people that already speak English. When my family first came from the Philippines, my grandma would always tell me that is was so hard for her to learn the English language and to this day she still has hard time pronouncing some words. I also found it easier to learn the Spanish language because one letter would only have one way of saying it or it was pretty obvious. Any language will be hard to learn but from what I see going to U of I, there is a language barrier from people that are across the world because they can't speak English but when my friends are taking classes like Arabic or Italian, they seem to learn it pretty quickly.