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!