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.
“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!
On April 23, we will be celebrating World Book Day! For us adults, there are many benefits that regular reading can bring about – including mental stimulation, stress reduction, and improved analytical skills! But what about very young children? Should we also be engaging them with books?
The answer is yes!
When we read with our children, not only do we get special bonding time together, we are also helping them develop language and listening skills. The first three years of a child’s life is critical for language development and they should be experiencing language-rich interactions often!
By engaging in language-rich interactions, young children develop:
Recognition of sounds (and letters when they get older)
Wider vocabulary size
Increased listening skills
Stimulation of imagination
Stimulation of their memory
Book reading is definitely a wonderful language-rich interaction!
But what if my child is too young to understand?
It’s alright if your child is too young to recognise letters and words. You can introduce pictures on the books and use storybooks as a tool for a language-rich interaction! In fact, at our lab, we provide wordless picture books to parents for storybook reading sessions (as part of our experiment set-up) because wordless picture books allow parents to freely expand on what they would like to convey to their child and use whichever language(s) they like!
Introducing books to your young child (0-3 years) will also provide sensory stimulation to them as they feel the textures of different books. Flipping pages of books is also a good way to stimulate fine motor skills.
For children above 3, storybooks allow children to encounter situations outside of what they usually come across in everyday life (e.g. teasing, bullying), and caregivers reading with them can help them think about how to manage those situations.
Can I use flashcards instead?
There is no concrete evidence that the use of flashcards helps children learn more words than other language activities like book reading. Some children may find flashcards fun and if your child does, it is just an additional tool you have to engage your child in language-rich interaction.
Are you a parent? Perhaps you might be interested in our wordless picture book? Or maybe you’re someone interested in the Science of Learning? Here at BLIP lab, we are researching various factors behind the Science of Learning – including what children are hearing in their environments. Join us in our research!
This post was contributed by lab manager, Fei Ting.
Sometimes, during a conversation, we find ourselves looking for a word in a particular language but it just won’t come up. Have we forgotten the word? Is it possible to entirely forget a language we’ve once learnt?
Second Language Acquisition generally means learning a second language that isn’t one’s first language, or a language that we learn or pick up (usually formally) as we grow older. In “Bridging the Gap between Second Language Acquisition Research and Memory Science: the Case of Foreign Language Attrition” by Mickan, McQueen and Lemhöfer (2019), Second Language Acquisition (SLA) involves the encoding of new words, consolidating, and committing them to long-term memory, and later retrieving them.
In Singapore, most of us experience early second language acquisition in Singapore or even simultaneous second language acquisition (exposure to both languages at the same time). Some of us may pick up a second language (or third, or fourth!) later in life, usually in a classroom setting. Sometimes, this sort of learning is referred to as foreign language learning ad in their recent paper, Mickan et al explored reasons for forgetting words in foreign languages we’ve learnt.
Foreign Language Attrition: forgetting words in that another language
Attrition happens when a previously mastered foreign language is forgotten. Some factors that affect the rate and/or severity of attrition are:
How proficient the speaker was before attrition
How old the speaker is when attrition happens
How often the language is used and how often they are exposed to it
How motivated the speaker is to maintain language usage
Previous research showed that attrition happens quickly yet gradually, leaving the speaker with the most basic vocabulary stored somewhere in the brain (Bahrick, 1984). How is this possible? Researchers suggested that this is because attrition is not a failure to remember, but more of a failure to retrieve. This means that instead of having forgotten that language entirely, the brain is now finding it more and more difficult to gain access to the previously learned language!
Attrition due to Interference between Languages
Rather than saying that attrition is a natural decaying process over time, experts suggest that retrieval triggers our languages to compete for resources in our brains. As bilinguals, we might find it easier to recall a word in the language that we are better at and do it often. Over time, we may be worse at recalling the word in our less dominant language. This phenomenon is called retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In a study done by Anderson and colleagues (1994), participants were asked to study a number of combinations such as:
FRUIT-APPLE FRUIT-BANANA FURNITURE-CHAIR
Participants then practiced recalling selective combinations of category and item, e.g. FRUIT-APPLE but not FRUIT-BANANA, before they were tested on all the combinations they studied. The results showed that recall was best for category-item combinations that were practised, i.e. FRUIT-APPLE, and worst for combinations where categories were practised but its corresponding items were not, i.e. FRUIT-BANANA.
How does this apply to language use? When a speaker of two languages, e.g. an English-Malay speaker, wants to refer to a “cup”, both “cup” in English and “cawan” in Malay will be activated and compete to be chosen as the word to be used. According to the language interference theory, the more the speaker chooses to use “cup”, the more inhibited the recall for “cawan” will be, making it harder to access in the future.
