Compare and contrast Jade Snow Wong and Richard Rodriguez as learners Essay

Compare and contrast Jade Snow Wong and Richard Rodriguez as learners and users of two languages(chinese vs spanish) - Essay Example There are different ways that Jade Snow Wong and Richard Rodriguez have learned different languages (Chinese and Spanish) in shaping their relationships and world view. This is manifested in their books Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong and Hunger of Memory-Aria by Richard Rodriguez (Gudykunst). It is essential to observe that both writers grew up in foreign lands from their original nations. For example, Richard Rodriquez narrates his experiences in Sacramento, California, in family that only spoke Spanish. During this period of growing up, the young Rodriguez experiences several setbacks caused by language because he had a Mexican history that is different from that of his new place (Gudykunst 66). The author notes that he attends a Catholic school in Sacramento that speaks only English thus causing a language barrier for his young life. In other words, the writer implies that he got inculcated into a culture that was different from one he had witnessed in his childhood. On the other hand, Jade Snow Wong speaking in the third person aspect in her book The Fifth Chinese Daughter observes that she came from a conservative family in San Francisco. The author notes that their first generation family was poor with a lot of discrimination upon girls being a part of the culture. In that aspect, there are tales of domination of the female by the male in the family of Jade Snow Wong that is an indication of stigma against in society. Therefore, the author observes that because of such prejudices against, it was hard for girls such as her to acquire education (Gudykunst 69). This means there was no means of learning a language of overcoming the culture barrier. However, the author narrates her resilience to overcome insurmountable odds of by proving her abilities and talents in various fields. The above two authors are similar in the aspect of growing up under a foreign language that did not resemble that of their childhoods. Similarly, both of them made determi nations of learning the new languages by overcoming the barriers of family and culture shock as noted in their respective books. However, there differences in terms of gender and the superseding advantages that followed for the writers. For instance, while Richard Rodriguez found it a little easy in Sacramento, California during his learning period, that was not the case for Jade Snow. She laments that her family treated females as inferior hence there no need to challenge authority if you were a girl. In other words, the writer attempts to highlight the challenges of learning a new language under the yoke of a conservative culture that treats women with contempt. Therefore, while Rodriguez only faces the challenge of distorted childhood in a new place, Jade Snow grapples with gender inequality that is ingrained their first family that started living in San Francisco before the eruption of World War Two. Alternatively, there is the issue of the cultural divide that is prevalent in t he lives of the two authors in terms of forcing their varying cultural inclinations to those of other nations (Gudykunst 74). Another interesting distinctive feature concerning how the authors learned their two languages and their growth in English entails the sound of the foreign language. For example, according Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory-Aria, the author concurs that the application of varying languages in terms of sounds is paramount in shaping