I’ve been learning Korean for about 7-8 years now. I started off as a KPOP fan in the year of 2009 when Girl’s Generation and Wonder Girls were gaining popularity. Following that, I continued to keep up with my interest in Korean pop music by searching for the translation of lyrics  of songs I was listening to, just so that I could understand what I was hearing and  grasp the main message of the song(s). I started delving deeper into KPOP around 2014/15 when I was going through major life changes after a personal incident led me to re-evaluate how I perceive myself. Since I started off as a KPOP fan pretty early on in my life, I wanted to understand what I was listening to as I believe that what I feed my mind can manifest in my thoughts and actions. Song lyrics were the primary medium of Korean that I was exposed to and they included a mix of both formal and informal Korean.

I also watched Korean dramas, mostly mid-length series, spanning 12 to 20 episodes that air over a duration of roughly two months. In terms of the use of Korean language in K-dramas, it helps that the language is contextualised and applied to real-life situations or an imitation of real-life scenarios. Another form of Korean I was exposed to was tweets. Being a KPOP fan, it was not uncommon to follow my favourite KPOP artists on Twitter where they posted photos with captions in Korean or longer tweets written in Korean. Being on Twitter since 2014, which is about 8 years so roughly the same amount of time that I have been learning Korean, I have been exposed more regularly to Korean script than text in my mother tongue (Malay). As such, some Korean words were often more accessible than Malay words, likely due to the strength of association and frequency of use.

I am proud to say that I now know enough to understand – I can understand more than I speak due to my lack of foundation in the grammar aspect of Korean – as well as translate, which I would consider to be an advanced level of Korean. I am currently doing translations for a fanpage of The Boyz member Hyunjae, which involves translating his messages on a fan-focused application as well as interview responses, promotional content, etc.

In the future, I hope to get proper certification or a placement test to determine my proficiency level in the language. Currently, my Korean proficiency level is ambiguous as I am not sure if I should consider myself to be an advanced speaker because I lack basic training in the language. As language learners, it is important not to become complacent and instead, we should humble ourselves when learning a language as it does not come as easily for some people. Thankfully, learning languages comes quite naturally to me as long as I have the interest.

This post was written by Aqilah, our #SGUnited intern. Aqilah is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks English, Malay, Korean, Spanish and Arabic.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

As the title suggests, my experience with languages has often been in waves. Perhaps to supplement this analogy further, a great example would be my experience with Japanese.

My household was filled with a variety of languages when I was younger: from Hokkien to English, Teochew to Mandarin. I was able to pick these languages up almost instantly with the intent to eavesdrop on adult conversations, or to even show that I was exceeding expectations as a child. However, my true interest lies with the Japanese language. It started from my experiences at sushi restaurants and watching child-friendly animations; I started self-learning this language with one of the language-learning compact discs you get from bookshops. While I managed to learn quite a bit of the language to make some sense of episodes of Doraemon without subtitles, the lack of usage among my family members hindered my ability to practise using the language daily. From my language environment, I picked up cuss words in Hokkien more quickly than the color names in Japanese.

My first wave of interest  in Japanese waned when school started getting busy. Of course, the lack of interest in the language or even the culture within my social groups in school hindered this learning further. As such, I lost almost all my grammatical and vocabulary knowledge by the time I was 15, though I remember quite vividly that I still remembered the numbers 1-10 and rapped it before my oral examinations as warm-up.

My second wave was fleeting when I was 16-17, when Murakami started being a little bit more popular on Tumblr and other book-reading communities. Of course, while I was not up to reading an entire book in Japanese (note: I’m not even n5 certified), I went back to watching animation and realized I had lost any form of understanding. While I was not surprised, it was definitely a pity to my younger self. Nonetheless, relying on my latent memories, I was able to pick some of those back up, though this proved to be futile when the wave ended a few months later.

Me, in 2017, living my best self in Osaka.

The most recent wave started when I started taking up lessons again in university. Of course, I still succeeded (quite well) in reciting numbers, though it became difficult and somewhat nostalgic when I started on the vocabulary. My social groups were more inclined to engaging in the culture , which inspired me to also engage more in Japanese content, further supporting  my learning of the language.  I hope this current wave doesn’t crash anytime soon, as there is still much more to learn.

This post was written by Cameron, our #SGUnited Intern. Cameron is a 4th year Psychology student and speaks English, Mandarin, and Japanese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Born to immigrant parents from China but growing up in Singapore meant that I am effectively bilingual, and as a child, the language I used was highly context dependent. If I was at home, I spoke Mandarin Chinese casually; if I was in school with my Singaporean peers, I spoke primarily in English and a “modified form” of my usual Mandarin. Translanguaging to me is intricately linked to my relationship with my identity, and as a kid I so desperately wanted to be a part of the in-group, the “true-blue” local Singaporeans.

