your cute.

I grew up speaking Cantonese and Mandarin. My father refused to speak to me in English. He wanted me to learn it properly – from a teacher at school. He didn’t want me speaking English with a Chinese accent.

I can relate to those people here that grew up knowing a language but lost it when they got older. It’s sad! After we moved out of my grandparents’ house, I stopped speaking Cantonese. I can still understand what people are saying but …I cannot pronounce many words correctly. Literally, it’s physically impossible. My tongue can’t move the way it has to. The Cantonese dialect has more tones than Mandarin. Ah well. What’s lost is lost.

And the best time to learn and absorb a language IS when you’re very young. Preschool/kindergarten age. That’s wha the studies report. Someone mentioned that above and they’re absolutely right. My neighbor is Taiwanese and lived in Puerto Rico from elementary school on through junior high. She’s fluent in Spanish and really wants to send her youngest (4) there over the summer. I really hope she does because she’s stopped sprinkling Spanish phrases into her conversations with her daugther for about a year and a half now. The kid has forgotten everything.

Here’s a weird story:
When I was 2-3, I had a Scottish neighbor that LOVED me. She was elderly and living alone so sometimes when everyone was busy, I got sent over there to hang out for a couple of hours and apparently she spoke to me a lot because I catch myself now and then speaking funny. Sometimes I say certain words or setences with a bit of a Scottish accent. People don’t notice but I do and I find it very disconcerting.

regarding the accent and languages. I’m filipino and yes we’ve studied english since pre-school. BUt i’m worried that we are losing our mother tongue. We are now conversing more on Taglish (a mixture of tagalog and english) that i’m afraid that in the next twenty years, the Filipino language will just die like Latin and you will have to study for 4 years to relearn it =(. What aggravates the situation is the texting that we do every minute of the day. We are not the texting capital of the world for nothing.

We easily learn english because we were first colonized by the Spanish vs. the Chinese, unlike our other neighboring Asian countries. Why did i say it? because the construction of sentences of the Spanish is basically the same as theat of English., Unlike the Chinese, where the words formation in sentences is a lot different. ANother that helped is that fact that we are also a Malay race. Hence, it is with this reason that we are like Malaysians, we can learn and speak several languages. Though here in the Philippines, only the rich can learn to speak Chinese or if you are already Chinese of race (chinese school are kinda expensive and limiting).

I’m a Filipino, but what i don’t like about the FIlipinos is how they tend to correct accents of others when speaking english. Sometimes even to the point of laughing at your face, Bad, yes very bad. Coz when i was exposed in working to a global company where there are INdians, malaysians, chinese, singaporeans, british, americans, etc., it doesn’t matter how you pronounced your english or how your english sentence is contructed. But if you talk to a Filipino, you have to be careful or you will be laughed at. IN fact, i heard that we are more grammatically correct in speaking and writing english vs. the Americans. Because we’ve been studying english since grade school. In fact, i am better in constructing perfect english sentences compared to my Filipino or Tagalog sentences. I think only the teachers who teach Filipino languages in school can do perfect Filipino. Let’s face it, we tend to forget our mother tongue when we get exposed to another language.

So in short, unless we are blessed with multi-lingual tongue, we can only perfect 1 language.

By the way, i think some of the stars in KOrea (before they become stars) came here to study english. Most of them enrolled in Visayas, were the great beaches are located =). I also found our that there is a Englsh school for Korean Kids ages from 6 to 12 years old (somewhere in LAguna). They stay here for a year or 2. Let’s say there’s a group of 10 kids, 1 mom will stay to take care of them while the other Parents will remain in KOrea. I just don’t know how many kids were accepted in that school, But when i talked to the kids, they are already speaking perfect english. Yeah, i think it’s best to start young.

Like Nom Kitteh, most Americans don’t think my English has an accent. They are usually surprised that I am not born in the US. On the flipside, my parents and some of my friends said I’ve acquired an American accent – if there’s such a thing.

I was fortunate that my parents spoke English with each other and to me from the time I was a toddler. I learned Cantonese from speaking to my grandmother. When I started school, I learned Malay from classroom instructions and Hokkien from my new friends. Then my mum decided I have to learn Mandarin – the mother tongue so I took Mandarin tutorial classes for most of my school life. Later, I learned some Hakka from listening to my dad converse with his siblings.

Despite the fact that I took all those years of Mandarin and spoke Cantonese at home with my family and relatives, I am ashamed to say my Chinese language needs improvement due to lack of practice now. My Malay is actually better than Chinese – at least I can translate it to English with no problem.

I know most experts believe children have to learn or be exposed to languages early in their life to be able to learn the language. I am not sure how true this is. I have several friends who are linguists in the military. They learn and master a foreign language i.e. Korean, Chinese in a year…yes, a year!! And for some of them, they’ve never heard the language in their life before taking the course.

Shaving the accent is a different story. It’s hard for an English native speaker to try to speak Chinese or Korean with no accent whatsoever. After all, it is a foreign language no matter how fluent they now are in the language.

It’s a shame that a stigma is placed on people’s speech patterns. I remember a Korean variety sketch starring HeeChul, where the punch line of the skit was that although his character was gorgeous, he was from the “back woods” (as said in America), and thus spoke with a country dialect. This was a complete embarressment to his girlfriend and everyone around him. Hilarity ensues. Yuk yuk.

I too have a problem with learning other languages, but it’s a problem of poor pitch perception and nothing else. I can learn another language with ease, I just can’t converse in it. I could write whole novels in Spanish, but try to speak it with me and I’d be like, “uhm, what?”