Multilingual Experiment: the 5th Year Update

FINE MOTOR & COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jumbo Jet, version 295

Our dear Ju will be 5 years old in a few months. He's asking me often, when he will have his birthday (May), which month are we now (January), and whether tomorrow will be February (no) and so on.

A child appears to have a nebulous sense of time until that magic moment that he figures out that there are 60 seconds to a minute and that when you say "10 minutes" it could actually mean 30 or 1 (well, many Singaporeans seem to think that saying 10 minutes will be understood by the other waiting party as 30 or more so who am I to talk). 

Acrylic on canvas "6 Trains", 2016

But apart from time, Ju has made leaps and bounds in so many areas of development that it's a real toughie to start this post! You can see from his latest pictures that he is something of a minor prodigy when it comes to drawing. If my memory serves me well, he started asking for drawings of trains at 2.5 years and since then he's been drawing non stop. I have enough drawing supplies to stock a small kindergarten. Ju pays very close attention to detail and for better or worse, he's a perfectionist. This means tantrums when he (or we!) doesn't get a particular turbine or cockpit done just right. Teaching him to manage his frustration with his perceived "imperfections" has been one of the main challenges since age 4. 

Christmas present for Oma, 2015.

While Ju can and likes to produce detailed and accurately-represented drawings, these are limited to his two favourite subjects: aeroplanes and trains. With some help from me, he learnt to include mountains, clouds and landscape features but not much else. It is an epic struggle to get him to add people in the trains much less anywhere in the picture. His forte: a train entering or exiting a tunnel. Ask him where the passengers are and he's got a good answer ready: "This train is going to the depot, everyone has alighted at the last station!" We are working on this. 

Ju's cognitive development is normal and his fine and gross motor abilities are developing very well. Since moving to Kuala Lumpur and transitioning to his new international school, Ju has made many friends and learnt to swim, play football, and most importantly read. The British national curriculum for the Early Years introduces phonics and early reading at age 4-5, known as the Reception year. This is early compared to the western European countries. In Germany there is no introduction to reading or even any formal education until Grade One (age 6). After 4 months of phonics training, Ju can now read simple sentences. The reading programme at his school is impressive and the children who finish Reception are usually literate by then and can spell. I'll devote a separate post on Literacy when I talk about school!

SPEECH AND COMMUNICATION

In my last update, Ju was 2 years of age and just starting to speak. In the last 2 and a half years, his speech has exploded exponentially in ALL THREE LANGUAGES. I cannot say this more emphatically and I feel a lovely kind of proud vindication every time I stop to wonder at how he has made it to this point!

People who discover that he speaks and understands German, Mandarin and English never cease to be amazed by Ju's ability. What is otherwise a normal day for him becomes an amazing thing to others watching him switch flawlessly back and forth from Mandarin Chinese to German in a conversation amongst him, his father and me. Family members are now used to Ju's categorical refusal to mix languages. He might be describing his train system to his Oma and Opa in German and in the next minute he would look up and inform me in Mandarin that Opa was driving the train wrongly. The only time he mixes in a word in the other language is if he doesn't know it in the current language. For example, "Mama, shen me shi Zug Schienen?" (Mama, what is "Zug Schienen" in Chinese?) He would actually ask for the term in Chinese if he needs to use it. Strangely, if he does not know how to translate a sentence to the other language, or if he doesn't want to take the effort, he prefers to say "I don't know" or "it's a surprise!" which is a euphemism for "I don't want to say". For instance:

Ju: 妈妈,今天我们在游泳池里跳进水里,然后浅下去地上抓一个东西!

(Mama, today in the pool we all jumped in and dived to the floor to pick something up!)

Oma: Julien, was hast du zu Mama erzalt? (Julien, what did you say to Mama?)

Ju: Ein uberraschung.... (a surprise....)

Of course, if you were constantly asked to translate what you just said, you wouldn't want to either, especially if you were 4 years old and had more interesting things to do! In fact Ju separates the languages so clearly amongst people that he would rather say nothing than speak the "wrong" language in front of the "wrong" person.

For instance, he speaks only in Mandarin with his friend and neighbour, Mia, who is Chinese. Conversation proceeds normally with Chinese speakers (Mia's parents and myself) but if Daniel enters the picture and everyone switches to English, Ju will not use English at all. He will answer Daniel exclusively in German. 

