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!