Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Language Dilemma
5-AUG-2008:
I've had numerous people questioned me on why we chose to speak to Dominic in English at home instead of our own mother tongue, and "adviced" us to speak to him in Chinese instead. Principally, I agree with them that I should give Dominic the gift of another language besides English. Every time someone asked, my "excuse" would be the following:
Dominic was born in Malaysia where Cantonese can be picked up easily from everyday conversation with relatives, the guy selling ice-cream or even Astro WLT. When he starts school (and there is an intention to send him to a Chinese school), he will pick up Mandarin. We didn't know before hand that we were going to come to the UK. Hence, English was the right choice then, and it became a habit.
When we got the UK, we had no plans for settling down here and foresee ourselves going back to Malaysia and sending our kid to a Chinese school. So we continued speaking to him in English.
Last Friday, the question cropped up again at Dominic's nursery and I decided to give it a try - speaking to him in Mandarin, that is. Of course, he couldn't understand anything I said but if I threw in an English word here and there, he understood my meaning. He had no problem understanding "Go to your room and get your pillow" (in Mandarin with italicised words spoken in English). He understood a question that ended with "ma" even though the entire question was spoken in Mandarin. "Do you want to wee-wee ma?" Oh ... but then he has always understood the meaning of "wee-wee". So no, I take that statement back. :-D
A few times he immitated my speech and it sounded exactly like how a gwailo would speak Mandarin. It was hilarious.
Speaking in Mandarin is difficult for me as I tend to forget that I was supposed to speak in Mandarin. Sometimes I struggled to find the words, such as "tractor", "laptop" and "juice". The books are all in English and during reading time, I switch back to English fully. Other times, I just mixed Mandarin with English and I wonder if that is a good idea. A child can maybe differentiate if two person are speaking two different languages but now I'm a one person mixing both languages up - will I screw up his speech development? It has only been 3 days and I feel like giving up already.
Once or twice, he got frustrated with me and he said "Mummy, so loud. So noisy". And I wasn't even raising my voice okay - I was just repeating what I just said several times. Once I told him to put on his pants (in Mandarin) and he said "Don't want ku zi". I said "Ku zi means pants". And he replied "Don't want ku zi means pants". Me: "Sigh ... Ok ok ... put on your pants!" and he obediently did so. Sigh ...
