My love for reading started out when I was very young and was further encouraged by my parents who shared a love for reading too! When I was little, I would pick out my favourite bedtime story to read every night, tucking the book under one arm and dragging my dad or my mum’s hand with my other arm to the reading corner. At first I always wanted to read only the English books – Aesop Fables, Peter and Jane series, anything Enid Blyton. I truly enjoyed escaping to another world in these stories fascinated by usage of sound words, descriptive words etc that make way for vivid imaginations.

But as a Tamil teacher, my mum started to get worried that I was not enjoying the Tamil language as much. She felt I needed to be well versed in my mother tongue too. To help me to enjoy reading in Tamil as much as I did in English, she would compile newspaper clippings, share storybooks filled with illustrations and colour, bring us to watch Tamil movies and stick up reading charts. This all helped to make sure my growing love for reading was balanced between my languages.

Also, by making reading fun and supporting my love for reading in both languages, I realize my parents have helped me to practise my bilingual language skills from a young age. Even to this day, I’m well-versed in both English and Tamil, and still enjoy reading stories in all my languages! What is the most fun thing you do in each of your languages?

This post was written by our Research Associate, Eshwaaree, who’s the only Tamil speaker in our team! She graduated with Master of Education in Developmental Psychology last year and is currently working on our language mixes project.

Want to know more about the fun things we’re working on?

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

My multilingual experience is best characterised as “late multilingualism”. Bilingualism attained early in life, either through the simultaneous acquisition of two languages at home or through early exposure to a second language before the completion of first-language acquisition at around age 5 is usually referred to as early bilingualism. So as a child I was monolingual, only speaking Chinese Mandarin. As some of you might be aware, in mainland China (as in Singapore), we have a lot of Chinese dialects. I would like to share stories of my dialect learning.

I spent my childhood in Jiangxi province, and lived mainly with my mother’s family. My grandparents were migrants from another province, hence my family conversed in a dialect different from the local Jiangxi one. They tried to teach me some words in their own dialects, and never encouraged me to learn the local dialect, as they deeply loved their own hometown and the culture. However, that didn’t stop me from learning the local  dialect from my friends in school.

Soon, I spoke the local dialect very well. I enjoyed talking, yelling and even swearing (which is not very good) with my friends in the local dialect. I kind of had to hide the fact that I can speak the local dialect from my family, as they were already a bit sad that I couldn’t speak their dialect very well. This small language conflict became a significant childhood memory. I knew how language related to one’s identity since then.

The dialect of the place I live is part of the Wu Chinese family. It has more vowels than Mandarin, and is one of the oldest languages in China. It’s not as hard as Cantonese for non-speakers to understand. I guess it’s probably because of the dialects I’ve been hearing since I was young that I have been open to learning the local languages wherever I go.

This post was written by Han, our Research Fellow. Beyond Chinese dialects, Han is also fluent in English and Japanese! Last year, she graduated with a PhD in Developmental Psychology. She’s working on language mixes project right now, with a focus on EEG.

Click here for more stories on our multilingual memories!

When my language skills became more developed as a child, a phrase that I would repeatedly (and perhaps excessively) say to my family was “humuhumu nukunuku āpuaʻa”. This is thanks to my Hawaiian-Chinese Uncle Byron, who is not actually my uncle by blood, but is definitely considered ʻohana*. This is the story of how Uncle Byron exposed me to another language that was not English (my native language) during the early years of my life.

I was fortunate enough to spend the first six months of my life in Honolulu, Hawaii, due to my father’s job assignment there. While I do not remember too much about my time there as an infant, I do remember Uncle Byron (as well as my father’s other Hawaiian colleagues) speaking to me and my sisters in Hawaiian. He bought us what eventually became my favourite childhood book; “Let’s Call Him Lau-wiliwili-humuhumu-nukunuku-nukunuku-āpuaʻa-ʻoiʻoi” by Tim Meyers. The book is intermixed with Hawaiian and English, and is about the journey of two different species of fish, the humuhumu nukunuku āpuaʻa (triggerfish) and lauwiliwilinukunukuʻoiʻoi (longnose butterflyfish), figuring out what to name their child. My sisters would pester Uncle Byron to read that book to us all the time. He happily obliged and read it in English and Hawaiian. When he needed a break from reading the book, he would play the ukulele and sing Hawaiian songs to us.

While I never continued to learn Hawaiian, I am forever grateful to Uncle Byron for piquing my interest to learn more than one language.