In another example, Ju will not speak any English at school in my presence. Getting him to say even a simple "Hello" or "Good morning" to the teacher feels as painful as pulling teeth if I were standing next to him. Mind you, he speaks English just fine, I have video footage from school to prove it. In fact he speaks English with a crisp German accent that is hilarious. He says "Ool of them" instead of "All (Orl, as locals like to drawl) of them" and he stretches out his "here" with "heeya" like you would say the German "hier".  

Strangely, Mandarin tones have not messed up his English or German tones. Ju maintains German and English closely to the native tones. Because German and English are much more monotonous compared to Chinese, Singaporean and Malaysian English has a sing-song quality that matches our Chinese tones, much like how a Hong Konger who is bilingual would speak. My early theory to explain this had been that simultaneous bilingual speakers like Singaporeans and perhaps Hong Kongers who learnt both languages at the same time tend to apply the Mandarin or Cantonese tones to English. This would be more pronounced in later generations who are taught English by non-native speakers and who grow up communicating with Singaporean parents who already spoke more tonal English, or "Singlish" as we call it, replete with lah's and lor's! 

The reason Ju does not speak in the distinctive "Singlish" manner could be down to two crucial factors: 1) I very rarely communicate in English with him and 2) His only English communication in the last 2 years have been primarily in international school where teachers are either British or European. 

First, English in the home is only spoken between Daniel and me, the parents. In terms of air time, Ju has had very little of it compared to the amount he hears in school mainly because Daniel is home after 7pm and Ju goes to bed at 7.30pm. In Brussels, he heard even less English spoken by us because Daniel only came home on weekends from Germany where he was working. Don't get me wrong! I am not in the least ashamed of my Singapore accent, hell, I would be the last person from whom you will hear a fake American or British accent. These days I inject a lot more English when I speak to Ju, but specifically only in cases for scolding or in an emergency like "Get down from there right now or you're going to break a leg!". But since Ju is way past the point for mixing languages, he never ever replies in English. 

Second, English communication for Ju is restricted to a clear social setting: school. Since age 2.5, he had gone to an English nursery in Brussels, then an English international school until he turned 4. His nanny who took care of him between the weekday hours of 3.30 and 7pm was Polish and so they communicated in English. (Interestingly, he hardly spoke to his nanny in my presence as he would be forced to use English! So I would often duck out of the room and spy on them talking just to hear Ju speak in English) After moving to Malaysia, we continued Ju's education in a British international school where he gets all instruction in English and 3 hours of Chinese lessons per week as his foreign language. 

The earlier Singlish influences in Singapore (between birth and age 2.5) were arguably minimal. He had begun basic utterances in English before moving to Belgium, but they were rudimentary and he was far from fluent. The video footage I have show a definite predisposition to Singlish tones, but this was to be expected as he spent close to 12 hours per week day primarily with my parents while we were working full time. 

It does sound rather bizarre for a parent to say that she has no idea how her kid sounds when speaking English. But this is our daily reality. Our son absolutely refuses to use anything but Mandarin and German in our presence. You can imagine the problems we have getting him to do his required reading practice at home. But here's the funny part: Ju has no issues accepting us reading to him in English, but it is an insult to his sensibilities if you expect him to read to us in English. 

Suffice it to say, our multilingual experiment has produced results far exceeding our expectations at the start, and it has also produced unintended consequences that we are just learning to deal with!

Prepositions in Wizard of Oz

My Experience With German

Language By Accident

With the exception of those who are true linguists (people whose life obsession is to learn as many languages as they are interested in) none of us choose the language(s) we speak. In a monolinguistic society like Germany, France or the the UK (I exclude the new immigrants) and China (I mean the dialects in addition to Putonghua), people speak the language they grow up with and they learn a foreign one or two, as in Western Europe, but they are mostly dominant in only their mother tongue since the opportunity to use the second or third languages is rare given the monocultural envionment. In smaller nations such as the Nordic countries or Holland, people are more bilingual given that linguistic cultural imports (like movies and music) are consumed in their original form, i.e. not translated into the native language. That's why on a holiday, you're more likely to encounter a Swede who speaks fluent English than a German or French one.

