Eye-brain-tongue coordination. HAHA yeah. right.
Hard to believe though it is, my first language was actually Chinese. I think I must have spoken nothing but Chinese for the first three years of my speaking life.
I learned English mostly through reading, television and interaction with the other (virtual) brains in vats. Although earlier on I’d learnt Chinese through television and interaction too, I think it was the reading that did it in for me. I never really got started on regarding Chinese texts as anything but homework, wheras when I was younger I kept wishing for longer and longer English stories to read. Moreover, my parents decided when I was around five to stop using Chinese around me, because English was more ‘practical’.
Eventually it evolved to the point where I was (and still am) using English almost exclusively, with Chinese shoved far away into the background for lesson time. At the moment I know enough to understand manga (the chinese editions are cheaper), but apparantly not quite enough to give road directions to mainland chinese visitors. *_* My parents are now attempting to reverse this trend by making a point of talking to me in Chinese, but it doesn’t often work because it’s inefficient – communication between the Parents and the Kids is already enough of a problem without throwing Chinese into the equation – and because they’re so used to speaking in English to us now that they often forget.
My mother tried teaching us Cantonese this February, an effort that failed miserably partially because we were all rushing homework and because, I think, we all got fed up with us not understanding her when she told us to wash the dishes.
This would have been quite different when I was younger. My father began his slew of Japanese lessons when I was four. I was particularly irritated by that because I don’t memorise well and my father is a very, very impatient teacher who tended to get excited and call people names. So eventually we didn’t learn Japanese, and ironically, when it came to secondary one and I wanted to take Japanese as a third language, I wasn’t allowed to. My parents are strange.
The method I used for learning the physical nuances was slightly at variance with the one I used in language, although the basic concept (repetition) still stands. For example, I took half a year how to use the chopsticks properly, but it eventually came to me in a brilliant flash of holy epiphany in the kiddie-school canteen and I haven’t forgotten how to do it ever since. Learning how to turn corners on the bicycle or swim breastroke was much the same, except that because the coordination involved was so complicated the motions tended to go clumsy after long periods of disuse. For the really convoluted things like dances, however, I am established to be hopeless.
The language of arty-farty things like colour harmony and human proportion I probably have been learning all my life, mostly through observation. Things like online language I have had to grope around blindly to pick up, although I still can’t bring myself to substitute ‘you’ for ‘u’.
That’s mostly all I have to say for language at the moment. I still can’t bluff my way through the pronounciations for strange French food though.
I learned English mostly through reading, television and interaction with the other (virtual) brains in vats. Although earlier on I’d learnt Chinese through television and interaction too, I think it was the reading that did it in for me. I never really got started on regarding Chinese texts as anything but homework, wheras when I was younger I kept wishing for longer and longer English stories to read. Moreover, my parents decided when I was around five to stop using Chinese around me, because English was more ‘practical’.
Eventually it evolved to the point where I was (and still am) using English almost exclusively, with Chinese shoved far away into the background for lesson time. At the moment I know enough to understand manga (the chinese editions are cheaper), but apparantly not quite enough to give road directions to mainland chinese visitors. *_* My parents are now attempting to reverse this trend by making a point of talking to me in Chinese, but it doesn’t often work because it’s inefficient – communication between the Parents and the Kids is already enough of a problem without throwing Chinese into the equation – and because they’re so used to speaking in English to us now that they often forget.
My mother tried teaching us Cantonese this February, an effort that failed miserably partially because we were all rushing homework and because, I think, we all got fed up with us not understanding her when she told us to wash the dishes.
This would have been quite different when I was younger. My father began his slew of Japanese lessons when I was four. I was particularly irritated by that because I don’t memorise well and my father is a very, very impatient teacher who tended to get excited and call people names. So eventually we didn’t learn Japanese, and ironically, when it came to secondary one and I wanted to take Japanese as a third language, I wasn’t allowed to. My parents are strange.
The method I used for learning the physical nuances was slightly at variance with the one I used in language, although the basic concept (repetition) still stands. For example, I took half a year how to use the chopsticks properly, but it eventually came to me in a brilliant flash of holy epiphany in the kiddie-school canteen and I haven’t forgotten how to do it ever since. Learning how to turn corners on the bicycle or swim breastroke was much the same, except that because the coordination involved was so complicated the motions tended to go clumsy after long periods of disuse. For the really convoluted things like dances, however, I am established to be hopeless.
The language of arty-farty things like colour harmony and human proportion I probably have been learning all my life, mostly through observation. Things like online language I have had to grope around blindly to pick up, although I still can’t bring myself to substitute ‘you’ for ‘u’.
That’s mostly all I have to say for language at the moment. I still can’t bluff my way through the pronounciations for strange French food though.
posted by the zen thing at 7:05 AM
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