Growing up, I struggled speaking Teochew. My family often asked jokingly, “Mei, why do you speak Teochew with such force?” To pronounce the words, I usually had to try extremely hard to get the sounds right and to them, it just sounded unnatural and funny. On the other hand, my older brother was fluent and could converse easily with my grandparents and any other Teochew-speaking elderly. It probably had to do with the exposure he received when he was younger in the Ellenborough Market where my grandfather was a fishmonger. I certainly did not get that same exposure and hence, struggled to develop the same level of fluency.

I quickly realised that Chinese dialects were ‘dying’ in the Singaporean community as I struggled to converse with my grandparents. Thankfully, this realisation drove my curiosity and I forced everyone to only use dialects with me during our weekly family gatherings. My parents were also highly encouraged (by me) to expose themselves to the dialects daily. Fortunately for me, my extended family spoke Teochew, Cantonese and Hokkien, but I could only pick up the former two dialects better. It was through the constant exposure and the learning from mistakes I made when trying to pronounce the words and form sentences that helped me learn the dialects very quickly.

Initially, learning the dialects was a way for me to remember my identity as a Teochew and more importantly, converse with my grandparents. I soon learned that using dialects and languages was an effective way to connect with others and three situations helped me to cement that realisation.

The first was during a Community Involvement Programme in secondary school. Most of my classmates could not speak or even understand any dialects . I remembered when I spoke to the elderly in their dialects and saw how much comfort it brought them, as Mandarin Chinese was not their first language. They grew up with dialects and using Mandarin was uncomfortable for them. Despite sounding forced, they appreciated that I tried my best to speak the dialects because it brought them much ease and of course, a good laugh.

The second incident was in Canada. My brother and I went to a Chinese restaurant with his Canadian friends. Upon hearing us converse in Cantonese, the waiters gave us the ‘special secret menu,’ with food not included in the typical menu they gave to others. The waiters said it was for “自己人” (translation: own people). I realized language was much more than just speech. It was an identity and a whole culture. The care they provided us that day was a sign that they were rooting for their own people to succeed in a foreign land, and I appreciated that experience a lot.

Upon learning from my second experience, the third experience allowed me to make others feel at ease in Singapore. I do my best using my limited Japanese proficiency to converse in short sentences or phrases with my Japanese friends in Singapore. Like おやすみなさい！（Good night!）お誕生日おめでとう！(Happy birthday!) which surprisingly, brings them much comfort in a foreign land. Language has the power to comfort us as we remember the environments we once spoke these languages in and remember the good old times back home.

Languages are so much more powerful than you would expect.

This blog post was written by Tammy, our #SGUnited Intern. Tammy is a 3rd year Public Policy student and can speak English, Mandarin, Teochew, Cantonese and basic Japanese.

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!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

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!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

When I was young, my mom always claimed that I was a talkative child. In my family, my mom always uses Mandarin with me and talks to me in Mandarin and my dad uses Mandarin and English. My mother  was always surprised when  I spoke to her with words or in ways that she hasn’t used with  me before. Growing up,  I was with my mom 24/7 , and she would sometimes leave  me alone in the living room to watch cartoons while she was cooking or cleaning. 

I enjoyed watching  cartoons from the different channels like Disney and Nickelodeon and since all of them were  in English, I was able to pick up English vocabulary . For example, I remember I learned to differentiate “weekday” and “weekend” because I wanted to watch “Winx’s Club” and it was only aired  on weekdays. So when “Weekend” was displayed on the advertisements, I knew there was no Winx’s Club to watch that day.