What about Singapore? Or the handful of tiny nation-states scattered across the Pacific that also use English in addition to their native languages? We're a quirk, a flash in the plan if you will. English is not considered our native language despite it being the lingua franca, the official working language and the first language taught in schools here with the mother tongues being called the "second language" (in the 90s, "second language" was dropped in favour of the term "mother tongue" to denote Chinese, Malay and Tamil for political reasons). I suspect it has a lot more to do with history, race and ethnicity rather than which language Singaporeans are strongest in. But I digress. This is not an essay about why English is our native language.

I would restate again that people do not choose the languages they speak and learn. It's a happenstance of birthplace, the education system and which world economy is currently dominating the airwaves. In the 20th century, it was America and Britain and for a decade or two, Japan. Today, it's China. If your child is learning French in school, you would not have a long wait before someone asks you why he isn't learning Chinese. Then again, there are many folks who are schooling and nurturing their kids in their own native tongue for the sole reason of passing on their heritage and this is completely reasonable too. In fact, if I were to take the extreme economic-advantage position, there would be no reason to put Julien through the torture of German verbs.

I jest of course, no offence meant to Germans, I would be the first to tell you how insane it is to memorize thousands of Chinese words. The point remains that languages are living things, they're not some physics or math theorems you should master. Languages are tools of communication and a window on culture. There are no better or worse languages, but there are languages that can give you an advantage depending on where you happen to be and what you have chosen to do.

Why Not German?

I am asked constantly why I don't speak German, or why I have never learnt it. The short answer would be: no time. The long answer is more interesting I hope. I am bilingual, so I've always been able to juggle two languages and make the code-switching in everyday life, since my parents speak different languages with me. I spoke a smattering of Cantonese as well, my mother's native dialect and the only tongue my maternal grandparents spoke. I loved the idea of French (note: I loved the idea of speaking it and being in France, not necessarily the French way of life, which I knew nothing about when I first learnt it) and so I studied it in university for two years. At age 19, any language feels great to learn, and French was fun. And as with any foreign language, it just gets harder and harder if there aren't environmental conditions to support its acquisition. So by my third year, without native speaking French friends or actually having to live in France for at least a year, it was pretty much au revoir to francais for me. I retained the basic structure of French grammar (which doesn't go beyond the present, past, future and imperfect tense) and some vocabulary to this day, but for lack of use, it's as good as Greek. So with 4 languages under my belt (each at different levels of proficiency), I did not approach German with as much enthusiasm as I would have expected of myself when I met my German husband at age 29.

I dabbled in a few classes of Spanish after graduating, and even a bit of the local Hokkien dialect. But I couldn't see the point in acquiring a language I didn't need. Language acquisition takes time, effort, practice and committment. On top of these, you need to use the language or you may as well learn Advanced Calculus. I've heard people complaining about foreigners who write English well or have excellent English language grades on paper but in person, they can hardly string a sentence together. So you see, while I was in university with all the time in the world to study and learn, it was no problem picking up a new language. In my late 20s, the motivation to put myself through the rigours of homework, practice and more practice (which I wouldn't get with Daniel anyway) didn't exist and the prospect of this seemed like a waste of my precious Saturday afternoons.

I'm not picking fault at the process of language acquisition, I am stating the facts of it and what is entailed in language acquisition. Julien is picking up 3 languages at the most amazing pace, but he is 17 months old and he has no other job to do but to listen to us talk to him all day. He isn't even required to answer us! How great would it be if you went to German class every day from 8am to 8pm and all you had to do was play with stuff and not have to talk to your teacher? I'd take this class in a heart beat.

Furthermore, I didn't live in Germany and I didn't have to speak to Daniel's parents but for a few weeks in the year when they visited Singapore or we visited them. Of course I made the effort: I bought books, a CD, a dictionary and I prepared before each trip. This was more for social reasons than anything else. And I was more than a little pleased when people in Germany complimented my German with each passing year. It was encouraging and no one gave me a hard time for bad grammar and tenses or my broken Germanglish. And trust me when I say it matters to many learners how others perceive the way they speak the language, I have heard Germans tell me they are simply too shy or embarassed to speak to me in English even though there is no way I would judge them or laugh at them.

The Way Julien Learns

In 2011 I gave birth to Julien and the world of social exchanges became transformed. There came a new person in all our lives and for the most part, life became tenfold richer and more full - of excitement and excrement. Suddenly, there were more things to talk about with the Germans, more reasons to interact and visit cross-continent. When I first met Daniel's parents in 2008, I started to email his Mum, because this was the only way to communicate with her (with an online translator, bless Microsoft Bing Translator, anything is possible). We kept up the weekly conversation and today, I still paste her emails into a translator. Technology is convenient, but it doesn't help you acquire a language. 

