When I went to Boston for a few months as a child and came back to Singapore, people said my accent changed, but I didn’t think so. I couldn’t hear it myself, but I could feel that the way I was shaping my words was different. I could feel that my words were rounder than usual, and used more of the back of my mouth than I used to. My family noticed, and my friends teased me, but I was oblivious. I hadn’t learned it consciously, yet my tongue remembered. This unconscious mimicry made me fascinated about the unconscious mechanisms of child language learning, and leaves my adult self staring wistfully at my Duolingo notifications, wondering where that magic went.

As a child, I managed to learn Cantonese and Japanese alongside the prescribed Singaporean languages of Mandarin and English, but that facility seems to have since faded. I’ve been trying to learn Hindi for a few months, in order to communicate with my boyfriend’s relatives, and to say that it hasn’t been as easy as my childhood experiences is an understatement. The hardest thing to wrap my mind around has been the introduction to gendered nouns. It becomes even more confusing when one realises the gender of the noun is not carried on the noun itself, but on the accompanying noun modifiers. For example: “She is reading her book” in Hindi is “Vo apni kitab padh rahi hai” – the gender of the owner of the book is carried on the possessive (apni) and the present participle (rahi hai) but not on the pronoun itself (Vo). When I complain of the difficulty, I am met with sympathetic nods and people saying that they simply learn the sentential structure as part of the word when learning the language as children.

Which brings me back to the original question: what causes the unparallelled facility of children in learning languages, and is it possible to replicate it as an adult? The answer to the first part of the questions lies in a confluence of factors: a brain built for exploration, a playground of fearless communication, and the constant symphony of immersion.

The Brain’s Linguistic Jungle Gym: Picture a child’s brain as a vibrant jungle gym of neural pathways, buzzing with activity. Every sound, every interaction, builds new connections, a labyrinth where languages weave and intertwine. Unlike adults whose pathways are paved and settled, children have a brain under construction, a “critical period” where they effortlessly absorb sounds and rhythms, mimicking them with a near-native precision that eludes many adults. Even their vocal cords are more adaptable, morphing to new pronunciations with relative ease.

Fearless Explorers of Words: Probably the bigger issue boils down simply, to shame, which is no doubt more ingrained in adults than children. Even when meeting people who can speak Hindi, I am usually too shy to try, letting my long pauses and perceived awkwardness fill me with panic. By contrast, children approach language with the courage of explorers, unburdened by self-doubt or the pressure of “getting it right.” They babble, experiment, make mistakes without flinching, piecing together the puzzle of communication through trial and error. This playful approach allows them to focus on the fun, the music, the emotional connection, rather than the technicalities. Adults, burdened by the “work” of language learning, sometimes forget this essential element. When learning becomes a chore, rather than a playful exploration, the spark of curiosity dims, and the path to fluency becomes a dusty road.

So, what can I do to recapture the magic of childhood language acquisition? I guess the answer lies in embracing the child within. To immerse myself in the language. Find opportunities for playful interaction, conversation, and laughter. Embrace the mistakes, the stumbles, the silly pronunciations. And most importantly, let go of the pressure to be perfect.

I want to have faith that we can all become linguistic chameleons, and it may take more effort than it did for our younger selves, but I have to learn to see the journey itself as a reward. After all, my attempts to learn the Hindi language is not just about mastering grammar and vocabulary; it’s about finding out more about my boyfriend’s family’s culture, their perspectives, and world. Here’s hoping I can shed my doubts, and let myself go on a wonderful cultural odyssey.

Jin Yi is our Research Assistant, working on the language mixes project. Jin Yi’s languages are English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Arabic.

Want to read more of our Multilingual Memories? Click here!

Unlike many Chinese children, my first language is not Mandarin, or at least standard Mandarin. I was mainly exposed to the Southwestern dialect of Mandarin before going to school, since my grandparents stayed with me and  spoke the most to me at that time. Though classified as a dialect of Mandarin, speakers of two different dialects can hardly understand each other due to differences in tones and native vocabulary. Even after I have learned and was “forced” to use standard Mandarin in school, I still used dialect in my family and with most of my friends, and the “vulgar” tones (in comparison to the Chinese government’s  standardization of Mandarin) always gave me a sense of warmth.

