MEMOIR...

Hi, my name is Shawn Corey Carter, also know to my fans as Jay Z, my stage name. Now at the age of 44, I am married to the world most powerful celebrity queen B also knows as  Beyonce Knowles from which I have a beautiful baby girl named Blue Ivy Carter.I am successful but not only job and money wise but family, I have succeeded in making my family happy and being there for them, financially and by my presence. Unfortunately this didn't come easy to me. As a young boy I was raised in a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. My mom brought me and siblings up alone because my father had abandoned us I wont forget the time my father shot my own brother, his own son in the shoulder at the age of 12 for stealing his jewelry. I tried to stay in school for as long as possible but in the end didn't have the honors of graduating like everyone else, instead I feel into the habit of selling crack cocaine.

Music was a passion for me. Every since I was younger I would wake up the house at night just practicing drums beats on the kitchen tables, my mum would shout at me saying: "Carter boyy, you best be stopping that noise, some people 'round here wanna sleep". Soon after I began to freestyle and writing my own lyrics and kept listening to the big artists from back in the days and soon that's how i developed the name Jazzy, everyone started calling me that which soon led them to calling me Jay-Z with a hyphen but I later declared it would be Jay Z without the hyphen, not that it would make a difference but it is now the name I am known for. As a artist i tried to aspire young teenagers to follow what they felt passionate about and do what they loved. I tried as much to represent the black community and show that we are as much capable of being successful and having great accomplishments in life. A lot of times I like to focus my songs on my community and what I have been through and what the community has been through.

One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, "No the fuck this nigga did not....." I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was indicted.

There was no reason to put my life on the line, and the lives of everyone who depends on me, because of a momentary loss of control..... I vowed to never allow myself to be in a situation like that again.

In one of my favorite songs, 99 Problems I say: "If you grew up with holes in your zapatosYou'd celebrate the minute you was having dough." After a while I started getting a lot of criticism relating my songs and talk about money. In this line i mean, if you grew up poor like me with holes in your shoes (zapatos) you'd celebrate the minute you start making money. In this song I also talk about how people take me for dumb because I came from the dirt and poverty but I'm not dumb but more like a millionaire,

This is a main part of my song:The year is '94 and in my trunk is raw
In my rear view mirror is the mother f****** law
I got two choices yall pull over the car or
bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
Now I ain't trying to see no highway chase with jake
Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
So I...pull over to the side of the road
And I heard "Son do you know why I'm stopping you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?
"Well you was doing fifty five in a fifty four"
"License and registration and step out of the car"
"Are you carrying a weapon on you I know a lot of you are"
I ain't stepping out of sh** all my papers legit
"Do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk and the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack are some type of lawyer or something?"
"Or somebody important or something?"
Nah I ain't passed the bar but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my sh**
"Well see how smart you are when the K-9's come"

This shows the stereotype many people including the police had set about the black people in America, that we were thieves and liars. The policeman was quick to assume I owned a weapon with me. I splashed debut in 1996 and cranked out album after album and hit after hit throughout the decade and into the next and became so successful. I am now one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America and one of the world's best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 75 million records, while receiving 19 Grammy Awards for my musical work, and other nominations. Consistently ranked as one of the greatest rappers ever, I was ranked number one by MTV in their list of The Greatest MCs of All-Time in 2006. Three of my albums, Reasonable Doubt (1996), The Blueprint (2001), and The Black Album(2003), are considered landmarks in the genre with all of them featured in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue"

One issue that grabbed my attention was the importance of a person's home language. From Tan’s article we get an insight through her personal life about the importance of one’s home language. She talks about how language has an effect in our lives. Amy Tan tells us how her home language had affected her life as she grew older; she believed that due to her home language spoken by her mom it would limit her possibilities in life, on the contrary to sociologists and linguists, Tan didn't believe it was the peers who so much affected her language skills but more the language that was spoken at home with the family and it played a large role in shaping the language of the child.