Now I am learning German (organically) along with my son, but nowhere at the rate that Julien is learning it. A child's mind is like a supercomputer. A billion neurons are firing every 3 seconds in his first 5 years of life. That's his job: to learn. Our adult brains will never acquire language the way a child's brain does until he is age 7. In a nutshell, Julien is learning German completely differently from the way I am: he is using both sides of his brain. Scientists discovered that in early childhood, the language center of the brain (located in left hemisphere) isn't formed yet, so a child processes language with his entire brain - the parts responsible for learning language and producing it is more diffused across both hemispheres. MRI imaging found that as we get older, the brain begins to specialise so that only one part in the left hemisphere takes over the work of understanding and producing language.

This explains why 33-year-old me finds it a terrible chore to remember genders and cases in German while Julien will most likely take to it "naturally".

Learning German "Organically" - What Works and What Doesn't

When I say "organically", I mean without the intervention of a teacher or a structured classroom curriculum. The problem with picking up a language through informal interaction is you would never learn the rules of its grammatical structure and syntax. You would be confined also to the parameters of the conversations you have. This way has been great for me, don't get me wrong, more words and phrases stick than if I had had to memorise it in a whole semester of language class. But the biggest obstacle is usage. Passive/receptive language acquisition, like what Julien is doing now, precludes the active component of speech. It is only when I have had to structure a sentence that I realise how handicapped I am. 

4 weeks ago, I started German lessons at the Singapore Goethe Institut. I am not in the beginners' class, since my test score let me skip 3 levels. My acquisition has leaped exponentially for the following reasons:

1) I have to do homework (which means daily or almost daily revision, which is necessary)

2) I have to speak German in class

3) I have a teacher who explains things and gives me the rules

Rules of grammar are for me like the roadmap to someplace I need to get. I just need it. I must say GI has a good program structure and the methods are effective. We get out of our tiny classroom at least 2-3 times each lesson to the break area and practise with one another the lesson, be it asking and answering questions on the Dativ prepositions or the Warum/Weil agreements. Using the language makes ALL the difference, and in this I have a small advantage because of my family circumstances. Daniel and I still speak no German with each other, but he helps with my homework and when I have a question on Why This Particular German Rule is So Annoying. So far, Daniel has agreed with me more than not that it is annoying. 

My experience with German has been largely positive, despite my bellyaching. The pronunciation is easy enough, I get plenty of practice if I just go online for lessons, and I have access to German speakers. The pace is much slower than French, which aids comprehension and conversation by 500%. I'm going at it really slowly, as I have no personal goal to master it in a year. After all, ignorance still comes in handy when you are not in any mood to join in the conversation in German!

For me, languages are the most interesting thing in the world. They are puzzles and when you get them, they become such handy tools. And starting on my fifth, I can say that multilingualism isn't just some lofty hobby, it can and should be normal. Our brains are capable of so much more, and looking at the state of our "bilingual education", I would guess that something just isn't being done right at the level of acquisition. If schools would help their students learn Chinese or Tamil the way I am learning German now, as a foreign lamguage, I am certain it would benefit a lot more children. If they hang on to the belief that Chinese is a "mother tongue" for Chinese kids, then the thousands of Chinese tuition schools will continue to reap millions of dollars each year. 

Speak Good English Campaign Flub #41

NTUC (the supermarket) is hiring full time and part-time staff. They would like to hire people to man cash registers, assist in retail-related tasks and cut skills. If you have experience with Skills and are moderately confident about cutting them, please contact NTUC Fairprice!

Speak Good English Campaign - Year 47

Copyright: Mr Brown (and his copyrighted source)

Coming to you proudly from the country whose working language is English, whose lingua franca is Singlish (a quarrelsome, polygamous marriage of Chinese, Hokkien, Malay and English) and the nation responsible for Hainanese Chicken Rice, electronic road toll and the only democratically-elected authoritarian parliamentary regime in all of post World War 2 history with selective native-linguistic amnesia.