* ʻOhana means “family” in the Hawaiian language

This post was written by our Research Assistant, Seraphina, who works on the language mixes project, and from time to time, designs cute “lab swag”. Check out our Red-Dot Baby-Talk game to spot her kawaii food drawings!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

I first learnt English in secondary school. For most of my childhood and adolescence, I only spoke Vietnamese. Back in my country, English was a required subject in school. There was hardly any difference to us between learning English and Math. You learn some grammatical structures and words as you would mathematical formulas, and then you make some sentences. I had no strong feelings towards learning English at all. I never used it to communicate outside my classes.

After I graduated, I started to use English formally for the first time for my diploma degree, as the materials were all in English. However, the teaching was still delivered in Vietnamese. Although I understood the material, I never really learnt how to speak the language. It wasn’t until I came to Singapore when I started to pick up conversing in English as the courses were all taught in English.

I use English daily now mostly for research and talking to my colleagues and friends. Yet, I still can’t really use English outside of these contexts. For instance, I don’t understand much when I listen to music or watch movies without subtitles. English as a language has much more depth than what I have acquired. It’s not just a tool to learn some facts. People sing their hearts out with it. People share their life stories with it. It’s a safe where people keep their thoughts and memories. It’s English as a human language that helps speakers of it to speak, to read, to share, to feel, to be aware, to remember, to understand and to be understood. I may spend many more decades using this language and still be unable to unlock the intricacies and beauty of this language, something that many of you who are native speakers can do effortlessly. Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that worth keeping? 

I wish everyone a wonderful International Day of Multilingualism.

This post was written by Tuan Anh, our Research Fellow. He came to Singapore in 2008, and now he’s our knowledge engineer, computational linguist, and IT expert!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Singing – who doesn’t like it? But is it also useful for language learning? Children memorise songs really fast – do you remember how quickly everyone learned “Let it go”? As a former preschool teacher, I noticed children learn and remember new words the most through singing.

As a madrasah* student, I learnt three different languages in school: English, Malay and Arabic. One feature of Arabic that is hard to learn is the different endings for verbs. For instance, in the Arabic language ‘I went’ is Zahabtu and ‘she went’ is Zahabat. To make our learning experience interesting, our Arabic language teacher incorporated singing in class. I remember vividly how my classmates and I sang at the top of our lungs, and got excited when our teachers pointed to the different verb suffixes on the board. I also found it extremely helpful during exams! I still remember humming to myself the tune while answering my examination questions as a primary 3 student. 

Did you have any interesting or fun experiences learning language while you were young?

*A Madrasah is an Islamic school where besides having secular subjects such as English, Maths, and Science, we also have religious studies! We used to study those subjects in Arabic, but kids nowadays learn them in English and/or Malay.

This post was written by our Research Assistant, Sakinah. She used to go to a Madrasah located somewhere along Bugis, where she enjoyed spending her school years.

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When I was in primary school, we had Language Days where we were only allowed to speak one language on assigned days. The school’s main goal was to encourage the students to use each language more often. Since I was in a Madrasah*, we were taught using three languages: English, Malay, and Arabic. On Language Days, speaking the wrong language would cost us fifty cents—that could afford me a plate of rice back then! On days where the language was English or Malay, talking went on as usual, since these are the languages we speak at home the most, and feel most comfortable talking in. But on Speak in Arabic days, the school was suspiciously quiet… It’s really ironic because instead of encouraging us to speak in Arabic, we chose the easier way – by not speaking at all! It gets even funnier when we do try to say something but don’t know the word in Arabic, so we make an English/Malay word sound Arabic. If I could not remember the word for ‘library’ in Arabic, I’d just say ‘li-bi-ra-ri’ which fairly sounds Arabic (although I would still get charged fifty cents).

Looking back on those days, I should’ve made more of an effort to speak in a language that I don’t usually use. Maybe I would’ve been a better speaker at Arabic! Did you have Language Days in school too?

*A Madrasah is an Islamic school where besides having secular subjects such as English, Maths, and Science, we also have religious studies! We used to study those subjects in Arabic, but kids nowadays learn them in English and/or Malay.

This post was written by our lab member Shaza (the one in the middle!) After the snapshot series we had of our team, we also wanted to share some stories of when we were children—when our language (and perception of the world) was still very much developing in all the funny, different, and interesting ways.

I want to read more stories like this!