Besides that, I spent most of my school holiday at my grandma’s house when I was in primary school , and that’s where I got to learn Cantonese. At first, I was so confused about what all the adults were saying. They would simply switch to Mandarin whenever I joined their conversation and automatically switched back right after I left. I always felt like the odd one out, being the only one that could not understand and speak Cantonese. Thereafter, I tried my best to learn by mimicking others’ speech  and I got better and better. Maybe it’s because of the availability of opportunities to speak and listen , it wasn’t hard for me to learn. I believe that there are many language learners  that find themselves stuck at the phase where they understand but cannot pronounce the word or sentence. So for me, the core idea is that “no try no know”, it is only when you pronounce words wrongly then  you can learn to pronounce them properly.  

Other than that, my mom likes to watch Hong Kong dramas and she watches it every evening. I remember I would just sit beside her and we would watch it together every day until she told me to go to bed. This  influenced me to be interested in Cantonese too. Not surprisingly, I then acquired  Cantonese pretty well because of this prolonged exposure. So, many thanks to TVB, a television station whose dramas  I used to watch a lot as a kid!  

All in all, I feel it is pretty fun to learn languages when I am motivated and also when I see myself improving. Also, I do think learning indirectly or subconsciously from the media is not very effective when you are not initially interested in the language itself.

This post was written by Hong Ern, our #SGUnited Intern. Hong Ern is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks Mandarin, English, Malay, Cantonese, a little bit of Hokkien and German.

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!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Growing up in a bilingual (English and Tamil speaking) household, my sister and I were able to pick up both languages easily. As proof of our bilingual abilities, my uncle still has embarrassing home videos of us singing theme songs from every Tamil soap opera to ever exist in the early 2000s. Despite this, conversing in Tamil just did not feel authentic to me at that time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate decision made by my parents, but at home, our dad would only speak to us in English and our mum would speak to us in Tamil. We used to speak to them both in English even though we were perfectly fluent in Tamil. I would be too shy to speak in Tamil to any of the adults in the family because then they would make fun of my pronunciation or word choice. We only ever spoke Tamil to our grandmother because she could not really understand English.

As I grew older, these feelings changed, thankfully, and I saw myself choosing to speak Tamil when conversing with family and eventually that helped me become more fluent. I know most bilinguals will relate with me when I say that there are some things that can only ever be accurately expressed in your mother tongue. 

Both my parents and the rest of my family can also speak Malay fairly well. My dad actually took Malay as his Second Language (now known as Mother Tongue) in school. Malay was the language that the adults in my family used, to discuss matters that were not meant for us kids to hear. When I was younger, I remember my sister and I relentlessly trying to figure out what the adults were talking about whenever they spoke in Malay. We mostly failed in our attempts and only went as far as figuring out our nicknames, ‘besar’ (big) and ‘kecil’ (small). I think it’s safe to say creativity was not their strong suit or rather it wasn’t the priority.

Being raised in multilingual Singapore also meant that the community here spoke a type of Tamil that is unique to this part of the world. The Tamil spoken in this region, has some Malay lexical borrowings among other differences. Tamil speakers here almost always use certain Malay lexical items (instead of the Tamil equivalent) even when the word appears in a Tamil sentence. Needless to say, my younger self was baffled when I came to know that words like ‘udang’ and ‘senang’ that I often used when speaking Tamil, were not actually Tamil words.

I appreciated being bilingual and just language in general, more than ever, as a Linguistics major in university. I picked up very basic Mandarin and Hindi as electives in university just to experience learning a new language all over again. Sadly, I don’t recall much of it now but I’ve learned that knowing a language means so much more than just being able to speak, read and write it. It means having access to understanding and appreciating a whole culture because culture is significantly encoded in language.

This post was written by our newest lab member Vinitha (the one on the right)! Vinitha speaks Tamil and English and is currently working on the language mixes project.