Language is a signifier of identity and belonging. If you spoke a different variety, you may be treated differently. I was very conscious of this as a child and did everything I could to mask my foreign accented Mandarin. As a primary schooler, I monitored how I spoke Mandarin Chinese in public, changing how I pronounced retroflex sounds. An example I can think of is “二” (pronounced as “eer”), Mandarin for the number two. In public, I never rolled my tongue when pronouncing the “r” if I could help it as Singaporean speakers tend not to – and this was one of many strategies I employed to fit in. English on the other hand was my safety language because I spoke a similar English variety as  my peers, or at least an English that did not reflect my mainland Chinese roots. I struggled with reconciling the natural language that I shared with my family, and the local identity that I wanted to construct for myself.

In my teen years, I had a brief rendezvous with French, studying it for a brief two years. Now the only French I speak is censored. I also learned the Sichuanese dialect, a variant of Mandarin. Sichuanese, or Sichuanhua is the only language my paternal grandmother, or 奶奶 (nai-nai), speaks, and to communicate with her I had to understand it. Like my mother, I can understand Sichuanhua but speak it  poorly. Both of my parents are from the Sichuan province, a Southern part of China, and Sichuanhua is the language we use exclusively when communicating with relatives. My father is adept at switching into it when speaking to his cousins and back into Putonghua (the official variety of Chinese Mandarin in China) when talking to me and my mother. Thus, Sichuanhua is both familial and foreign to me, being a language spoken by my family but not one I can readily use. Perhaps an interesting side note is that I address my maternal grandmother as 姥姥, lao-lao, and my maternal grandfather as 姥爷, lao-ye. This is because my maternal grandmother is a Northern girl through and through and she wears the pants in the family (rightfully so). These terms are not commonly used in the Mandarin spoken here in Singapore.

As cliché as it sounds, I now love the languages that I speak. Maybe there will never quite be a label that’s a perfect fit for my identity, but that’s fine. To me, speaking and living a language comes with an appreciation of its culture and people, and that is a beautiful experience.

This post was written by Shifan, our #SGUnited intern. Shifan is a 3rd year Psychology major and speaks English and Mandarin Chinese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Growing up, I struggled speaking Teochew. My family often asked jokingly, “Mei, why do you speak Teochew with such force?” To pronounce the words, I usually had to try extremely hard to get the sounds right and to them, it just sounded unnatural and funny. On the other hand, my older brother was fluent and could converse easily with my grandparents and any other Teochew-speaking elderly. It probably had to do with the exposure he received when he was younger in the Ellenborough Market where my grandfather was a fishmonger. I certainly did not get that same exposure and hence, struggled to develop the same level of fluency.

I quickly realised that Chinese dialects were ‘dying’ in the Singaporean community as I struggled to converse with my grandparents. Thankfully, this realisation drove my curiosity and I forced everyone to only use dialects with me during our weekly family gatherings. My parents were also highly encouraged (by me) to expose themselves to the dialects daily. Fortunately for me, my extended family spoke Teochew, Cantonese and Hokkien, but I could only pick up the former two dialects better. It was through the constant exposure and the learning from mistakes I made when trying to pronounce the words and form sentences that helped me learn the dialects very quickly.

Initially, learning the dialects was a way for me to remember my identity as a Teochew and more importantly, converse with my grandparents. I soon learned that using dialects and languages was an effective way to connect with others and three situations helped me to cement that realisation.

The first was during a Community Involvement Programme in secondary school. Most of my classmates could not speak or even understand any dialects . I remembered when I spoke to the elderly in their dialects and saw how much comfort it brought them, as Mandarin Chinese was not their first language. They grew up with dialects and using Mandarin was uncomfortable for them. Despite sounding forced, they appreciated that I tried my best to speak the dialects because it brought them much ease and of course, a good laugh.

The second incident was in Canada. My brother and I went to a Chinese restaurant with his Canadian friends. Upon hearing us converse in Cantonese, the waiters gave us the ‘special secret menu,’ with food not included in the typical menu they gave to others. The waiters said it was for “自己人” (translation: own people). I realized language was much more than just speech. It was an identity and a whole culture. The care they provided us that day was a sign that they were rooting for their own people to succeed in a foreign land, and I appreciated that experience a lot.

Upon learning from my second experience, the third experience allowed me to make others feel at ease in Singapore. I do my best using my limited Japanese proficiency to converse in short sentences or phrases with my Japanese friends in Singapore. Like おやすみなさい！（Good night!）お誕生日おめでとう！(Happy birthday!) which surprisingly, brings them much comfort in a foreign land. Language has the power to comfort us as we remember the environments we once spoke these languages in and remember the good old times back home.

Languages are so much more powerful than you would expect.