Learning Chinese: A Reality Check

According to the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin is one of the five most difficult languages in the world for native English speakers to learn. The Institute quotes 2,200 hours as the minimum number of class hours required for attaining fluency in Mandarin (that's over 2 years if you put in 3 hours a day, 6 days a week and do that without a break for 2 years) but I do not know their exact definition of "fluency" since most students who clock those hours report being completely lost when they get to China. The other four languages are Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Cantonese. (Yay, I have limited proficiency in two of the world's 5 hardest languages!)

A disclaimer before proceeding: I studied Chinese (writing, reading, speaking) for all 12 years of my formal schooling (the last 2 years are what the British call college, what is junior college in Singapore and is not mandatory) and have a Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK5) Intermediate certification. While this might qualify me as proficient in the language, I do not claim to be a native speaker as I am more proficient and comfortable in English. In fact I have lost maybe half my 3000 or so characters along with 80% of my academic proficiency at age 18. I am, however, able to converse with a native speaker from China and have had prolonged conversations with my Taiwanese friend whose patience outstrips my Mandarin vocabulary. Those of you who already know me would know that I am ethnically Chinese, my grandparents were born in China and I use informal Chinese on a daily basis in a predominantly English-speaking environment although Singapore is a multicultural society with an ethnic Chinese majority.

To begin, I'm not putting anyone off from learning the language. As a new parent whose single biggest challenge is to bring her child up in 3 languages (including Chinese), I think I am entitled to say that this is not a walk in the park. It's closer to a swim across the Pacific with your hands tied behind your back. You're more likely to drown before you get to Hawaii. Many westerners who have put in their hard yards to seriously learn the language have paid their dues and pretty much all of them agree that Chinese is pretty damn hard to learn (read a great tongue-in-cheek piece from American scholar David Moser or input "Chinese is hard to learn" in Google and find all of these people easily). There are plenty of good blogs out there which explain in great detail the difficulty in achieving minimal proficiency in this beautiful yet exasperating language -- David Moser's is a must-read for all beginners, Hacking Chinese gives good and practical advice -- but what else can I add to the conversation? 

Well, as an almost-native speaker,  I can comment on the difficulty of learning the language and the claims about what strategies work best, since I spent a good 12 years at it and during this time, I have been in the shoes of Western students who have never learnt a tonal language.Yes, I have wanted to tear my hair out staring at a list of words I had to memorize (we learn writing and reading at the same time) before a test and wishing to God and The Cosmos that I could quit Chinese was a weekly -- sometimes daily -- prayer. Ask any Chinese student or student of Chinese who didn't do it voluntarily. This is my version of a reality check for anyone who's deciding whether to embark on this journey. Oh, I'm not saying it isn't worth every bit of effort you're going to put in, it's damn well worth it after the 5 or 6 years you've been at it; but for those of us who like to live life without the blinkers of delusion, painful as it may be, here are a few things that some of you might find helpful if you are thinking about taking Chinese on, or wondering whether to call it a day.

1) Your Chinese-speaking husband/wife/girlfriend ain't gonna be much use

From first-hand experience, I can tell those of you who are thinking of or who recently acquired a partner who speaks Mandarin to forget it. If you think he/she is going to be your free tutor, conversation partner, you're better off speaking Mandarin to your dog. Your dog would be more interested. As others can attest to this, spouses and lovers are in your life for other reasons -- communication, getting intimate and the other half of the chores -- and they don't have the time or patience to be your teacher. 

My husband Daniel is German and in our 4 years together, he has not picked up enough Chinese from me to have a conversation beyond two sentences at the coffee shop. I, on the other hand, have enough German (from being self-taught) to have a protracted conversation with his relatives: me in broken German is a lot more comprehensible than Daniel with any Mandarin. A big reason for the disparity in our ability is the requirement for me to speak German in order to communicate with his parents (they don't speak anything else). You may think that's a real pain, but it's like a little accelerator for any student of any language. That's why you always hear about immersion and people advising you to go to China or Taiwan to really accelerate your proficiency. It's the deep end of the pool. Do or die. And most of the time, when you have no choice but to use the language, you do almost what any baby does naturally in language acquisition: you soak it up. 

