UCLA students are required to take a year of a foreign language in order to graduate. Luckily, students are given many options to choose from, ranging from commonly taught foreign languages such as Spanish to other languages such as Swahili. I chose to take Chinese to fulfill my foreign language requirement and to genuinely improve…
Three years ago in my high school classroom, I watched as a college student mocked an entire language in the halls of my future university. My 11th-grade teacher projected the video for the whole class to see, the audio loud enough that the words rang through our minds. We talked about the way she condensed…
One of my earliest memories is of panic. At four years old I returned from a summer with my family in India and struggled to take hold of English. It was in many ways an unbalancing, a question posed with no clear answer – if I could hold onto only one language, Tamil or English,…
TranslateCovid.org compiles resources to aid vulnerable communities
When third-year civil engineering student Michelle Truong discovered UCLA’s Teochew Association (TCA) her freshman year, she was taken aback. It never occurred to her that UCLA had a large enough Teochew community to form a club. Growing up in Garden Grove, she didn’t know many other Teochew people her age, aside from her family members. …
Questions rain heavily upon us. Who am I? What are my beliefs? What are my values? Which customs do I follow? What norms of social behavior do I adhere to? Which section of society do I belong to? To shield yourself from this rain, whose droplets feel like leather balls falling onto your head, you…