Keep your mother tongue alive
Posted in Language learning on March 19th, 2009 by Christine Jalleh – 4 CommentsDo you speak languages or dialects other than English? If yes, use your mother tongue whenever you can with your child.
Because language is the key to open the doors of success in our globalized world, knowing more than one language means that you have a special access card!
Growing up with an English-speaking father and a Chinese-speaking mother, my siblings and I were bilingual from the start. We’d chat with our father in English and automatically switched to Hokkien when we turned to our mother.
Since we lived a few years with my Cantonese-speaking cousins in my grandmother’s house, we picked up a second dialect. Needless to say, I have no problem getting around places like Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong or Shen Zhen.
Furthermore, I’ve found Cantonese incredibly useful in my current adventure of learning Mandarin Chinese (or Putonghua) due to some similarities in tones and word forms…
When I took up German as a foreign language in the university, Bahasa Malaysia helped a lot as both languages are straightforward and pronounced as they appear – unlike English, which can be quite confusing sometimes with its silent “h”, “b”, “p” or other variations in pronunciation.