Figure from: Varieties of Mandarin. Wurm, Stephen Adolphe; Li, Rong; Baumann, Theo; Lee, Mei W. (1987), Language Atlas of China, Longman, ISBN 978-962-359-085-3.

My first experience with English and Cantonese were all related to music. My grandma loves music and used to play and sing songs to me ever since I was born. My mom would drive me to school, giving me an hour a day of music. Most of them were in Cantonese or English, making my taste of music unique compared to my peers. Now when I think back on it, I feel the lack of Mandarin or other dialects in the music list was probably a conscious decision by my parents. I did fall in love with those songs, anyway, and I tried hard to find lyrics or transcribe them using the phonetic alphabet, which largely helped with my pronunciation.

While my emotional memories about English are from music, the rational part comes from a few novels. I began to read some dystopian novels since I was 12. Maybe because English is not my mother tongue, I could not feel much emotional energy from pure English literature, compared to Chinese. Thus, the more I dove into it, the more I found that I could be a bystander while reading in English. With little sentimental impact from the words, I could evaluate pros and cons of people’s behaviors or government’s policies.

I chose to take German as one of my electives after I had some basic knowledge in linguistics. I was fascinated by etymology, either the connections among Chinese, Korean and Japanese, or the relationships in various Indo-European languages. It was a happy and fruitful time, but I gradually realized that English is probably the easiest Indo-European language to learn. With no grammatical gender and much fewer tenses, English may now be the freest western language since you can hardly be wrong regardless of what you have said.

This post was written by our intern, Zhixing. Zhixing is a 3rd Year student majoring in Psychology and Biological sciences. He speaks English and Mandarin, can understand Cantonese, and is learning German!

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

As a Singaporean born in the United States, the only lifeline I had to my Mother Tongue (Mandarin) was literally my mother. Worried for my language ability, she taught me in every way she could: reading stories, reciting poems, physically guiding my handwriting; an experience in both English and Mandarin. The difference, however, was that at kindergarten ages, I had more formalised lessons in English than I did in Mandarin, which was almost exclusively taught to me by my mother. Comparatively, it could be said that the process was much more intimate than that in acquiring English. Perhaps because of this difference then, accessing my emotions through English was more foreign than I expected…

Where English is the primary operative language in Singapore, with much formal communication using it, I found it difficult to express myself fully through English—there would always be this gap, this invisible wall, between me and the other party no matter how I tried to put my sentences together. Meanings would get across, sure, and at the same time, the communication felt flat—was the depths of what I felt actually getting through? This concern showed glaringly in my interactions with my mother: wires would get crossed and we’d often misunderstand each other. For some unknown reason, on a random day, I tried talking to my mother in Mandarin about a complaint I had. What I realised, after switching to Mandarin, was that my ability to express myself had been enhanced. The ranges in tone and pitch in which I was able to express myself had expanded, allowing for a greater variety of ways I could express exasperation, joy, playfulness, my feelings in general, and allowed me to better communicate with my mother.

Understandably, many things affect expression through language, but I would like to think that thanks to the unique experiences I had in being exposed to Mandarin as a child, that it truly has led to it being my Mother Tongue.     

This post was written by our new Junior Research Assistant, Xavier. Xavier was a Sociology student and speaks/uses English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Singapore Sign Language (SgSL), French and German (in order of proficiency).

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

Over the years, I have picked up languages, little by little. And for me, knowing about different languages has helped me to build bridges and relationships with many groups of people throughout different stages of my life. 

Growing up, my language environment at home was quite diverse. I was exposed to a lot of English, which my parents spoke at home. Sometimes, Mandarin was spoken at home, but less so. Besides English and Mandarin, I was also exposed to Hokkien at home as my grandparents stayed with my family until I was in Primary 2. Unfortunately, I did not learn much Hokkien from them, and mainly spoke in Mandarin to them. I could only utter short phrases or sentences in Hokkien to them, such as “jiak ba liao (吃饱了)!” (Ate already!). 

