Le Xuan’s best friend from childhood was an outsider
too, a Japanese girl. Their shared misery forged a permanent bond, and they
remained in touch for the rest of their lives. (Finding the Dragon Lady, p. 31)
Like her Japanese friend from childhood, Madame Nhu’s
new friends [Americans] were outsiders too, which made her feel comfortable
around them. (p. 82)
Who is this best friend of hers from childhood? Shared
misery??
I finished François Grosjean’s “Bilingual: Life
and Reality” several days ago, and the chapter about “code-switching and borrowing” makes me wonder if the
use of katakana characters in the Japanese language should be considered a case
of code-mixing. Therefore, understanding Japanese seems to be a form of
bilingualism. This idea is reinforced, of course, by the fact that the language
cannot be whole without the help of Chinese characters. Is the use of Chinese
characters also a form of code-mixing? Though I’m quite ignorant of how the
Japanese language is defined or positioned in the field of linguistics, it
seems to me that after all, it may not be a language so unique as many suppose,
believe or claim. In addition, some words of Japanese and Vietnamese have
similar pronunciations because both languages are influenced by Chinese.
After “Bilingual,” I started and already finished “Psycholinguistics
of Bilingualism” by Grosjean and Ping Li. This book, somewhat related to those
by Steven Pinker, which I read many years ago, delves more deeply into the mechanism
of bilingualism and provides more information than “Bilingualism.” Though both
books do not offer much data about Japanese bilinguals, I found that the
chapters of “Written Language Processing” and “Language Acquisition” of “Psycholinguistics
of Bilingualism” relevant to my own experience.
Now, I’m
reading “Memoirs” by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
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