This blog post was written by Tammy, our #SGUnited Intern. Tammy is a 3rd year Public Policy student and can speak English, Mandarin, Teochew, Cantonese and basic Japanese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Growing up, I was fortunate to experience living overseas before I entered Primary One. My father was sent to Thailand for work, and my family followed, living in an apartment in the middle of Bangkok. I attended an international school there for two years and studied Thai as my second language.

I recall the steep learning curve when I was first enrolled into a school in Thailand. Being only 4 years old at that time, I remember the shock and fear I had upon being ushered into a classroom where everybody spoke an unfamiliar language. Most significantly, on my first day there, my teacher had given an instruction in Thai, which prompted all my classmates to begin flipping through the pages of their workbook. Confused and lost, I promptly burst into tears.

Living in Thailand meant many things for my language development. For one, there was never a need to use my Mother Tongue. There was no need to know what the Mandarin word for bus, or school, or doctor was. Even when speaking to other Chinese Singaporeans, we only communicated in English. As such, I had below-kindergarten fluency in Mandarin when I returned for primary school in Singapore.

Another notable thing about my own language development was the varieties of English that I was exposed to every day. In school, my classmates were mostly British and Australian. My teachers were all either British or Thai. It would come to no surprise that, years later, people still point out some of my pronunciations as “odd” or not “Singaporean”.

It was the year 2005. Video calling technology was not really a thing yet. Watching Singaporean programmes from our Bangkok living room was not an option. I didn’t speak Thai well enough to play with my neighbours and didn’t have family friends or cousins to play with on the weekends. As such, the majority of my weekends were spent watching the few American programmes aired on TV or re-watching our handful of Disney DVDs for the hundredth time.

2008. I turned seven and my parents decided to send me back to Singapore for primary education.

I recall struggling a lot with Mandarin and detested the mandatory Mother Tongue lessons we had. It was unsurprising that I was shuttled in and out of Foundation Mandarin classes up until secondary school.

Growing up, it had always been amusing to me that while Singaporean English teachers were desperately trying to teach proper English and have their students un-learn Singlish, I was fighting to do the opposite. Many common terms thrown around here were unfamiliar to me for years. I felt victorious being able to mimic the colloquial phrases of “boleh, sian, onz, what talking you?”

I have always been quite aware of how the environment plays a huge role in language development, having experienced shifts in my language environment and its accompanying struggles as a result. Thus, language development is an area that I am interested in and wish to know more about.

This post was written by Kai, our #SGUnited Intern. Kai is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks English and Mandarin.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

When I was young, my mom always claimed that I was a talkative child. In my family, my mom always uses Mandarin with me and talks to me in Mandarin and my dad uses Mandarin and English. My mother  was always surprised when  I spoke to her with words or in ways that she hasn’t used with  me before. Growing up,  I was with my mom 24/7 , and she would sometimes leave  me alone in the living room to watch cartoons while she was cooking or cleaning. 

I enjoyed watching  cartoons from the different channels like Disney and Nickelodeon and since all of them were  in English, I was able to pick up English vocabulary . For example, I remember I learned to differentiate “weekday” and “weekend” because I wanted to watch “Winx’s Club” and it was only aired  on weekdays. So when “Weekend” was displayed on the advertisements, I knew there was no Winx’s Club to watch that day.

Besides that, I spent most of my school holiday at my grandma’s house when I was in primary school , and that’s where I got to learn Cantonese. At first, I was so confused about what all the adults were saying. They would simply switch to Mandarin whenever I joined their conversation and automatically switched back right after I left. I always felt like the odd one out, being the only one that could not understand and speak Cantonese. Thereafter, I tried my best to learn by mimicking others’ speech  and I got better and better. Maybe it’s because of the availability of opportunities to speak and listen , it wasn’t hard for me to learn. I believe that there are many language learners  that find themselves stuck at the phase where they understand but cannot pronounce the word or sentence. So for me, the core idea is that “no try no know”, it is only when you pronounce words wrongly then  you can learn to pronounce them properly.  

Other than that, my mom likes to watch Hong Kong dramas and she watches it every evening. I remember I would just sit beside her and we would watch it together every day until she told me to go to bed. This  influenced me to be interested in Cantonese too. Not surprisingly, I then acquired  Cantonese pretty well because of this prolonged exposure. So, many thanks to TVB, a television station whose dramas  I used to watch a lot as a kid!  

All in all, I feel it is pretty fun to learn languages when I am motivated and also when I see myself improving. Also, I do think learning indirectly or subconsciously from the media is not very effective when you are not initially interested in the language itself.

This post was written by Hong Ern, our #SGUnited Intern. Hong Ern is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks Mandarin, English, Malay, Cantonese, a little bit of Hokkien and German.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!