While it was probably a conscious decision by my parents not to teach me Hokkien, I regret not learning Hokkien early in life. I often ended up using Mandarin for most daily interactions in Chinese, seldom replying to others with short Hokkien phrases. Yet, there have been times where I reply to seniors in Hokkien, and they become happier to hear my limited Hokkien.  

In secondary school, I became friends with somebody who belonged to a common online community related to buses. (Yes, I have been interested in buses since I was young!) He introduced me to Cantonese music and Hong Kong dramas that he watched and listened to, and I slowly started listening to Cantonese music on my own. I also attempted to pick up a little Cantonese, although I currently can only utter short phrases without switching to Mandarin. Fortunately, there was once when I managed to give directions in Cantonese to somebody when I holidayed in Kuala Lumpur! 

Besides knowing limited Hokkien and Cantonese, I have surprised people by speaking and writing in yet another language: Malay. In fact, I consider Malay to be my third language after English and Mandarin, on the virtue of my frequent usage of Malay almost daily. Additionally, I listen to Malay pop songs daily, with my favourite Malay singers including Arni Om and Nora. 

While often a stylistic shift, I have used basic Malay to communicate with different groups of people I jumpa (Malay for meet), including my Malay friends and colleagues, as well as Malay hawker stall owners. In addition, I sometimes greet Malay bus captains (BCs) in Malay and have even made some BC friends through my greetings to them! 

In Malaysia, while I can often get by using English, being able to speak and understand Malay has often come in handy. Similar to how I managed to give directions in Cantonese, being able to speak in Malay allows me to give directions to others who also speak Malay, including Malay Grab drivers. Additionally, speaking in Malay helps me to communicate better with Malay shop assistants, who often become friendlier towards me due to my knowledge of Malay. 

While some of my peers do speak Malay, including my non-Malay friends, many of my friends are surprised to hear me speaking in Malay, or a mix of English and Malay. Besides hearing me speak in Malay, another thing surprising to them is how I only began learning Malay intensely in the second semester of Year 1 in university, after several years of wanting to pick up the language. 

In my journey of learning Malay, there has been many struggles. Owing to a lack of knowledge of Malay vocabulary, and struggling in knowing what to say, I often speak slower than my Malay friends, and sometimes stumble in my speech. The road to learning Malay as a non-native speaker is still steep for me! 

Yet, despite these changes, the benefits of learning Malay have been tangible. Through my usage of Malay, I have had warmer and friendlier conversations with both friends and strangers alike. Additionally, I have written posts on social media in Malay, albeit often in combination with English and sometimes Mandarin Chinese. My multilingual posts, and particularly my usage of Malay, have fascinated many friends who view my Instagram and Facebook posts, and compliment my Malay speaking and writing skills. 

While becoming an effective communicator in Malay will be a lifelong journey, I am blessed that learning Malay has helped me to have closer relationships with my Malay friends and has given me a chance to engage with native Malay speakers more effectively and intimately. With Malay continuing to be an important lingua franca (“bridging language” between speakers of different native languages) in the region, I hope that my endeavours in Malay will continue to reach new heights, and that I may one day know how to write, speak and know Malay the best way I can. 

Indeed, languages are bridges across cultures, ethnicities, and ages. Just like food, languages provide a common ground for all of us to unite and be harmonious as a society. With Singapore’s uniquely multilingual society, knowing different languages is a blessing that ties everyone together. And it is on this note that I hope you may appreciate the power of multilingualism, one way to a person’s heart just like food (yum!).  

Makasih kerana baca pos ini! (Thank you for reading this post!)  