Is there a difference between words which sound similar versus words which sound completely different? For example, “table” in English and “tafel” in Dutch sound very similar, while the Malay examples I used sound very different. It is unclear, however, whether which type interferes more or less with each other. Sometimes, it might even seem like we may forget words in both languages! Maybe it’s just our brains trying to choose between the word we hear or use more often, instead of the language we use more often. What we do know is that being able to access both languages can be improved via active retrieval and usage of both languages. As they say, all is not lost!
At BLIP Lab, we’re working on some super exciting projects that explore Singapore’s colourful and unique language landscape, and how this might affect the language development of our young Singaporeans! For more information on our ongoing studies and how you can participate, click here!
The original article:
Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Bridging the gap between second language acquisition research and memory science: The case of foreign language attrition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00397
This article was originally crafted by Shaza, with edits by Fei Ting
As the beginning of a new term approaches, our lab director Prof Suzy Styles has a few words of advice through her own drawing of the Roadmap to Graduation! Here, she expands on the stops (and potential pitfalls) that students might face as they brave uni. Follow her Twitter account @suzyjstyles for more interesting tidbits about the brain, language, and intersensory perception!
START 💪
On the path to graduation, different people may encounter different things. Notice how the path is not straight? There are many twists and turns along the way.
Everybody has Real World Stuff outside of school that impacts the work they are able to do in school.
👉🏻Students can think about how to monitor these impacts.
👉🏻Faculty can think about how not everyone has the ability to reduce those burdens.
Everybody can lose their footing when unexpected things like illness, injury and trauma happen along the way.
👉🏻Students can think about how to communicate their needs.
👉🏻Faculty can think about how to respond compassionately.
If you are organised and lucky, working hard can put you in a position to earn YOUR BEST GRADE.
👉🏻Students can think about how not everyone is able to take this shortcut, and whether they can help others
👉🏻Faculty can think about how grades don’t necessarily reflect talent
Most people on the path to graduation will find themselves squeezed for time at some stage! What you do next depends on whether you have missed your deadline.
If the deadline has not yet passed, you have a chance to ask for help. Help comes in lots of different formats – study groups, you university’s study skills centre, the class TAs or even the student counselling centre. If you don’t want help you can always work super hard!
If a deadline has passed, and you have a valid reason for missing it, there’s another chance to ask for help!
👍It’s OK to ask for help!
👍In fact, please ask for help!!! Because it might save you from…
The FAIL-OUT PIT OF DOOM ☠️
👉🏻Students: Your main goal at Uni is to not fall in this pit on the way to graduation.
👉🏻Faculty: Help your students learn how to not fall in this pit on the way to graduation.
In summary…
Life can be hard
Some people are lucky
Be kind to yourself and to one another
Side note: Everybody looks great in graduation regalia! Let’s help you get that selfie ✌🏻
Footnotes:
Thoughts about compassionate teaching inspired by several great @bonni208 discussions on the @tihighered podcast
Thinking about how to help demystify the Hidden Curriculum inspired by conversations on the @TeachBetterCo podcast
As we look back on the year that is coming to an end, we would like to thank all our mummies and daddies and the little ones, citizen scientists and collaborators!
This year we began the first phase of our Baby Talk-A-Thonwhich will help us to understand more about the languages heard by little ones growing up in Singapore.
We conducted a series of recordings of how parents talking to their babies when playing with books and picture cards. We have begun discovering all sorts of interesting details about how parents switch between their languages to make the interaction more fun for their babies. The language mixes unique in each household may contribute unique individual differences in language outcomes of Singaporean children!
The Baby Talk-A-Thon will continue in the New Year – We will be contacting parents of children from 3 months to 3 years to invite 500 families to take part. Participating families will receive an individualized talk-report to help parents understand more about their child’s experiences with language. The talk-report details estimates of the number of turns taken by the parent and child, the number of adult words, and the number of child vocalisations.
This year we also developed new materials and tools that will help us to understand how language begins emerging for children growing up in Singapore. These tools include context-appropriate vocabulary checklists of all four main languages – a measure of vocabulary size of children under 3.
We also looked into special Red-Dot Baby-Talk words like mam-mam and shee-shee, which are some of the first words kids in Singapore learn to recognise. It is important for us to document and understand these Red-Dot words if we want to paint a fuller picture of a Singaporean child’s vocabulary.
