Chinese language assimilation
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In a household of parents who were born in China, my siblings and I were raised around four different dialects of Chinese as well as English. My parents are fluent in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese and their native dialect: Shang-Hainese. My parents never taught us one dialect of Chinese. They usually speak to me in a mixture of Chinese and English, but I usually respond with English answers. As a result of being exposed to so many different dialects, I was left utterly confused and can only stumble through a few of these dialects with the common mistake of mixing them.
Due to this inability to speak my parents' native language , I decided to enroll in Chinese language courses to learn Mandarin. I have been taking introductory Chinese courses for a total of three quarters; however, I seldom use the language outside of the classroom. Even in the classroom, we mostly speak English. We learn a lot of our words through Pinyin text, which are English characters used to sound out the Chinese word with the proper tones on top of the alphabets. The teacher encourages students to practice using the correct tones, but most of us have thick English accents and are reluctant to make the effort to properly speak the language...