Lingo limbo
- From: ** <**@.org>
- Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:02:32 +0800
Monday August 20, 2007
Lingo limbo
Over a Cuppa
By HOO BAN KHEE
Many of us pride ourselves on knowing more than one language, but we?re not
really good in any of them.
WE, MALAYSIANS, pride ourselves on being multi-lingual. Besides our mother
tongue, most of us are able to speak and understand one or two other languages.
This stands us in good stead in the globalised business world. The ability to
speak English, Mandarin and Bahasa Malaysia has become an asset in the job
market, especially with the rise of China, which boasts a huge market of 1.3
billion consumers.
However, many of us only have a working knowledge of these languages. True, we
speak and understand English, Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia and maybe one or two
other dialects, but most of us don?t put in enough effort to master any of them.
We may be polyglots but we actually speak only a smattering of English, Mandarin
or BM. Most of the time, we manage but a mouthful of linguistic rojak in our
daily conversations.
Sometimes it is agonising listening to some of our ministers or VIPs struggling
to string words together to form a sentence in a particular language without
having to resort to borrowing words from another language.
We are so comfortable doing it that we don?t find it funny or awkward until, of
course, we go abroad and need to make people understand what we say, especially
at more formal occasions. It is only when we interact with others that our
weakness shows. We may find, to our embarrassment, that our pronunciation is
incorrect, our vocabulary inadequate and our expressions, rather odd. Let?s face
it. Our English, for example, can be painful to the ears of native speakers and
our Mandarin is heavily-laced with either a Cantonese or Hokkien accent.
Whenever I used Putonghua in Beijing, the locals could immediately place me as
someone coming from the south, either the Guangdong or the Fujian provinces.
Many a time, I was tongue-tied and struggled for the correct Chinese words to
express myself without having to resort to borrowing Malay or English words,
which the mainland Chinese would not be able to understand.
Mind you, I was taught by Chinese schoolteachers who fled to Malaya before China
fell into the hands of Chairman Mao?s Communist army and I have always
considered my Mandarin to be above average. My two-year stint in Beijing was a
humbling experience. It dawned on me that I needed to expand my Chinese
vocabulary and fine-tune my pronunciations.
While my fellow-Malaysians struggle with their Mandarin, it is amazing to note
that many Westerners have put their lives on hold in order to go to China to
study Chinese culture and Mandarin. They speak immaculate Mandarin, with perfect
intonation, and some have gone to the extent of doing Xiangsheng, or cross-talk,
which demands an in-depth knowledge of Mandarin and Chinese culture.
Canadian Mark Rowswell, better known as Da Shan, is just one of many familiar
faces on Chinese TV. He teaches Mandarin on CCTV and appears on shows and
advertisements. Others are quietly working in the business world or producing TV
programmes in Mandarin, and getting invited regularly to appear at gala shows.
An American elder of my church in Beijing surprised his congregation one day by
preaching in Mandarin and having his sermon interpreted by a Hong Kong Chinese!
Today?s generation of Westerners has a different mindset. If you were to close
your eyes and hear them speak Mandarin, you wouldn?t believe they are French,
Americans, or Germans. Gone are the days when Westerners spoke Chinese, whether
Putonghua or Cantonese, with a heavy Western accent because they thought it
would mean lowering themselves to speak like native Chinese.
Recently, I did some mountain-walking in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, with a group of
friends. After our 30-minute walk, we stopped by a cluster of stalls selling the
usual Malay and Chinese snacks and drinks. One of the stalls displayed a nicely
laminated menu in Chinese and right across that piece of paper, someone had
written in bold letters: ?I don?t understand Chinese! I am a Malaysian Chinese.?
Obviously, the writer had wanted to vent his anger because he was not able to
understand what was on the menu. But in the process, he not only defaced other
people?s property, he also displayed a certain mindset. Some of my friends just
shrugged and laughed it off, but others did not find it so funny.
thestar
.
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