Some could pick up languages quickly, like a brand-new tool, and use it immediately, while others, like myself, had to build the craft just to communicate, whether verbally or in writing. For those of you who are still learning, keep learning and see the small rewards you find along the way—a smile returned with a greeting, a flurry of words that are a progressing conversation, or just an odd look.
After learning French for three years in junior high, I signed up for another year of French in high school, until I discovered Mandarin Chinese. In high school, I had Chinese friends whom we sat in the hallways in front of our lockers during lunch time and played card games. During these games, Chinese (Cantonese) bubbled from our conversations to the point I felt left out. Being Asian, I guess the group was so comfortable with another Asian that they forget I am an Asian who does not speak the same language.
In another situation, I have heard some think that Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are all the same. Unfortunately, they are all different languages. When you ask a Japanese speaker what it says on the cover of a Chinese magazine, for example, it is like asking an English-speaker if they could read Russian because it had Romanized lettering similar to the English alphabet (for those who know; they use Cyrillic letters which look like the English alphabet but have distinct sounds for the letters). Or, when you ask a Japanese-speaker, while watching a Korean drama, what they are saying, it is like asking a Dutch person to translate a French dialogue.
Much like these examples, I have thought that if I learned Mandarin Chinese, I could communicate with my Chinese friends; however, I learned that there are more than one Chinese language—and Mandarin Chinese is one of them. The language that my friends spoke was Cantonese (commonly used by Hong Kong Chinese). Mandarin Chinese is the most common dialect, that standardized form of Chinese used in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. The difference in not just in the languages, but also in the writing (Mandarin uses simplified Chinese characters while Cantonese uses traditional Chinese characters). It was until I learned Mandarin Chinese that I understood these differences.
If you ask me how my Mandarin learning went, I did well—better than French (sorry, Francophones). I would like to say that my knowledge of kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) helped.
For now, I will say that I was glad about my decision to expand my language borders by learning another language.
No comments:
Post a Comment