But what if you don't want to spend 6 months in Beijing (in the smog) stuttering to locals and ending up having a conversation with them in English? There's plenty out there. Watch movies or TV from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (here we get Taiwanese and Hong Kong stuff dubbed in standard Mandarin, putonghua) online. Lots of Chinese pop music available, Jay Chou has atrocious enunciation, but he's a good starter kit to Chinese pop culture. Youtube will give you hours and hours of Chinese lessons (only helpful for students who already have some foundation and need practice), Chinese programs, and pop culture. Or you could just come to Singapore, aka "Asia For Beginners". There's enough Chinese resources here you can get on the cheap (books, libraries, media and the people) while having the safety of falling back on English when you feel like you're going crazy.

2) You can't escape rote memorizing
Many have commented that the learning curve at the beginning is steepest and it gradually gets easier as you ease into the grammar and gain traction with the tones. I would say the first year is akin to jumping off a cliff into a black abyss and then climbing back up again and repeating this another 5 times with every new word. Alright, I'm exaggerating it, but people who hate memorising and got by learning their French and German and Spanish relying on the alphabet system and cognates should take me seriously. The steep curve at the beginning for all novices is due to the fact that you must learn to recognise and pronounce enough individual words to have a basic conversation about the weather. Many students think it's sufficient to speak Mandarin and they choose to be illiterate. This is well and good if your aim is simply to have a couple weeks holiday in Taiwan or Shanghai. My view: Chinese is the hardest thing you're ever going to attempt to learn, may as well go the whole hog.

Native speakers have the advantage of having been exposed to the language since birth, so that syntax and all that grammar stuff becomes second nature. You instinctively know how to form sentences and express yourself in the native lingo. This might take the non-Sino learner maybe a year or two, depending on how much practice, interest and determination you have. But if you are doing this at the same time as you're learning new vocabulary (and this is the labour intensive part), it really feels like you're heavy-lifting all the time because you are consciously acquiring the entire system of word recognition, memorization, pronunciation and sentence formation all at once. It can be really daunting and I get it. I've given up learning German grammar because it's too hard. German isn't my passion and neither is cracking the magician's code that is their grammar. Hell, thinking about the genders in German is enough to make me take a sleeping pill. I need enough German to be understood and to understand and nobody has any problem with that. So if you're bent on becoming fluent and proficient in Chinese, make sure you're doing it because you have nothing else in your life that's more important than devoting the next 3 years of your life to this project. Because it WILL take that long, at the very least.

3) Give it up if you're tone-deaf

I'm serious.  Daniel is as close to tone deaf as one can be, but to his credit, the man tries hard. He gets by being understood even with his atrocious tones, but he can't really understand someone who's speaking in Mandarin because he can't tell the difference. This is crucial. I've had many conversations with Daniel that went like this:

Me (speaking to Juju): 帮妈妈把垃圾丢掉 bang Ma Ma ba la ji diu diao (Help Mummy throw away the garbage)


Daniel: Why did you ask Ju to throw away the spicy chicken? (辣鸡 la ji)

Me: It's 垃圾 (la1 ji1) not 辣鸡 (la4 ji1) ! 

But to Daniel, all the la ji sound the same. Here's a fun sentence to demonstrate tones: Lao3 shi1 lao3 shi lao1 dao1. If you know that Lao3 shi1 means "teacher" and lao1 dao1 means "nag", you could figure out that lao3 shi is probably "always" = "Teacher is always nagging". Western learners make a big deal of the tones, but I always tell people there are only 4 plus one neutral tone, it's not so hard, as long as you figure out those 4. It's really like singing in only 4 or 5 notes. Which brings me to my next point:

4) Learn to read

Yes, we have tones and it's a real pain to have to memorize every word with its exact tone. That's why you need to learn to READ THE CHARACTERS. Hanyu pinyin is a romanised form of the language which makes it really convenient to type on the keyboard, look up a word in the dictionary and figure out how to pronounce the word, but only if you already know how to read and write! It's really not a solution for learners who can't read. I'll tell you why: learning solely with Pinyin is like playing the piano without seeing the notes on the score. You're half blind. Think of the piano keyboard: it has several octaves but only 8 white keys and 5 black keys representing a note in each octave. There are 8 possible C keys and 7 possible C sharps. You can't possibly know which C sharp to press unless you can read the note on the scale. It's the same for Chinese. My previous pinyin example, la1 ji1 on paper doesn't make any sense unless you read it together with "ba3 la1 ji1 diu1 diao4" and you figure out that diu1 diao4 means "to throw away", by which you understand that I meant 垃圾 the garbage and not spicy chicken. But if you could read the characters, you would have no doubt about what I meant. In fact, when I learnt French, I would make it a point to look up every new word I heard to make sure I knew the spelling. I am a highly visual person and seeing the French or German word in my head reinforces my memory of it so I can pull it up again in future. If you can see the word in your head, you can remember it a lot better, and this is even more critical in a tonal language with pictograms in place of an alphabet.

