To Speak Is To Blunder Analysis

Our identity is a place upon many attributes of a human being. Whether the person is someone who goes on promoting themselves to the world or not, and it shows how people communicate to others around them. Language is one of the main components that unveils the person’s identity in their everyday life, and they are many different ways to approach a person’s language. Relating to the article of Yiyun Li, “To Speak is to Blunder,” she knows two languages that has its positive and negative outcomes in her life. I to relate to her understanding of language, but a different view of what language means to me. This how a language connects towards those who can relate to other people and may or may not have a deeper relationship Language is a representation

Yiyun Li feels that same way and can’t comprehend but feel separated from her own language’s culture. “In my relationship with English, in this relationship with the intrinsic distance between a nonnative speaker and an adopted language that makes people look askance, I feel invisible but not estranged. It is the position I believe I always want in life. But with every pursuit there is the danger of crossing a line, from invisibility to erasure” (Lin 7). This clearly shows that she can be isolated from the people around her. She can’t seem to bare on having the image of being invisible to others who do not understand where she is from. Somehow she likes to be different from her surrounds, because she understand and speaks two different languages, but she cannot find the comfort she always wanted. A sense of unity towards her family and the people around her is the comfort of expressing on what she feels and

She has a secret language in which she does not want to expose to her mother and family because the native language that she already knows should be the only language she should only speak. “Over the years, my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. And memories—not only those about America but also those about China; not only those carried with me but also those archived with the wish to forget—are sorted in English. To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, like a crucial decision” (Lin 6). Yiyun Lin is caught between letting go her native language and wishes she can speak both because they both identify her. She struggles on choosing one of them and having one of them as a memory or a dream. This not only becomes a struggle for her, but an eye open decision on solving the problem of how she can combine a private language into a public language. “English is my private language. Every word has to be pondered before it becomes a word. I have no doubt—can this be an illusion?—that the conversation I have with myself, however linguistically awed, is the conversation that I have always wanted, in the exact way I want it to be”(Lin7). She does not want to a person who has two identities and someone who will judged by other people. Yiyun’s situation begins to grow more and more because