Singing – who doesn’t like it? But is it also useful for language learning? Children memorise songs really fast – do you remember how quickly everyone learned “Let it go”? As a former preschool teacher, I noticed children learn and remember new words the most through singing.

As a madrasah* student, I learnt three different languages in school: English, Malay and Arabic. One feature of Arabic that is hard to learn is the different endings for verbs. For instance, in the Arabic language ‘I went’ is Zahabtu and ‘she went’ is Zahabat. To make our learning experience interesting, our Arabic language teacher incorporated singing in class. I remember vividly how my classmates and I sang at the top of our lungs, and got excited when our teachers pointed to the different verb suffixes on the board. I also found it extremely helpful during exams! I still remember humming to myself the tune while answering my examination questions as a primary 3 student. 

Did you have any interesting or fun experiences learning language while you were young?

*A Madrasah is an Islamic school where besides having secular subjects such as English, Maths, and Science, we also have religious studies! We used to study those subjects in Arabic, but kids nowadays learn them in English and/or Malay.

This post was written by our Research Assistant, Sakinah. She used to go to a Madrasah located somewhere along Bugis, where she enjoyed spending her school years.

Click here to read more stories like this!

When I was in primary school, we had Language Days where we were only allowed to speak one language on assigned days. The school’s main goal was to encourage the students to use each language more often. Since I was in a Madrasah*, we were taught using three languages: English, Malay, and Arabic. On Language Days, speaking the wrong language would cost us fifty cents—that could afford me a plate of rice back then! On days where the language was English or Malay, talking went on as usual, since these are the languages we speak at home the most, and feel most comfortable talking in. But on Speak in Arabic days, the school was suspiciously quiet… It’s really ironic because instead of encouraging us to speak in Arabic, we chose the easier way – by not speaking at all! It gets even funnier when we do try to say something but don’t know the word in Arabic, so we make an English/Malay word sound Arabic. If I could not remember the word for ‘library’ in Arabic, I’d just say ‘li-bi-ra-ri’ which fairly sounds Arabic (although I would still get charged fifty cents).

Looking back on those days, I should’ve made more of an effort to speak in a language that I don’t usually use. Maybe I would’ve been a better speaker at Arabic! Did you have Language Days in school too?

*A Madrasah is an Islamic school where besides having secular subjects such as English, Maths, and Science, we also have religious studies! We used to study those subjects in Arabic, but kids nowadays learn them in English and/or Malay.

This post was written by our lab member Shaza (the one in the middle!) After the snapshot series we had of our team, we also wanted to share some stories of when we were children—when our language (and perception of the world) was still very much developing in all the funny, different, and interesting ways.

I want to read more stories like this!

When I was in Kindergarten, our school introduced after school classes in Japanese. This was pretty unusual for a government school in Australia at the time, where most of my classmates grew up monolingual – speaking only English at home and in school. I don’t remember much about the classes except for a small laminated card of the hiragana characters, and the orange striped cover of a square-paged exercise book. And origami. Lots of origami flowers. We moved house and changed schools not long afterwards, and I forgot that I had even taken those classes. But they must have made an impact on me… When it was time to choose my language major for High School, Japanese was top of my list, winning over French, German, Italian, Spanish and Auslan (Australian Sign Language). I continued studying Japanese for 6 years of high school, then three years of university, eventually living in Japan as an exchange student. 

During that time I went through the radical transition from competent learner to fluent speaker, and felt my mind shift gears to accommodate new ways of perceiving, ways of thinking, ways of being in the world, and ways of being myself. That transition is the main reason I am a language scientist today. As a developmental psycholinguist I investigate how minds develop in the context of their languages, and the sensory worlds they bring. We should value every chance for a developing mind to wrap itself around the shapes and sounds of language.

I recently spotted the orange striped cover of one of those exercise books on a trip to my family home. Inside was a treasure trove of early word learning attempts. Fleeting chances for the seed of a word to take root. Living away from Japan for some time now, my Japanese is getting rusty. But occasional words still sprout unexpectedly in my English sentences – wildflowers bursting into the light … genki… pittari… tappuri… And I am still obsessed with origami.

This post was written by lab director Prof Suzy Styles who will probably never draw a horse more stylish than the one drawn by her 6-year-old self in Japanese class. 

Click here to read more stories like this!

“Uncle! Prata set please—one egg, one kosong—and one teh peng! Oh actually can change to kopi siew dai?”

As a Singaporean, we’re used to hearing many different languages and/or dialects in our daily lives. Whether it’s talking to an uncle at the hawker centre or switching between languages to talk with different people, communicating in more than one language isn’t a foreign concept to us. #multilingualisnormal

Multilingualism is the ability to communicate in more than one language, whether it’s speaking (or signing), writing, reading, or understanding. Today, most people on the planet are multilinguals. Here in Singapore, we’ve been brought up to learn English alongside our Mother Tongue Languages. And in most cases, we even pick up another language or two as we grow up. For some of us, learning language might be a useful business advantage, while some of us just want to learn another language so we can understand and communicate about more things around us!

Previously, we have posted stories about our language backgrounds and experiences in a miniseries called Singapore Snapshots. Starting today, we will be sharing stories of our multilingual experiences from childhood. Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Let us know on our Facebook page whether any of our stories reminded you of your experience(s) with language, or whether you just want to share a different experience you had as you were growing up.

We’re also currently recruiting families and individuals to participate in our journey to understanding more about language. Click here to find out more about what we do and how you can participate!

The BLIP Lab team came from various language backgrounds! Want to read more about our various multilingual experiences? Click here!