Take the word 老 which on its own is an adjective which means "old". If you heard someone say 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) you would naturally guess they were referring to someone old or something which was old. In fact, you would need to know that the three words go together to make another word: commoner or common folk, which has nothing to do with being old. Again, 老板 lao3 ban3 (the boss) has very little in common with being elderly (although some bosses could be aged) nor a wooden plank which is what 板 is. Wait till you get to 4 word proverbs like 老当益壮 lao3 dang1 yi4 zhuang4（to gain vigour with age). So you need to learn individual characters and words that are composed of 2 or 3 characters and then proverbs and idioms (there are more but I won't go there). 

5) Context is everything

The Chinese don't like to get to the point. Even after they've finished the sentence, you still have to figure out what they meant because there are not tenses that resemble the Germanic or Romantic languages. It's worse than the Germans making you wait for the verb at the end of the sentence. When you're deciphering Mandarin, you need to replay the entire sentence in a split-second to work out the meaning because the context sets the meaning. Take this example: "Wo3 qu4 de2 guo2" and "Wo3 qu4 le de2 guo2".

Context A:
Question: Ni qu na li du jia? (Where are you going on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I am going to Germany).


Context B:
Question: Ni qu le na li du jia? (Where did you go on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I went to Germany).


Context C:
Question: Ni qu guo na xie guo jia? (Which countries have you been to?)
Answer: Wo qu le de guo (I've been to Germany).


Context D:
Question: Shang ge xing qi, ni qu le na li? (Where did you go last week?)
Answer Wo qu le de guo (I went to Germany).


Without the question (which sets the context), you would not have any idea if I was going to Germany or I had gone to Germany; whether I've been to only Germany on holiday or if I went to Germany last week. But then again, some people find the lack of tenses totally refreshing, since there are fewer arbitrary rules to learn. There isn't any better or worse here, it's just a completely different way of orienting your comprehension of what is being said. Instead of relying on tenses, you rely on an intuitive reading of the context.


*******

If you aren't put off already, I'll throw in two more cents on the arduous learning of Chinese. It's true what they all say about immersing yourself in an all-Chinese environment and memorizing every single word. But if you can see yourself making this commitment, the other reasons for learning Chinese is just as compelling as the challenges I've just listed. That's why I love the language, it's like the Tao of Ying and Yang: what is black is also white, and what is agonizing is also beautiful. Learning to write is a wonderful skill and the journey can be an endless puzzle of discovery for those who love puzzles or a perpetual endeavor of frustration. I've written elsewhere in this blog about how to write Chinese characters. In school, it was typical for students to write pages and pages of "xi2 zi4" (Writing Practice) for every new lesson. This was anything from 100 to 1000 repetitions (we would write 10 repetitions per new word) a week, sometimes twice a week. It does get easier because once you learn enough, you can use what you've got and this reinforces your long term memory. Your "core" 2000 word vocabulary will get you by in most situations. 

As students, we also read a lot (out loud), what is called "lang3 du2" (recitation) to practice our enunciation and pronunciation. In Primary school, our teacher would get the entire class to recite the entire essay (sometimes 3 pages) three or four times per lesson. If we didn't recite with quite enough expressiveness or if our tones were too flat, we'd have to do it from the top. There is only one word for this: arduous. At times you wanted to bash your 10 year old head on the cement floor you were sitting on. But I must say the 6 years of reciting ensured that I have perfect tones. This is the shit of Chinese poetry reciting, it's an actual art form. To become fluent, you'll need to do this a lot, and the best part is you can actually practice lang3 du2 on your own. Of course, having feedback is a lot better, so you'll need to attend class or get a tutor. It's like playing music, you really need someone to correct and encourage you. 

Finally, if you can get through all of that, you get the satisfaction of connecting with any Chinese speaker in the world (and there are many), discovering the magnificence of a 5000-year-old culture and just taking simple pleasure in being able to read stuff that, to any other person, looks like hieroglyphics. You do need a certain amount of proficiency to be able to do this, but like the circle of Tao, if you love the language, you'll master it eventually, and then you'll love it all over again. 

