A question I get asked a lot is if I can speak Chinese. Interestingly, most friends and people who were born in Asia assume I can’t, and most non-Chinese background people assume I can.

I think the reason for this is because most people don’t know what it’s like to be Chinese but born and bred in an English speaking country. As I have experienced, you are always suffering from some sort of identity crisis! Chinese people assume that one who grows up in a Western country could not possibly speak Chinese with any degree of fluency, and other people assume that if you look Chinese you must naturally be able to speak it!

Well the truth is that I can speak it fairly well but I am a much much better listener. I can understand most things others say, even words I’ve never learnt before (simply by the context and the way it’s used in the sentence). I can translate quite easily from Chinese Mandarin into English but not the other way around. Reading and writing is another story though!

However, the other day I was looking through the oldest of old baby/childhood family photos with my sister and in that box of photos was an old letter that my cousin had written my mother. For a laugh we decided to try and read it (it was written in Chinese). My cousin was in her early-mid 20s at the time and had spent some time living in Japan (she was previously living in Taiwan) and wrote to tell my mother about her time there. As if reading Chinese wasn’t hard enough we had to decipher her very scrawly cursive-style handwriting as well, which was another challenge. However, I am very proud to say that my sister and I, together, managed to read about 90% of the letter! I was so shocked and so pleased. I never would have thought I could read so many of the 3000+ Chinese characters.

My sister and I went to Saturday or Sunday school which is a community language school for children of non-English-speaking backgrounds to continue learning their mother tongue. I can’t say it was a great experience and everyone I know who went hated the experience, and to be honest I never learnt a great deal there as it was just rote learning/memorization. However, when I studied Chinese as an elective in university I finally learnt something!

But it wasn’t really until I lived in China that it all started to sink in. It is so much easier when you are immersed in the language. I never had any lessons there but since I was forced to speak, listen, read and write it daily (OK maybe not write) it made learning so much easier, and more fun! One of my proudest moments of being able to read an entire bus stop sign, which had the names of all the stops in Chinese. Later I could read almost every bus stop sign. I also felt very humbled many times when I saw many Caucasian people speaking and writing it better than me! You’d see them in cafés all the time with their laptop and textbooks…

Another challenge I had I was that I was brought up learning traditional characters, which have more strokes than the simplified characters. Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional characters, whereas China and Singapore use simplified characters. However, it’s much much easier to go from ‘rags to riches’ rather than the other way around. When you’ve done things the harder way, it’s easy to go and do them the easier way. I had this funny thought today in my head about HTML (another language!) as well. It’s easy to go and use Dreamweaver when you’ve learnt to write code by hand but it’s difficult and almost impossible to do it the other way around. Having learnt things the harder way first is not only more rewarding, but it makes you understand things better too.

I am proud of the fact that I’m bi-lingual and I know many Chinese-background people who were brought up in Australia who can’t speak any Chinese at all, or some that can speak it but not read it. I do think it’s sad when basically in just one generation, all their ancestors’ language gets wiped out.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter I had a go at the Masterchef hosts because one of them couldn’t pronounce “paella” and another couldn’t pronounce “bruschetta” correctly.

Having spent some time learning Spanish, I knew the “ll” is pronounced like a ‘y’ in English, some (like my Spanish teacher at the evening college) pronounce it like a ‘j’ too. Yep, that’s right. Those funny long-necked sheep-like animals are pronounced yamas. (What’s funny is that llama also means ‘name’). I’ve never learnt Italian but I feel like I was Italian in my former life. I have an Italian (Latin) name, I have a home in Rome, and I’ve adored Italian food for as long as I can remember. (I also likened myself to one of my favorite childhood cartoon characters, Garfield, who loves to eat pizza, pasta, and lasagne, and hates Mondays!) Somewhere along the way I heard or read that “ch” is pronounced like a “k” in English.. but even if I didn’t know this, I would look it up! I am very pedantic about spelling and pronunciation and all of that. If I don’t know something I make it a mission to find the answer!

One common thing about English, Chinese, and Spanish is that there are different ‘varieties’ of it. The Chinese that they speak in Taiwan is slightly different to the Chinese that they speak on the Mainland. By that I mean they use different words to describe the same things, the same way that people in the US or England or Australia or New Zealand use different words (eg flip-flops/thongs/jandals). The Spanish used in Spain is slightly different to the one used in South America, which is the kind they use in Pimsleur* and in the US. But in Europe, obviously, they use the Spanish Español. All of this makes it both fun and frustrating at the same time!

Learning a foreign language is one of the most difficult things but definitely one of the most rewarding! My sister is an inspiration to me as she started learning German in late high school and through university and has become so fluent in it she speaks it like a native-speaker with no hint of an accent, and could mark essays written in it. I have a good memory for remembering words but my problem is sentence structure and grammar (heck, my English grammar probably needs some work too!)

Links

• * I highly recommend the Pimsleur language learning system. I tried so many other tapes CDs which were useless then I read some great reviews about Pimsleur on Amazon, downloaded some samples and I was sold. I have recommended these to so many people because I think they are that good. I would play each lesson over at least 10 times until it finally sunk in, before moving on to the next one.
• A bit off topic, but check out Garfield Minus Garfied. It’s funny in a sad, scary way.

I don’t know if anyone has even noticed but I do realize that I write with both American and Australian/UK spelling. I figure if I use both I can cater for more people