Hello world!
I’m Han and I’m from China. So obviously I speak Mandarin as my native language. As most of the Chinese kids in the 90s, I learnt English from secondary school, but it was typical dumb English. Also around teenage years, I became a fan of Japanese manga, movies and literature, so I started to pick up some basic Japanese. After I went to a Japanese language school, and joined a Japanese publisher as an editor, Japanese formally became my second language (or say, third language, but there has been a long while that my Japanese was far better than my English). Cantonese is another dialect that I picked up when I was working in the Guangdong province. After 5 years of my life living in the UK, English took back the proper secondary position of all my languages, dominating my work and over half of my social life.
Languages provide me pathways towards different cultures. For example, understanding and speaking Cantonese brought the Cantonese culture and local environment closer to me. When traveling around Japan, being able to talk to local people fluently helped me enjoy my trip. I always feel so amazed when sitting in a public space, and randomly heard any of these four languages popping into my ears. That makes me feel like an information gathering spot.
Apart from all the convenience in communication, being multilingual also inspires me the link between language and the way people think and behave. As a language I use most during my academic training and at work, when using English, I’m more logical, certain, and feel more strong and direct. While Japanese as a language famous in being vague, it makes me feel soft or even more feminine. I also find it very interesting to experience how second languages work different with native language in my brain. Particularly when I have difficulty quickly switching between two of my non-native languages. I guess that’s how I ended up as a researcher looking at language and brain.
Dr Ke Han is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the BLIP Lab working on EEG of babies’ language development.