Regards,
Adik Andrew 

This post was written by our intern, Andrew. Andrew is a Year 2 Linguistics and Multilingual Studies student with a Second Major in Theatre and Drama, likes to wear many hats, and speaks English and Mandarin, some Hokkien and Cantonese, and basic Malay.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

As a Deaf person who grew up in a hearing family and later became part of the Singaporean Deaf community, I was exposed to a variety of spoken and signed languages which shaped my linguistic repertoire today. I was born hearing and grew up learning English and Mandarin Chinese like many other Singaporean Chinese. My parents had hoped for my sister and I to be effectively bilingual in English and Mandarin. As English was used extensively in school, my parents spoke more Mandarin to us at home. As I gradually lost my hearing over the years, it became more challenging for me to speak and understand spoken Mandarin, due to its tonal nature. I stopped learning Mandarin in my teenage years, and currently have a basic knowledge of Mandarin from what I could retain from my childhood. My strategy of learning English also changed from one that is more aural to one that is more visual, with my acquisition of signed languages.

It was in my early teenage years that my family and I picked up Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) together. As online learning resources for SgSL were limited back then, we started off learning American Sign Language (ASL), which shared many similarities with SgSL. We would learn a specific theme (i.e., animals, transport) each week, and each time we did not know the sign for an English word, we would look it up on the ASL dictionary. We eventually took SgSL classes, where we learned the language in its entirety from a native Deaf signer. My family now mainly uses sign supported English in our communication.

Through my language experiences, I discovered the role of language in shaping our identity. My process of learning signed languages and integrating into the Deaf community was not a smooth one. Before achieving proficiency in SgSL, I felt stuck between the Deaf and hearing worlds and was confused about who I was. I did not belong to the hearing community due to my inability to hear and effectively communicate through speech, neither did I belong to the Deaf community as SgSL was not my first language. This was a common struggle faced by many Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who grew up without exposure to signed languages and the Deaf community. Additionally, it was difficult to relate to my hearing Chinese friends due to my lack of proficiency in Mandarin. I did not feel comfortable with the fact that I was ethnically Chinese, and yet I could not speak my own mother tongue.

However, with my increasing proficiency in SgSL and interactions with various Deaf signers, I learned that there is no one way to sign or to “be Deaf”. A diverse range of communication methods and sign varieties are used within the Deaf community, ranging from speech to sign supported speech, signing exact English, pidgin signed English and SgSL depending on an individual’s background and language exposure, and translanguaging occurred frequently. With this realisation, I began to embrace myself, my languages and the experiences I’ve had as a bimodal Deaf individual and gradually developed a sense of belonging to the Deaf community, while also gaining greater confidence in navigating the hearing world.

This post was written by our new Junior Research Assistant, Gigi. Gigi majored in Psychology and mainly uses English and Singapore Sign Language (SgSL).

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

When I was presented with the chance to try new things to fulfil my unrestricted electives in university, I jumped at the chance to learn a new language so that I finally would have something to say to my extended family members when they say, “Oh how nice! So how many languages do you speak?” when they find out that I major in linguistics. Linguistics is more of the scientific study of language and its intricacies rather than just learning multiple languages, but I thought it wouldn’t do me any harm to be able to humour them anyway.

On a more serious note, I had been wanting to learn a new language because I always felt like languages were the key to a multitude of experiences. There is also that famous quote that goes “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” The quote expresses that people would also view you in a more positive light if they saw that you were making an effort to learn and practise their language.

Learning a new language would be able to open so many doors and introduce you to a variety of things, an example would be media consumption in that language (How many of us watch K-dramas religiously despite not understanding the language but relying on subtitles? I’ve heard so many stories of people’s elation when they realised they didn’t need those subtitles as much as they used to!)

I was so excited and there were so many options to choose from, I made the decision to learn the German language. German was one of the language modules offered in my university, with some of the more popular ones being French, Korean and Japanese. I walked into the German classroom for my first lesson 30 minutes late, because I was a freshman and I couldn’t find anything around the university. Unfortunately, I also didn’t have the forethought to survey the place beforehand. I was filled with adrenaline (both from running up 3 flights of stairs trying to be less late and also because I was going to learn something new) and ready to begin my journey into the great unknown of the German language.