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! Click here to read more Multilingual Memories: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/tag/multilingual-memories/

If you have a child between the ages of 0-4, you might be interested in our Baby Talk-a-thon Study! Click on the following link to sign up: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK

Visit our BLIP Blog for more information about our Talk-a-thon study: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

When I was a child, I always found myself being more interested in our local Channel 8 serial dramas than American Hollywood movies. I remember being frequently scolded for watching too much television but this was the avenue where I picked up Mandarin from a young age. I would even memorise the theme songs of different dramas by heart and sing them with my sister! I feel that watching these local dramas helped me become a better bilingual because I could match the Mandarin audio I heard to the English subtitles appearing on the screen and from there, I started to understand and learn how to use certain phrases or idioms in both Mandarin and English. On top of that, there was a natural ‘language divide’ in my family whereby I would usually speak to my mother in English and to my father in Mandarin and this gave me more practice in the two languages.

However, growing up in multilingual Singapore meant that not only was I exposed to English and Mandarin, but I also heard dialects being spoken by those around me. In particular, my parents typically conversed with each other in Hokkien while my mother and aunt frequently spoke to each other in Hainanese. When I was younger, I was often frustrated that I could not understand what they were saying and I think that partially motivated me to subconsciously pick up these dialects just by observing and listening to them. Now, I understand and speak Hokkien much better than Hainanese and I think it is because Hokkien resembles Mandarin more and is thus more intuitive for me. I am still working on learning Hainanese and while partly it is because I wish to be able to speak more languages, it is also because speaking Hainanese brings joy to my mother as she considers it a less common dialect here in Singapore – many people know of Hainanese chicken rice but not many know how to speak the dialect…                                                   

Aside from learning language through incidental exposure, I am currently trying to learn a new language (Korean) by myself using the Internet! I find this to be more difficult and I guess it is due to my age and partly because of the language itself.

Overall, be it learning from exposure or not, I find language learning to be a magical thing. When we learn a particular language, suddenly what used to sound like gibberish becomes intelligible and this experience of finding meaning and making sense of these previously meaningless words is incredible to me. 😊

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Kelly. Kelly is a third-year psychology and linguistics major.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

I have fond memories of my time in secondary school, where I went through a whole host of new experiences: failing a test for the first time, trying competitive sports for the first time (where I fell in love with volleyball), and getting a job for the first time. One of these transformative experiences took place in my classroom in Secondary One, where my classmate innocently asked me: “Have you ever watched anime?”

That was my gateway into the Japanese language – it was so radically different from anything I’ve ever known or learned in my own cookie-cutter bilingual experience as a Singaporean, and therefore it made for a very thrilling subject to explore. From then on, I watched much more anime, read even more manga, and even made friends with likeminded people with whom I could engage in simple (albeit stunted) Japanese conversation.

As I grew older and developed a healthy appreciation for linguistics, I began to understand what exactly made Japanese so different from English or Mandarin. From its grammar to its syntax to its unique orthographic system, every turn and corner provided a new and exciting tidbit for me to discover. Even linguistic expressions for similar concepts vary greatly because of their distinctly different history and culture. My first genuine experience with the language came in 2019, where my family’s trip to Japan gave me a realistic view on everyday, conversational Japanese as compared to the textbook words or phrases I learned. I went on to take an introductory course on Japanese in university, where I eagerly devoured all the learning material and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

Learning a new language is like going on a vacation at no cost. So much of a society and its culture is represented through its local language, dialect, or slang terms. It’s a rich, vicarious experience that any other medium would be hard-pressed to replicate perfectly. However, much like coming home from a vacation, my native languages provide me with a certain sense of safety and comfort that no foreign language can ever provide, as the cornerstone of my linguistic and personal identity.

This picture was taken in Japan on Dec 2019, before COVID-19 measures were implemented.

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Symantha. Symantha is a Psychology major and will be in her third year this August.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

There is a common misapprehension that there is a universal sign language. That, regardless of where you grew up in, every genesis of a signed language will magically converge into a single, unanimously agreed upon system of sords (sign equivalent for ‘words’) and syntactic structure. The myth starts to collapse when one tries to imagine this hypothetical situation. That being said, Deaf communities around the world have a unique way of navigating through new linguistic environments despite what most of us would normally refer to as a ‘language barrier’.

