Mother tongue

Mine was the generation that grew up hating Chinese and hating Chinese tuition. And I didn't even have it bad. My brothers had it worse. They learnt what failure was because they failed Chinese many times and repeatedly at a national level. Thankfully, I was put into a Chinese kindergarten, went to a neighbourhood school where everyone around me spoke Chinese (or dialect!) and I had a thing for Chinese drama series. It helped counteract the detriment of being in a primarily monolingual household; not by much, but by enough so that I managed to score a distinction in one Chinese national exam. And I rendered my family and friends speechless when they found out that my research thesis in university had to do with the cognitive structures in our brain that facilitated second language translation using Chinese as the second language.

I can roughly make myself understood in Chinese and I can understand when I'm spoken to, most of the time. And that, in my world and to many of those around me, is considered a success. Packrat, by virtue of being from a school that prides itself in producing "kantang" (yellow on the outside, white on the inside- effectively monolingual and unable to speak a word of their mother tongue), relies on me to be the Chinese representative of the family. His Chinese is halting, his comprehension is pretty basic and he can't remember the proper way of writing Chinese characters. He blames the system for forcing him to do Chinese at a level that was too much for him. As with most things, I don't think much about it and think that while Chinese was a struggle, I got through it and am grateful that it's over and remember some things about it fondly.

But this Chinese thing is back to haunt me because now I have children and should we choose or end up having to put them through the Singapore education system, they will have to struggle with it. With that in mind, I have attempted to make their introduction into the language as painless as possible. Videos with talking panda bears, Dora in Chinese, music and books (that I had to painstakingly learn to read first) that they enjoyed.

We were extremely proud of them when they started singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars in Chinese last year and I asked their teacher to give me the words so that I could help them with the bits that they would inadvertently use English to continue because they'd forgotten. The teachers also told me that they understood simple Chinese instructions although they couldn't converse in it.

So for a long time, it was just a matter of picking up vocabulary words. Until recently.

Because I did my thesis year studying our bilingual brain, I understood that there was a need for them to first acquire metalinguistics awareness and part of that awareness is the understanding and knowledge that there are different languages out there and across the different languages, there are different words to describe or express the same thing.

Evan has recently acquired that ability. He now knows how to ask what the names of objects are in Chinese.

These are some of his favourites. Some of which, I've had to ask people for the translation because never in my life had I had the need to find out what some of these things were.

Mischievous Prankster- 捣蛋鬼 (This one, he learnt the Chinese word for it without a translation into English, from Dora the Explorer!)

Circle- 圆形 (His favourite!)

Triangle- 三角形

Square- 正方形

Thunder- 雷声

Lightning-闪电

Escalator- 自动扶梯

Tunnel- 地道 (I tried to ask Aunty J and Uncle S what it was. Uncle S replied 一个大洞 [a big hole] and Aunty J's reply was "no, that's Nicol Highway" But that's another story altogether)

Door- 门

Helicopter- 直升机

He, being a boy, I suspect, also enjoys the technical aspects of it. I was floored by the fact that the school was teaching my almost 3 year olds Chinese strokes. These are among Evan's prized possessions. A set of worksheets that denote each basic stroke.
























We also have a visual of him demonstrating said strokes, as taught in school.



Jordan, as I have discovered of late, is far less interested in the academic side of things, preferring to indulge in what is pretty and pink. Even with Chinese, she seems to be interested in different words from Evan. Evan seems to like naming objects, things that he sees around him. Jordan has been far more interested in naming people. The only way I have managed to get her to speak Chinese is to point out people to her and name them.

你是 妈妈 (You are Mommy)

你是爸爸 (You are Daddy)

我是姐姐 (I am Big Sister)

我是凯慧 (I am Kai Huei)

你是凯智 (You are Kai Tze)

你是弟弟 (You are my younger brother)

Even here, she is rather distractedly responding to me but she does so. Evan couldn't be bothered if he didn't know how to refer to us in Chinese. I do have my work cut out for me.



And strangely enough, when Jordan is feeling vulnerable and teary and needs a hug, she calls me 妈妈 .

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