Watch out on ourFacebookfor the launch of the first-ever study of these words in Singapore! We are asking people all over Singapore to help us understand how these words are used and when they are learned.
BLIP Lab has also presented our research at a number of different conferences:
Wai Tung shared her systematic review of language interventions at the University of Oxford.
Fei Ting presented on new approaches to characterising multilingual infants at the British Psychological Society Cognitive Developmental Joint Conference in the UK.
Various lab members also shared their work at the International Symposium of Cognitive Neuroscience held at NTU.
We also hosted meetings with our international collaborators in our new home – the Lifespan Research Centre in the LKC Medical School at Novena.
In the coming 2020, we look forward to beginning our neuroscience studies involving EEG and eye-tracking, continuing with Baby Talk-a-Thon & Red-Dot Baby-Talk, and pursuing the promotion of Open, Replicable science.
We look forward to having you involved in our upcoming investigations! Join us here!
We shared the news recently of Singaporean students and their fear of failure as reported in the well-being survey in the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – an international assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
72 per cent of Singaporean students revealed that they are anxious about how others would perceive them when they fail. 78 per cent of the students also reportedly viewed failure as something that would cast doubt on their future plans – well above the 54 per cent average reported by students from the other 37 OECD member countries. Is this just a case of being kiasu or is there more to this?
Being kiasu is the hallmark of a being Singaporean student – with high-stakes national exams and assessments for academic and non-academic activities. While this fear of losing to others may drive students to work hard but it may also ingrain an unhealthy mindset that focuses purely on outcomes and returns.
So how can we encourage our children to be less afraid of failing?
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, is known for her research on children’s mindsets when facing challenges. She identified two core mindsets: Fixed mindset, the belief that one’s abilities are predetermined at birth and set in stone and the Growth mindset, the belief that one’s qualities and skills can be cultivated and improved through hardwork and perseverance.
In her research, she saw that children with the Fixed mindset have a predetermined idea of what their abilities are and see challenges as high-risk. They shrink back and avoid challenges, thus limiting their learning opportunities. When they do try, harsh criticisms, poor grades, failures become proof that they are incapable.
On the other hand, those with the Growth mindset see challenges as a way to improve their abilities and skills. They tend not to shy away from learning something new or something difficult. For years, her research has influenced parents, educators and education policymakers. A teacher might praise a child for making an effort on a test even if he’d failed it, believing that doing so would promote growth mindset in that student. Encouraging our children to develop the growth mindset can help make them less afraid of failing.
But, here’s a caveat – empty praises may actually impede the development of the growth mindset.
In Dweck’s new book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she warns about the false growth mindset. She summarises the false growth mindset as 1) believing that a person has the growth mindset all the time for all areas, and 2) oversimplifying the growth mindset to be all about effort.
An individual may have the growth mindset for an area that she has already experienced success, for example, getting all the math problems in an assignment right. She may then be more confident when taking on other math problems. However, everyone experiences triggers that can set us on the fixed mindset for example, encountering something outside your comfort zone or meeting a person who is much better than you in something you pride yourself in. The key is being aware of what your triggers may be and being mindful when we find ourselves falling into the fixed mindset.
Secondly, we should never oversimplify the growth mindset and just simply praise all effort. Children who don’t do well may start to see the praise for effort as just a consolation prize. They may believe that you already see them as incapable and therefore are just praising them to make them feel better.
Dweck encourages parents and teachers to not just give empty praises but tie the praises to efforts that led to learning or growth. She says to also support the children in identifying strategies that worked for them and those that didn’t. In that way, failures become part of the process of identifying strategies that didn’t work.
Children need to know that when they fail, purely redoubling the effort in ineffective strategies may not lead to success. We should help them evaluate themselves and find more effective solutions to solve their problems.
Read more about Carol Dweck and her new book in this interview.
This post is crafted by Fei Ting: lab manager, teacher, and budding psycholinguist.
Are you a parent or educator? Or just someone interested in the Science of Learning? Here at BLIP lab, we are researching on various factors behind the science of learning – including what children are hearing in their environments. Join us in our research
Credits to Karasik, L, Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Ossmy, O., Adolph, K.E.
In recent years, there has been an uptake on promoting open, reproducible, and replicable science. One aspect of reproducibility is the replicability of experiments in non-WEIRD communities (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) but therein lies the question of cultural differences – What if our cultural behaviours change us?
In our recent journal club session, our lab manager, Fei Ting shared an interesting article from Science News on how culture helps shape when babies walk. We invited researchers from the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (RRIS) for the session to hear their insights on cultural differences in motor development.