I had the pleasure of flying to Nepal along with a group of hearing and Deaf volunteers as part of an overseas community project to contribute to the building of classrooms to one of the few Deaf schools in the country, and the only one in the city of Dhulikhel. Being the only Deaf school that conducts all its classes in Nepal Sign Language (NSL) in the entire city, some children travel for hours on foot while some others opt to stay in the few lodging areas to have the opportunity to partake in a syllabus taught in NSL.

When we arrived at the school on our first day, we were warmly welcomed by smiles and excited faces from the students and teachers. We were then divided into two groups: one assisted on the classroom construction work and the other interacted with the students in their respective classrooms in smaller subgroups. I was part of the latter. Since it was the first day, we wanted to kick things off with icebreakers and just spending some time to get to know each other. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a herculean task given the difference in the languages we use. Our volunteering team communicated through Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) whereas the Deaf school students used NSL.

We started with names which was easy. Deaf individuals tend to have a strong inkling when a sign name is being introduced in a sentence, regardless of the signed language one uses. After a few rounds of introduction and simple games, we kind of ran out of ideas. So we started sharing some of our own stories. I tried to explain the word weird to tease one of my teammates. First, I signed the sord weird but obviously this didn’t work because that sord was only intelligible in SgSL (and some other signed languages, just not NSL). For some reason, my natural instinct went into fingerspelling w-e-i-r-d. This is the equivalent of going to a foreign country, asking for directions and when they give you a puzzled look, you speak slower in the hopes that they will somehow understand whatever it is you’re asking. One of the Deaf volunteers stepped in and did something absolutely amazing. In a metaphorical sense, he painted a picture of what weird is. This was beyond language and gestures. He distilled the essence of the word and the students nodded their head and laughed – the message got through to them! I was astounded because here I was struggling to explain a word in the most methodological way for me but it came so naturally for the Deaf volunteer. He didn’t know any NSL, mind you. He simply constructed a string of commonly understood facial expressions and gestures to convey a piece of information. So perhaps there may not be a universal sign language, but in this illustration, it’s clear to see that there may be a universal element that signed languages have that transcends beyond a communication system. The Deaf volunteer referred to this as the Deaf experience. I’m not personally Deaf but learning SgSL has afforded me this wonderful opportunity to immerse in a rich and beautiful culture. The more I interact with members of the local Deaf community, the more I stand in awe at this culture and language. Perhaps one day, I’ll understand what it is that Deaf volunteer did and how he did it. Perhaps.

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Jan Paolo (on the far left!). Jan Paolo is a Psychology major and will be in his final year this August.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

I did not realise it back then, but the day I got back my PSLE results was probably the day I started my journey in Linguistics. Or perhaps it started when I was much younger, and it was each step taken unknowingly that led me to where I am today.

My results qualified me a place in the MOE Language Centre, to study a language of my choice – Japanese, German or French. Back then, I loved reading Beauty and the Beast. I was a huge Beauty and the Beast fan! I knew the lyrics to all the songs. So naturally, I chose French. My intention was to learn this language for a few years, then drop it when it starts to become too overwhelming.

But I loved it! I loved the people and the places this language brought me to… Once, pre-COVID-19, MOE paid for our trip to study French and the culture, right in Brest, Brittany!

This photo was taken when I was in Brest! It was probably the most defining point of my language journey. Years later, because of my love for French and learning language, I decided to take on a second major in Linguistics.

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Raye Fion. Raye Fion is a 3rd-year Psychology and Linguistics major.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Language learning has always been something fun since my childhood and it would not have been made possible if not for my mum. As an ex-preschool teacher, she played a huge role in creating amusing ways of teaching English and Mandarin. For example, when I was still in kindergarten, I recall vividly how she made a hawker push-kart out of painted cardboard for my younger sister and me to role-play as hawkers at home. We would learn the vocabulary of the different kinds of “food” (plastic toys) in Mandarin and sell them by talking to “customers” in Mandarin.

