Bilingualism

     In the class, we were discussing about three poems and its context about bilingualism. Bilingualism is the ability to speak two languages fluently. Different poems have different stances toward the bilingualism, some says that bilingualism is impossible, some says that its very beneficial. We discuss about it and how the context of poems is related to us and our identity. The poem I got is called the Bilingual Sestina written by Julia Alvarez in 1996. This poem is about a girl who grew up speaking Spanish, molded by it. She later learns English and related things she had learn with her childhood memories. She also talked about how Spanish has failed her sometimes to explain her meaning to the world and in the end, she said that even if she had grow up speaking Spanish, English is still her preferred language. This poem suggested that being bilingual can be very beneficial for the speaker and the poem encourage people to learn new languages as it can opens up a new point of view from the different culture to the speaker.
     The stance of this poem accurately matched my experience. Since I was a child, I was studying in Thai school so my only language is Thai. I could not read, listen or understand anything in English unless it is a small phrase such as 'Thank you'. At that time, my point of view was very narrow, I only see things the way Thai people see it such as playing games that Thai people plays, read Thai books etc. Later when I moved to RIST, I started to learn some English and was able to communicate with foreigners and discovered how differently their ideas are from the Thais. I begin to listen to music, read books and watch movies in English and doing so had expanded my point of view on to another level. I have learned more than language but also multiple cultures that are involve in English language and also identity of people who uses English. Being bilingual really give benefits to your life, not only just to be able to communicate but to learn and gain the experiences from different cultures that will help you later on in your life.

Language Symbol: Thai

This stone is a representation of Thai language. This is the inscribed stone crafted by Por Kun Ramkamhaeng Maharath who was the king of Thailand back in the Sukhothai Era. On this stone, he crafted the Thai alphabet on an artifact for the first time since he was the one who invented Thai language. This expressed the Thai cultural identity in the way that it has Thai alphabets crafted on to it. It is literally the first book written in Thai. In the present, this artifact might not be unique since we have discovered a lot of ancient crafted stones but back then when there are o communications, the ideas of crafting alphabet on to stones are not widely spread, it is one of the most unique thing in Thai history.

My Cultural Artifact

During class, all the students were assigned to come up with an object that represents them or in other word, is their cultural artifact. They were asked to add a picture of the object, explain about the cultural context of the language or the image detail of their object such as what does it says about the culture that creates it and lastly, they were asked to explain how they are identified with the object. Students chose different things due to the differences in interest, some chose musics, some chose movies, some chose social media and some chose sports. The length of the presentation varies due to different people chose different ways to present their works. For my artifact, I chose my cleats as something that identify me. The context of my object is that it represents the sport culture as it is the tool that is used to assist player while playing sports. The sports that I used my cleats to play with are Football and Softball. The cleats represents how sport is one of the biggest thing in human culture as people kept on organizing these sports events such as Olympics and kept producing the sports tools products. The cleats also demonstrate how people wanted to use the best tool in order to assist them in sports and that represents the competitive culture of human. I also talked about how different brand effect how people look at specific pair of cleats. I talked about how my old cleats are made by Pan which is Thai brand and are 600 baht and my new one are made by Adidas which is German brand and are 1800 with 40% discount. That shows how people actually values the name as something that worth paying for. These are the picture of my two pairs of cleats. The right one is Adidas Predator Absolado FG Yellow Light Flash. the left one is the Pan one, I am not certainly sure what version it is because it is pretty old. Though it is true that higher price cleats might give you slight advantage, it does not significantly improve your performance, leaving the only reason for buying more expensive cleats just for showing off. That also shows how money are playing big role in human culture.