The idea of strapping our babies in a cradle under swathes of cloth so that only their head can move for up to 20 hours a day in their first year may be shocking and unacceptable to some. However, this practice is common in Tajikistan, where mothers secure their babies in gahvoras – traditional cradles which infants are bound tightly in. The infants are not unwrapped for feeding as mothers bend over the gahvoras to nurse and the infants defecate through a hole in the cradle.
This practice of bounding infants and restricting their movements is largely unheard of outside the region of Central Asia and has never been studied before until recently. In contemporary child-rearing guides, parents are often encouraged to move their infants’ limbs and let them roll onto their tummies. Some paediatricians warn against binding limbs of infants as it can lead to severe long-term damage to their limbs and stun their motor development. However, that is not the case with these children who go on to develop regular motor skills despite the restrictions. In general, they reach milestones like crawling and first steps at a later time compared to children in Western societies but by age 4, they are no different from their peers in other societies.
Now, scientists want to find out if this cultural practice affects other areas of development.
A baby’s sensory perception of the world changes when they move from lying on their backs most of the time to being able to crawl and then walk on their own. These changes in sensory perception are also coupled with changes (mainly an increase) in interaction with caregivers – you can now point to an object, name it, then ask your baby to crawl towards it and perhaps name it again. In psychology, developmental cascade refers to the cumulative consequences of development across different developing systems e.g., motor, sensory etc.; where acquiring a certain set of skills (such as walking) influence the development of other skills (e.g. language).
So do babies who reach developmental motor milestones slower, also acquire language slower? That is the question that researchers like Lana B. Karasik are trying to find out.
At the end of the presentation, our lab director, Prof Suzy Styles shared with us her observations about Singaporean parents being less likely to put their kids in strollers and prams compared to parents in Australia. Here, parents carried their children if they aren’t walking, which gives them more opportunity to develop neck muscles at an earlier age. Researchers at RRIS also shared about how culture may also have implications on motor development, using the “Asian squat” as an example!
Can you think of more cultural practices we do here in Singapore e.g. using the baby bouncer? How do the different cultures in Singapore interact with the way we learn language?
Here at BLIP Lab, we’re interested to find out more about how our diverse language backgrounds influence language development for children in Singapore. Join us in our exciting discovery by clicking on this link: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/join/
This article was originally drafted by Shaza and edited by Fei Ting.
Will my child get confused? When should my child learn another language? My child has a condition which delays language learning, can he/she still learn a second language?
Most Singaporeans, like more than 60% of the world’s population, are bilingual or multilingual (Wei,2000). With our education system having a bilingual policy, many parents in Singapore have many concerns about raising bilingual children:
Learning more than one language limits my child’s ability to acquire language
The number one fear is that the child doesn’t only perform poorly in a second language—the “main” or first language gets affected too. However, studies have found that bilingual children:
Achieve similar critical milestones such as babbling and first words within the same time frame as those born in a monolingual environment (Maneva and Genesee,2002)
Produce first words around the same time as monolinguals (Genesee, 2003; Patterson & Pearson, 2004)
Are often found to know fewer words when each language is considered separately, but equivalent or even more words when the languages are considered together (Pearson & Fernández, 1994)
But will my child be confused and mix up the two languages? To answer this question, it’d probably be more accurate to ask, “will my child use words from two (or more) languages in the same sentence”? Yes. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing! Even if your child “mixes up” both languages (code mix), we can look at it this way: that this indicates their awareness of grammatical structures and constraints of each language, and their ability to activate both language systems simultaneously in a conversation. Children who are exposed to more than one language are actually competent in communicating and are usually able to adjust how much they should code mix according to who they’re speaking to. In fact, research has found that bilinguals rarely grow up using incorrect mixed sentences, especially if they receive formal education in that language in school.
Younger age = better acquisition
Some of us are aware of a ‘critical period of language acquisition’ where kids learn best. The problem is that age is usually linked to exposure, but these two factors sometimes don’t go hand in hand. There is also no consensus on whether exposure to a language at an earlier age on its own helps with achieving native-level language skills. There is evidence that other things being equal, young second language learners are more likely to attain levels of oral proficiency like those of monolinguals or, at least, greater proficiency than learners who begin to learn a second language when older (Birdsong & Vanhove, 2016)
More exposure = better acquisition
Studies report a positive relationship between exposure and language proficiency, which means that children who are more exposed to a language showed higher proficiency. In Singapore, English has become the most frequently reported main language at home for children between ages 5-10 (2010 Singapore Census). Understandably, these children might be more likely to show poorer competence in a second language, especially if they have no interest in learning it, much less using it. By encouraging the use of both languages for entertainment and fun, caregivers can help enrich their children’s language skills, and show them that there is more to learning a second language than just doing a subject in school.