As a child that grew up in a mixed cultural and linguistic household, language was and still is a very key factor in my life. I constantly change my language depending on who I am talking to which helps me interpret different situations in different perspectives but for me my home language is the most important because it signifies intimacy and in a way comfort because it is something that I am fully in control of using. As Tan said in her article: “It has become our language of intimacy” which is something I can relate to tremendously. Both my parents aren't  fluent in the English language but it is still very good and understandable yet it required me to speak more Arabic and German at home which limited my English making it harder to communicate in a society that mainly spoke English. My parents focused more on teaching me my home language because it was my main source of communication, even with my other family members and I soon grew up to thank them and realize what this means. Being able to speak and know the importance of my home language helped me identify myself- I was more connected to my culture, to my family and to my surroundings. A massive influence to my home language was also my country.

“According to National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2007, about 10.8 million (or 20%) school-aged children in the U.S. spoke a language other than English at home, in the US.”  The schools and teachers know of the importance of the home language and therefore encourage their students to look deeper into it and see connections between their languages and, thus, to better understand how languages are structured and organized and so they ask them questions such as:
“How is the home language the same and how it is different from English?”

“Are there words in the home language that sound the same and mean the same thing in both languages?”

“Are there words in the home language and English that sound the same but mean different things?”

I find that it is important to teach young children to value their home language and not to forget it and keep using it. Like Tan says towards the end of her article is that language ability tests don’t reveal intent, passion, thought and imagery. A person’s home language and dialect shouldn't limit their perspective on them. Many people believe that when a person is too busy speaking and learning his home language and not as fluent in English it means they’re lazy and ignorant and thought to be a reflection to the quality of their intelligence which is really isn't and I believe that Amy Tan did a great job in portraying that in her article. 

Source: 

Genesee, Fred. "The Home Language: An English Language Learner's Most Valuable Resource." Colorin Colorado. N.p., 2012. Web. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.colorincolorado.org%2Farticle%2F50323%2F>.

Welcome! Wilkommen! مرحب به! υποδέχομαι! accueil! bienvenidos!歡迎! 歓迎! To my blog

Hi, my name is Ghadeer. Its been a year since I moved to Abu Dhabi with my younger brother. I am partly Sudanese and German. I like swimming, reading and football, I support Chelsea F.C.
My dream for this year is to work hard and be successful and achieve high grades in all my subjects though for the future, I have much bigger dreams. I want to be able to attain many things and reach my goals. One of my main goals is helping the poor. I have done a lot of work in the past to do with that because it is something I genuinely care a lot about. Family is my number one priority and what i care about the most.

I was born and raised in Germany and at the age of 12 moved to England. Throughout my whole life i only ever lived in Europe and experienced similar cultures within Europe so when i moved to Abu Dhabi it was a whole new experience for me. To me culture is a system that include components that have been developed over time by a group of people which includes language, myth, laws, practices, customs but a main part of culture is religion, religion has a great impact on culture and how people think, religious practices are a main aspect in cultures. I identify with an Afro Arab (Sudanese) culture that is very closely knit to religion- mainly Islam. which has great influences and affects it a lot. For instance in my culture one of our daily practices is praying 5 times a day and fasting during the holy month of Ramadan which is all linked back to religion.
In previous times I have felt excluded from a culture due to language barriers because the only source of communication is by using a language that I couldn't understand

Mosque- where prayers are held and a main monument in my culture 

Language plays a big role in my life. I am fluent in three languages and it is the key aspect in my life. It is the only way of being able to communicate in my everyday life. I have to talk to different people in different languages. Language is a complex system used to communicate our advanced thoughts and ideas for cultures. Language and religion both go hand in hand into culture because they are the key necessities of a culture. They develop cultures to a higher and more complex system, before a way people would communicate cultural ideas and practices through noises and sign gestures that wouldn't be understandable which is where we see how language impacts a culture.