Unlike many Chinese children, my first language is not Mandarin, or at least standard Mandarin. I was mainly exposed to the Southwestern dialect of Mandarin before going to school, since my grandparents stayed with me and  spoke the most to me at that time. Though classified as a dialect of Mandarin, speakers of two different dialects can hardly understand each other due to differences in tones and native vocabulary. Even after I have learned and was “forced” to use standard Mandarin in school, I still used dialect in my family and with most of my friends, and the “vulgar” tones (in comparison to the Chinese government’s  standardization of Mandarin) always gave me a sense of warmth.

Figure from: Varieties of Mandarin. Wurm, Stephen Adolphe; Li, Rong; Baumann, Theo; Lee, Mei W. (1987), Language Atlas of China, Longman, ISBN 978-962-359-085-3.

My first experience with English and Cantonese were all related to music. My grandma loves music and used to play and sing songs to me ever since I was born. My mom would drive me to school, giving me an hour a day of music. Most of them were in Cantonese or English, making my taste of music unique compared to my peers. Now when I think back on it, I feel the lack of Mandarin or other dialects in the music list was probably a conscious decision by my parents. I did fall in love with those songs, anyway, and I tried hard to find lyrics or transcribe them using the phonetic alphabet, which largely helped with my pronunciation.

While my emotional memories about English are from music, the rational part comes from a few novels. I began to read some dystopian novels since I was 12. Maybe because English is not my mother tongue, I could not feel much emotional energy from pure English literature, compared to Chinese. Thus, the more I dove into it, the more I found that I could be a bystander while reading in English. With little sentimental impact from the words, I could evaluate pros and cons of people’s behaviors or government’s policies.

I chose to take German as one of my electives after I had some basic knowledge in linguistics. I was fascinated by etymology, either the connections among Chinese, Korean and Japanese, or the relationships in various Indo-European languages. It was a happy and fruitful time, but I gradually realized that English is probably the easiest Indo-European language to learn. With no grammatical gender and much fewer tenses, English may now be the freest western language since you can hardly be wrong regardless of what you have said.

This post was written by our intern, Zhixing. Zhixing is a 3rd Year student majoring in Psychology and Biological sciences. He speaks English and Mandarin, can understand Cantonese, and is learning German!

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!