Alas, it didn’t take long for cracks to appear in my resolve. There was this completely new aspect that German had and it was called grammatical gender. I knew that languages such as French and Spanish used grammatical gender as well but German didn’t just have 2 grammatical genders, it had three! The third one was called ‘neuter’ and it meant that the word had a neutral gender, ie. neither masculine nor feminine.

Coming from a background where both the languages I spoke – English and Tamil – didn’t make use of gendered nouns, I found myself in completely unfamiliar territory. There were sure to be over a thousand nouns in the language, was I meant to remember the gender for every single one of them? To my dismay, the answer was ‘yes’. I wasn’t sure how to go about learning gendered nouns because I never had to do that for Tamil and English. In the English language we have the all-encompassing ‘the’ as a definite article, and Tamil works a different way by not quite having an equivalent for ‘the’. In German however, we have ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’, all of which translate to ‘the’ in English but in different genders. I found this out the hard way when I thought Google translate could help me with classwork and I ended up with “the, the, the”.

With time (and a lot of guidance from my German teachers), I came to learn that the only way to master grammatical gender was to learn the gender of the noun together with the noun itself. Even though this seemed daunting, it was the most efficient way to get the gender right. Although some word endings would always go with a certain gender, like how words ending with -chen are usually neuter, this was not always a foolproof way to guess because there were always exceptions and special cases. There was also the issue of plural nouns, but fortunately they were always feminine.

The gendered articles also do not follow a fixed form, the case of the noun can affect how it appears in a sentence. Noun cases tell us how a noun is being used in a sentence, whether it’s an object, the subject, or taking another role. Combined with the cases, German has more than just three definite articles. Even though I’ve come a long way from the wide-eyed freshman that I once was, grammatical gender still remains something that stumps me at times despite moving on to higher levels of German.

That being said, it does help to know that statistically most German nouns are feminine, followed by masculine and finally neuter. So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re forced to guess (think: German exams where you don’t have Google to help you), guessing ‘die’ would be the safest option.

I’ve learnt a lot in my journey of studying German and I still have a long way to go, but I’m thankful that I got to experience learning a language that makes use of gendered nouns. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m willing to continue despite the rising number of ‘der, die, das’ crimes I’ve committed. To answer that question from earlier, ‘flower’ is a feminine noun, ‘die Blume’. Of course, if you put it in different cases or add plurality it can become ‘den Blumen’ and ‘der Blume’. They do say practice makes perfect!

This post was written by our intern, Sheetal. Sheetal is a 3rd Year Linguistics & Multilingual Studies student, speaks English and Tamil, and is learning German!

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

My experience with multilingualism has been pretty colourful. I speak English and Mandarin and can speak and understand Cantonese and Hokkien, though a little less fluently. But my first real experience of having to speak in a third (fifth?) language out of real necessity was when I went on exchange to Korea last year.

The initial level of panic and anxiety I experienced was indescribable. At first, something about speaking in another language in front of actual people was really anxiety-inducing for me. 

The longer I stayed in Korea, the easier it got for me to calmly listen to, understand and respond to locals who spoke to me in Korean. However, high-stress situations (e.g., dropping your phone on the floor when paying a taxi driver at Jeju Airport, not realizing until the taxi drives off and your flight departs in an hour) completely wiped every single language from my brain aside from English. I guess the panic and urgency must have overridden other considerations aside from needing to quickly and clearly communicate what I needed at the time. (Travel tip: always use a ride-booking app overseas so you can track the vehicle down when you lose something).

The biggest test of my Korean to English/Mandarin skills was when my family and I visited a wood craftsman’s studio. The constant stream of “Lisa, ask him what this is/when he made this/if he made all this by himself/what else he uses the studio for”, asking him the questions, comprehending his answers and translating them back was more tiring than I expected it to be. 

There are also some words in Korean that mean rather specific things, that I suddenly wouldn’t be able to remember when I needed them (tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, hahaha). For instance, there’s a word specifically for getting a job after you graduate. The artist had asked me about my older sister’s career, and I simply could not remember that specific word until hours later (취직하다 chwi-jik-hada, in its root form).

