User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: Getting Your Hair Done
January 20, 2008 at 4:39 AMHello uncle changye. That's a good question you asked. Poor nephew has to go to school at the age of 2+ -- to learn Mandarin -- because the only languages he can expect to hear spoken well at home are: English and Tagalog. We do have a 93-year-old Amah who speaks Cantonese to us, but the truth is that we only speak "nursery Cantonese". The true "mother tongue" for us is probably Baba Malay (our own dialect of Bahasa Melayu). However, I lost that in the time-consuming struggle to learn Mandarin from scratch once I went to school, although I am trying my best to make up for it now by studying Bahasa Melayu as an adult. Learning Mandarin was a disheartening struggle for me because the teachers of the day could not comprehend the idea that a "Chinese" person could grow up in a home where almost no Chinese was spoken. My parents were unable to help me at all because neither of them could read any characters. I think that my teachers' fantasy was that I would learn Mandarin through immersion, but since Mandarin was only taught for 1.5 hours a week, that was a bit of wishful thinking. Happily, I began to pass my Mandarin exams after a few years, but it was all exam-focussed, rote learning. This is a situation that makes me feel a great deal of regret. It's one of the reasons why I am so glad to have found CPOD, which has taught me more Mandarin than 11 years of formal classroom lessons in Mandarin. I am very glad that my nephew's pre-school is aware that he does not have any Mandarin background, and they are teaching him with so much understanding and consideration (one Mandarin-speaking and one English-speaking teacher in the classroom at all times, and BOTH are bilingual). changye, it's a strange language situation that my nephew is in! But going by how quickly he picks up Japanese from his two Japanese "girlfriends", I am sure that his pre-school will prepare him well to be speaking and enjoying Mandarin in no time. I am studying Mandarin with CPOD now so that I can keep up with him! One "factoid" which I tend to be a bit reticent about with friends, is my family's decision, taken generations before I was born, to embrace English. My late father attended local schools, but all of his cousins were packed off to English schools in England by the age of 10 or 11; it's so normal in the family that we even have "family schools" (Winchester and Charterhouse; though some cousins go to Harrow). I don't regret that at all because I doggedly believe that language and culture is not governed by a "zero-sum" dynamic; there's no reason why my nephew can't speak English, Tagalog, and Mandarin well if he gets all the support he needs. Personally, I am secretly preparing to nudge him towards learning Malay, and secretly hoping that he will not be afraid to learn French, the language which gave me the confidence to give Mandarin another go.
Posted on: Getting Your Hair Done
January 19, 2008 at 2:36 AMWell, at least the nephew seems to be able to know how to recognize Chinese sounds... But his favourite girlfriends -- Yuuka (aged 12) and Francesca-Ryuuri (aged 8) are already revving up to teach him the おにぎり ちょっと冷たい song and 像さん; he might learn Japanese before he learns Mandarin. Maybe we should try to look for pretty young Chinese 姐姐s to counter the powerful motivational effects of his Japanese girlfriends...
Posted on: Getting Your Hair Done
January 19, 2008 at 2:20 AMThank you uncle changye! Hee hee. Btw, the nephew -- aka Stunt Toddler -- came back from Day 10 of pre-school singing the "four tones" (妈麻马骂）! We're so excited... and relieved. So maybe his expensive school fees -- for "bilingual" early education -- are worth it! But later, when I tried to prompt him to reproduce his trick again for his grandmother, he gave me a knowing, "I know this!" look and showed off the only Chinese we ever (accidentally) taught him, "CHOI! choichoichoi choichoi CHOI!" (Cantonese; in Mandarin that's 呸 pei4, not a very pretty expression!). Bet his poor 张老师 already had a big shock from his language, but she was too nice to call us and complain! Happy weekend.
Posted on: Getting Your Hair Done
January 18, 2008 at 11:16 PMZhou sunn. howard97, a "mullet" is a man's hairstyle where the front, top and sides are short, but the back is long. In the 1980s, just about every New Wave popstar (eg. think Duran Duran) and every English footballer (think Bryan Robson) had one. If you watch Scorpion King, the baddie there has an incredible mullet. Bangs are the American word for a "fringe", a straight one across the forehead or brows. Suri Cruise has very pretty bangs.
Posted on: No Kidding
January 18, 2008 at 2:03 AMOops, sorry, I made a mistake; the sentences should be: 他的女朋友買衣服很挑剔。 他的女朋友買衣服得很挑剔。 他的女朋友很挑剔地買衣服。 Thanks!
Posted on: No Kidding
January 18, 2008 at 1:59 AMHello. I definitely second linguisticpotato's request for a bit of time on "－地", especially since I think heruilin and I are still in some confusion over the following permutations from the previous Elementary lesson ("Picky"): 他的女朋友買衣服很挑剔。 他的女朋友買衣服得很挑剔。 他的女朋友買衣服地很挑剔。 Yikes! Thanks, Amber, for your help. I apologize for not including the hanyu pinyin, but I still haven't figured out where to put the spaces that you need in hanyu pinyin. Auntie
Posted on: Singapore
January 16, 2008 at 1:23 AMSomehow, I don't think my nephew is going to be helping to keep Singapore high in the international Maths and Science rankings. His favourite game is, "Flipping Hamburgers".
Posted on: Singapore
January 16, 2008 at 1:19 AMYes, tvan, the Stunt Toddler now attends three hours of school daily from Monday through Friday! He is still in nappies; we're hoping that he'll get through Potty 101 before he starts on trigonometry. The minimum age for admission to his preschool was: At least 29 mths old as of 2nd January 2008, the first day of the school year. But there are preschools with students who are even younger! The main reason why his parents have him in school now is -- Mandarin. My family is slightly unusual (for a Singaporean family) because apart from me, nobody at home can speak it, let alone write the characters. And given that ST's mother is a Filipina, all the efforts at home will be directed towards helping him to learn Tagalog, rather than Mandarin. Hopefully, CPOD will get my Mandarin in shape in time for me to help him with his homework when he has to sit for the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) in 2018...
Posted on: Singapore
January 15, 2008 at 1:40 PMOops, now he is aged 30 months, minus a few days, that picture must have been taken before he was a year old. Half of my DVD cases have small teeth-marks in them from those days when he was teething. It seems like I blinked once or twice, and suddenly he is wearing a school uniform and learning... Mandarin!
Posted on: Getting Your Hair Done
January 20, 2008 at 7:45 AMDear changye, this Auntie usually dreams in English, but -- surprisingly -- also in Baba Malay, which is a language that I can understand well but never spoke (to my regret). In my dreams, I can speak Baba Malay! That's brilliant; maybe it enters my dreams because I miss the sound of it so much now that my grandmother and my father aren't around any more to fill the house with my "language of the cradle". My grandmother in particular used to speak in a very refined way, her Baba Malay was full of Malay 成语...