My child has language and/or developmental problems, should they be learning more than one language?
Studies found that bilingual children with language impairments such as Developmental Language Disorder (or Specific Language Impairment), and developmental impairments such as Autism Spectrum Disorders, were not at greater risk of “worsening” their condition compared to monolingual children, nor do they fall short on language skills compared to monolinguals who have similar conditions (Bird et al., 2005; Hambly & Fombonne, 2012). However, these children are often excluded from bilingual programs and may have an impact on their future, such as employment opportunities or acceptance in a community, and cognitive benefits associated with bilingualism. More research needs to be done for us to learn more about how individuals neurological disorders deal with having two languages.
Here at BLIP Lab, we’re interested to find out more about the language landscape in Singapore, and how this might affect children’s language skills! We know that most children would be exposed to more than one language and are excited to see how language environments possibly change language outcomes. Join us in our discovery by clicking here.
Bird, E. K., Cleave, P., Trudeau, N., Thordardottir, E., Sutton, A., & Thorpe, A. (2005). The language abilities of bilingual children with Down syndrome. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 187–199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(2005/019)
Birdsong, D., & Vanhove, J. (2016). Age of second language acquisition: Critical periods and social concerns. In E. Nicoladis & S. Montanari (Eds.), Lifespan perspectives on bilingualism. APA and de Gruyter.
Hambly, C., & Fombonne, E. (2012). The impact of bilingual environments on language development in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42, 1342–1352. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10803-011-1365-z
Genesee, F. (2003). Rethinking bilingual acquisition. In J. M. deWaele (Ed.), Bilingualism: Challenges and directions for future research (pp. 158 –182). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Genesee, F. (2015). Myths About Early Childhood Bilingualism. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 56, 6-15. doi: 10.1037/a0038599. (main ideas in this post was drawn from this review article)
Maneva, B., & Genesee, F. (2002). Bilingual babbling: Evidence for language differentiation in dual language acquisition. In B. Skarbela, S. Fish, & A. H.-J. Do (Eds.), Boston University Conference on language development 26 Proceedings (pp. 383–392). Somerville, USA: Cascadilla Press.
Patterson, J. L., & Pearson, B. Z. (2004). Bilingual lexical development: Influences, contexts, and processes. In B. A. Goldstein (Ed.), Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers (pp. 77–104). Baltimore, USA: Brookes.
My name is Hannah, and I grew up in an English-speaking household. My language background is a little different from that of the typical Singaporean’s, as I was exempted from taking ‘Mother Tongue’ classes when I was in primary school. As a result, my exposure to the Chinese language came from my experiences of being sequestered to the back of the classroom with stacks of Chinese workbooks, a class name list, and instructions to check off the names of the pupils who had handed in their homework – by matching the Chinese character names on the workbooks to the name list. This task generally took the better part of the class time and was often fraught with mistakes due to the characters all being incomprehensible and perplexingly similar to my untrained eye.
Despite this rather unconventional childhood exposure to the Chinese language, I still managed to muddle through early life with an understanding of basic, commonly spoken Chinese words and phrases, likely gleaned from kindergarten and the daily conversations of the people around me. This was satisfactory until I entered secondary school when I decided that I wanted to learn more Chinese. In order to achieve this goal, I began listening to Chinese radio stations regularly, started watching more Chinese television programmes with the subtitles on. This regimen went on for a while with little obvious result until one day, I found that I had understood most of a story that was being told by a radio deejay! I still remember the story till this day, due in equal part to my surprise at having effortlessly comprehended a good stream of conversational mandarin, as well as the unfortunately shocking nature of the story involving accounts of grievous bodily injuries.
Although my second language ability may still pale in comparison to most other Singaporeans’, I am happy to know that I can understand at least a little of another language, as it opens up a whole new world of communication and adds a splash of extra colour to my conversational life. One tiny problem, however, is that I started learning basic French during my undergraduate years, and now find that my brain often accidentally substitutes French words for Chinese ones that I can’t remember on the spot. This can be a tad embarrassing when attempting to order lunch at the local food court by asking the aunty to jia (add, Mandarin) un peu plus (a bit more, French) cai (veg, Mandarin), merci (thank you, French), and being met with bemused confusion.
Hannah is a PhD candidate at BLIP Lab examining aspects of language learning including statistical learning.