The overall experience was still positive, I would say. Learning new languages and picking up new skills is always fun and a good activity for your brain. It’s important to find ways to use these skills and practise these languages, so that the information stays relevant and accessible. 

Some advice: don’t worry about not being able to remember those specific, advanced words! Using simple words for what those words mean gets the message across fine, and it’s actually often what locals tend to do as well. Also, native speakers are a lot more forgiving than you expect them to be. They already appreciate your efforts to learn, and they will not laugh at you for making mistakes unless they’re really mean, in which case you’re better off not speaking to them either. Have fun!

This post was written by our intern, Lisa. Lisa is a 4th year student majoring in Psychology, and speaks English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Korean.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

Primary school felt like aeons ago and my memories of it are pretty much hazy, but I still recall that in my small neighbourhood school, my everyday conversations with friends comprised mainly of Singlish with a liberal usage of Mandarin Chinese. This was something that I was comfortable with, for it is the language that my parents brought me up with. A Chinese-heavy version of Singlish became my default conversing language, even during the secret monologues and quips in my mind!

They say secondary school is a world of difference from primary school, and that rang true for me. My secondary school was quite westernised, where friends all seemed to speak perfect English, but were conversely weaker in Chinese. Chinese was seen as a “subpar” language, and everyone seemed to hate it.

And so my adolescent brain crafted a secret motto: “English is good, Chinese is bad”. My comfort in Chinese gradually twisted into shame and distaste– I was ashamed that I was comfortable with Chinese, and that my family spoke in a mix of broken English and fluent Chinese. 

But the truth is, Chinese is a beautiful language in its own way. There wasn’t really a watershed event that subverted my unfair notions; it was a gradual change that came with experience. Interestingly, it wasn’t the old poems we were forced to recite in class that hammered this understanding into me– it was the lyrics of mandopop songs. As I grew older and read more into song lyrics, I began appreciating languages more. I found the lyrics of some Chinese songs strangely poetic; the words used are concise, yet hold so much. 

Maturation also meant the realisation that it was foolish to dislike a language that has done no harm to me. Why should I be ashamed of a skill that helps me to form bonds with people? Much less a skill that has been an essential ingredient in my family’s relationships. 

My Chinese capabilities now aren’t on par with what it was like during ‘O’ Levels, but my reconciliation with the language has certainly persisted through time. 🙂

This post was written by our intern Joan. Joan is a 3rd year student majoring in Psychology and Biological Sciences and speaks English and Mandarin.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

“Uncle”?

My American friend repeated quizzically. I thought: how does one refer to a stranger outside of Singapore? “I meant an old man, some stranger,” I corrected myself.

I was relaying an anecdote to my friend, who is American and has no understanding of Singlish whatsoever, including the fact that the noun ‘uncle’ can refer to any man from an older generation who may or may not be a relative. It took me this moment to realise how idiosyncratic our unique blend of colloquial English is. I was spending my semester abroad in upstate New York, and found that my code-switching capabilities were unexpectedly running short.

How difficult can it be? I speak English too, and with Singapore being no stranger to the effects of American cultural imperialism, the majority of Singaporean youth have a grasp on how the Americans talk based on binging episodes of American television, consuming American products and listening to American musicians. 

Instead, I still found myself at times trying to explain what ‘sia’ or ‘leh’ meant, oftentimes failing to come up with an understandable definition and feeling embarrassed at simultaneously looking like a ‘failed’ Singaporean and feeling like I speak broken English. Growing up in the shadow of the ‘Speak Good English’ movement, I was inculcated with the knowledge that Singlish is detrimental to one’s social standing and hinders their upward mobility. And yet, Singlish has never been any less removed from the common Singaporean vernacular of today. In fact, those that consciously attempt to separate themselves from Singlish seem to only face ridicule and are accused of being supercilious.

