How many languages can you speak? By speaking, I do not mean “words”, but the ability to build up simple phrases to converse with people.
I am a lucky person, really, to have a Taiwanese background and brought up in Mauritius. Apart from my mother tongue, the Mandarin Chinese, which I have been speaking since small, learnt reading and writing in my first two years of primary education, I have also learnt some English before moving back to Mauritius. Hokkien Chinese was one of the dialects which I could understand too, but barely spoken.
I was completely lost when I went to school, the class mates were all trilingual. Apart from English which I was still trying to get control, then I had to learn French and Mauritian Creole. French was to me an alien language, I remembered myself very reluctant to study it! Gradually, as I got used to the environment, I also got used to both French and Creole, because they were similar somehow.
Around this time last year I came to Taiwan, it was to complete a Corel Painter course, but in the mean time, I got a chance to learn Japanese, the language I was most eager to understand. This interest was of course induced from Animes that I have been watching, and their OSTs which I played and replayed endlessly while having my shower, without knowing what the lyrics were about. Japanese had been easy to start with for me as I had previously studied a little bit of it on my own when I was younger, and the fact that I knew Mandarin greatly helped me, since in Japanese, Chinese characters known as Kanji were used too. And now, I am happy that I can start to get around 40% of the song’s meaning.
Many of my friends say that I have an accent while speaking English and Creole, but but but…I really don’t know how to speak like a native Mauritian! And even though I had lived in Mauritius for more than 18 years, there are still many local vocabularies that I do not understand. Even the easiest, the all-new-learners-must-learn swear words, I only got to know some of the most heards around three years back.
Sometimes, people just asked me to teach them certain language, but I had to say that, to learn a language properly, you’ve got to be in that environment where the language is spoken. Mauritius is an ideal place to learn both English and French, but not really that suitable for learning Mandarin, or any other Asian languages. Afterall, Mandarin is a complicated one. A same word can be pronounced differently, and a same pronunciation can be written and mean differently. I would advise spending at least half a year in China, or any other Mandarin-speaking country. And same applies for all language learning.
So far, English was the easiest to learn for me. French…I always got confused whether this noun is masculin or feminin. Japanese, so many transformations of verbs, nouns and adjectives and so many ways to express a same idea!
There are still so many different languages out there, each with its difficulty, but each with its beauty. I wish Good Luck to all language learners!