Was Ist Typisch Deutsch?

I came across this great video while trawling for free German lessons. I am amused, slightly appalled and more enlightened about how the Germans think about their nationality. Oh, and I learnt a new word: "punklicht und ordnung"!

Chinese Lesson 1: Know The Bloody Difference

In keeping with my multilingual experiment to raise Ju trilingual, I have decided to do a series on learning Chinese. This first post is something of a prologue of sorts, just to set things straight. In my research on multilingualism, I've chanced across a few personal blogs by Westerners (mostly American) who have either (1) studied the language and/or (2) married a Chinese person and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English or (3) adopted a Chinese baby and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English.

They are not all that bad, and some are in actually entertaining and quite insightful.  However, some of them have made the following mistake that I deem it worthwhile to devote my first post on Chinese language to this irritating error: they do not know the difference between MANDARIN (Pu Tong Hua) and CANTONESE (one of the many dialects of Southern China).

This is the Chinese character, "learn", pronounced "xue" in pinyin.  "Xue" is what we call MANDARIN or Pu Tong Hua. Some Westerners call it "Mandarin Chinese" but even if you say "I speak Chinese", most Mandarin speakers understand that you speak Mandarin.   Mandarin is the official spoken language of China and Taiwan. 

Now, Westerners who have learned to speak CANTONESE, which is a dialect of Chinese, would pronounce the word as "hock".  They are not speaking Chinese. Cantonese is th de facto tongue of Hong Kongers and spoken in the province of Guangdong (previously known as "Canton", therein the origin of the name).  In Mandarin, the Cantonese dialect is known as "Guangdong hua" or "the language of Guangdong.

So today's very basic yet important lesson is to know the bloody difference between Mandarin Chinese -- Pu Tong Hua -- and Cantonese. Of course if you want to nitpick, you could say every dialect including Pu Tong Hua counts as "Chinese". I would disagree as a native Chinese speaker*.  That's because Mandarin is the unifying language of China, created  its written script was first standardised by China's First Emperor of Qin (aka Qin Shi Huang) to unify the vast lands hitherto known as Zhong Guo (the Middle Kingdom, aka China). Cantonese, on the other hand, is only spoken by a small percentage of the 1 billion inhabitants of China. They of course include the large population of overseas Chinese migrants which would explain why Americans and Canadians think they are speaking "Chinese" when they are really speaking a popular southern dialect.

Hence, from here on, I will use "Mandarin" to refer to the spoken language Pu Tong Hua; "Chinese" to refer to the entire language system which includes verbal Mandarin and the written Chinese characters. With this,I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I think I will in bringing up my baby trilingually.

*I consider a native Chinese speaker as a person whose heritage and lineage derives from China and who has learnt Chinese at a level that it constitutes a central part of his/her identity and perspective in addition to proficiency in the language. I have studied and spoken Chinese since birth, simultaneously with English and Cantonese. My mother's parents hailed from Guangdong province and they spoke only Cantonese to me when they were alive. To this day, even though my proficiency in Cantonese is below-average, I maintain a vocabulary and fluency that gets me by pretty decently on the streets of Hong Kong.

The Language Nazi: Singaporean English Faux Pas #1

I have decided to do a weekly post citing horrendous Singapore English proudly displayed in The Straits Times and other local English language publications. It shouldn't be difficult because almost every day I read a cringe-worthy piece that makes me want to tear the paper to shreds with my teeth.

The objective? To prove that the Ministry of Education has to do something about the quality of their English teachers, who are the role models for the very children who will grow up to become the future journalists and editors of The Straits Times and other local English language publications and productions. Don't get me started on the abysmal quality of our television presenters and TV hosts, most prominently the man formerly known as Phua Chu Kang.

Picture from www.straitstimes.com

Today's Faux Pas: ST, Home page B8, Monday 14 December 2009

"Keeping Fit Is Not A Military Exercise" by Jermyn Chow (typical Y-generation name, almost certainly grew up under the Teach-No-Grammar English language curriculum)

Under the sub-header, Chow writes: "Leading an active life should be cultivated from young, not at BMT"

An extremely commonly-used expression, "from young" can be heard - cringe!- on local tv shows and occasionally by the television reporter. Nobody seems to use the correct phrase "from a young age", likely because it's easier to say two words than four.

CRINGE FACTOR: 9/10