About Me, About the Blog
January 27th, 2009 | View Comments
The first complete English sentence I could speak was, “I am big, you are small.” The perils of letting your child learn the language of your adopted country via Sesame Street.
In the nearly three decades that have passed since I first proudly uttered those words, English has become, by far, my dominant language. The switch took place when I was around seven years old, much to my parents’ chagrin.
I remember being a small child on the playground, struggling to find an English retort to some bullies. Now I can sling English wisecracks like any native speaker, but my repertoire of Mandarin insults is sadly limited to pig, turtle, and various types of bad eggs. 笨蛋!—ben4 dan4!—stupid egg.
This blog is about my journey to re-claim my Mandarin proficiency and hopefully achieve native fluency. My spoken fluency is intermediate, I’d guess either 2+ or 3 on the ILR scale, but with native pronunciation. I can recognize several dozen Chinese characters and write even fewer, making me functionally illiterate.
This blog is also about my journey to learn Japanese. I married into a Japanese family and would like to communicate with my in-laws, beyond こんにちわ (konnichiwa—hello), ありがとうございます (arigato gozaimasu—thank you very much), 結婚式 (kekkonshiki—wedding), and 編み物 (amimono—knitting).
I’d like to take this moment to thank the computer for auto-converting romaji to hiragana to kanji and making me look way more advanced than I actually am (unless it did it wrong, in which case I’d like to thank it for helping me to get over the hump of the first Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation). I can write/sound-out hiragana and katakana, but it’s pretty slow and painstaking.
And if I have time, I’ll even dust off my rusty ol’ Spanish! I’m better at speaking Spanish than speaking Japanese and reading Spanish than reading Chinese, which is to say that after six years of coursework and more years to forget, my Spanish is really, really lousy.
I hope that eventually I’ll be able to write entire non-English posts and mostly make sense. Hope you’ll come along for the ride!
Yvonne posted this on January 27th, 2009 @ 2:43am in Biographical, Chinese, Culture Gaps, Japanese, Spanish | Permalink to "About Me, About the Blog"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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Korean-American girl who blogs under a Spanish pseudonym because being culturally confusing is fun. Native speakers say that she has outstanding Spanish (which is a definite compliment) and outstanding German (which is most assuredly not).
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American-born, Taiwanese guy who took five semesters worth of German and ended up with a major in Linguistics.
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Because I’m me, I have to say: Ich bin sehr fasziniert! :p
Buena suerte, querida. This should be fun.
What, no Korean?
Hubby already caught the first Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation. It used to say 有賀とございます for arigato gozaimasu. There’s apparently a silent う (u) at the end of arigato (or really, arigatō), without which it turns into…something else.
Hey, I’ve got to leave something for later on, just for the hell of it.
Someone told me once that the silent “u” in Japanese is kinda sorta like the French Liaison. I have a feeling that it was my uncle, though; and if it was, it should be taken with a teaspoon of salt.