At night, my mum would read bedtime stories to us. One of my favourites was the Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves. Each book in the series introduced a different character with a single dominant personality trait conveying a simple moral lesson. It helped me expand my vocabulary of adjectives in an entertaining way.

Other than through books and role-play, I learnt languages from watching TV. In primary school, we would watch Hong Kong dramas over dinner. When I encountered phrases or idioms that I did not understand, I would learn their meanings through the English subtitles. It was also my mum who piqued my interest in the Japanese language when she introduced us to an anime called Inuyasha which aired on Arts Central (now called Okto).

My mum instilled a love for languages in me which continued even as I grew older. When travelling to other countries and interacting with the locals there, I was able to appreciate how languages are influenced by culture. During an overseas exchange programme, I remember being intrigued by how people in Beijing described spoons as 勺子 whereas, in Singapore, the very same spoon is known as 汤匙 in Mandarin.

At NTU, I was excited at being able to take up foreign language courses as elective modules. Over the past 3 years, I have taken Japanese levels 1 to 3 and Malay level 1 and I look forward to learning another new language in my remaining year in NTU. I am thankful for having grown up in a supportive environment where language learning is not just a compulsory subject in the education system, but rather, a fascinating and fun-filled activity.

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Jerald Chew. Jerald is a fourth-year Psychology major.

This week, we’re sharing our interns’ experiences and memories of learning language. Click here to read more of BLIP Lab’s Multilingual Memories!

We’ll also be posting interesting  and useful resources and bite-sized research about brain and language development on our news page here, or you can follow us on Facebook to stay updated about BLIP Lab’s activities 

Since I was young, friends and family described the way I speak my Mother Tongue, Malay, as pelat. I had trouble pronouncing words like air (water) and articulated in an unnatural accent. I remember my first day of Malay class in primary school, I introduced myself to Cikgu using the informal pronoun “nama aku Nadia” instead of “saya”. That may come across as rude to your elders, and I was not aware of the proper form until my classmate informed me.

I naturally felt more comfortable conversing in English as mostly everyone around me did, except for my grandma. I grew up living with my grandparents, where we listened to 70s Malay songs, sang along while on car rides and watched P. Ramlee movies together. During Hari Raya Aidilfitri, my grandma would cook her scrumptious ayam masak merah that I would not miss to indulge in. I acquired the taste for spicy food, thanks to her cooking of traditional Malay dishes. The Malay language encompasses my heritage and identity, which I am proud of, despite sounding pelat.

With my fondness for languages, I enrolled into Japanese, Korean and Singapore Sign Language classes. My goal has always been to expand my abilities to interact with more people and learn about other cultures. My most memorable experience was a school trip in Japan, and we accommodated in a homestay. The host family was an elderly couple and we called them おばさん (‘obasan’ for grandmother) and おじいさん (‘ojiisan’ for grandfather).

Photo of Japan by Chris Fowler on Unsplash

As a welcome gesture, they prepared dinner for us on our first night. With my basic Japanese skills, I asked them whether the meal contained pork and it did. So, I explained that I am a Muslim. Fortunately, they understood and apologised for the misunderstanding. The next morning, they laid out a breakfast spread that was freshly picked from their own farm and reassured me. I was truly delighted by their respectful and considerate manner. This encounter brought me insight that the differences in cultures or languages do not impose barriers. There are limitless opportunities where we can learn from one another.

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Nadia Alya. Nadia Alya is a third-year Linguistics and Multilingual Studies major.

Starting from this week, we’ll be sharing our interns’ experiences and memories of learning language. Click here to read more of BLIP Lab’s Multilingual Memories!

We’ll also keep posting interesting  and useful resources and bite-sized research about brain and language development on our news page here, or you can follow us on Facebook to stay updated about BLIP Lab’s activities 😀