What does this mean about our perception of language? More than just a tool for communication, it is a marker of our national identity and represents our shared history: there are vestiges of Standard British English mixed with lexical borrowings from our 4 official languages to produce a cocktail of a language that is singularly unique and non-standard. I found myself conflicted by the government’s attempts to eradicate a wonderful shared creation, and even though the Singaporean government has switched its stance in recent years by acknowledging Singlish’s unifying force and even celebrating it, the widely-held perception that ‘Singlish is bad’ remains, my aforementioned feelings of shame included.

I am still learning to accept the beauty of Singlish: my difficulty in defining a Singlish term is simply a testament to its profound complexity, and my inability to completely desert it in my vernacular only speaks to my own enduring bonds to my home country. Speaking to a fellow Singaporean friend who had also just returned from the States, we both lamented at how hard it was to communicate with a non-Singaporean for a prolonged period of time because only Singlish, in its diversity and emotional depth, is able to effectively bring across the truest sense of what we mean. How does one translate into words the despair associated with the term ‘sian’, the pleasure associated with ‘shiok’ and the simple joy of exclaiming ‘gao dim!’ at the end of a tedious and difficult task? As a celebrated linguist once said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”

This post was written by our intern, Charlotte. Charlotte is a 4th year student majoring in Public Policy and Global Affairs and speaks English and Mandarin.

What do you call the people around you? Do you call strangers ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’? Do you use these same words for family members? We’re interested to find out more about these ‘kinship terms’ used in Singapore! Participate in our online study here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6WgBjxXcjSM3IvI

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

In my family, I was the oldest among my cousins (on both sides), and hence my grandparents’ first grandchild. I spent most of my time as a kid chatting with my grandparents in Mandarin whenever we visited. I would also sing along to Mandarin songs that played on the radio, even if I didn’t know what they meant. Mandarin came naturally to me, and I enjoyed speaking it.  

After primary school, I enrolled in a SAP* school. It was around that point in my life when I started to dislike Mandarin. To me, there was a clear distinction between speaking Mandarin in everyday life and in Mother Tongue examinations. I could converse well in Mandarin with my family, but I was pretty bad at writing Chinese essays and performing at Chinese oral examinations. It was also a common experience shared among my classmates, which was strange for a school that heavily promoted bilingualism. Conversely, many of my friends in school were quick to learn foreign languages – Japanese, Korean, French etc. I started learning German in secondary school as well and found it a lot easier to acquire.

I still made it through Chinese exams though, and I think it was probably because of my Chinese teacher. He quickly realized that many of us in class found Mandarin difficult and tried to make it more fun for us. We often watched Chinese movie clips and music videos in class. In preparation for our O-levels, he also made a long list of Chinese vocabulary with English translations. It doesn’t sound particularly interesting, but it made learning these words feel less of a chore and more like a trivia quiz. I mean, when else would I find the need to use the translation of GPS (which I learnt was 全球卫星定位系统 quan2qiu2 wei4xing1 ding4wei4 xi4tong3)?

Slowly, I began to reconnect with the language through pop culture – belting out to Eric Chou at karaoke sessions, chasing Chinese Meteor Garden and Idol Producer episodes with my friends. We still hated the exams, but learning Mandarin started to become more enjoyable.

Working in a café at university now, I came across many Mandarin-speaking customers. I’m glad that I’m still able to take orders and give basic directions in Mandarin. Even now, I’m still learning new words! Like 拿铁 (na2ti3 ‘latte’) and 焙茶 (bei4cha2 ‘hojicha’), which are words I hardly encounter anywhere else.

Although I used to dislike the language, Mandarin has served me well; it helped me connect with my loved ones, communicate at work, and even watch my favourite shows without subtitles! Truthfully, I don’t use Mandarin as much these days, but it’s a language I will always appreciate and continue to revisit whenever I can.

*In a Special Assistance Programme (SAP) school, several subjects may be taught in the mother tongue, alongside other subjects that are taught in English. SAP schools currently cater only to those studying Mandarin as their mother tongue.

This post was written by our intern Jia Yi. Jia Yi is a 3rd year Psychology major and speaks English, Mandarin, and German.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!