I have always been fascinated to learn more
than one language. For me, learning more than one language is really helpful in
terms of communicating with other people from all over the world. Mandarin is
one of the languages that I am most attracted to learn. I do not really know
how and why, but if I were happened to speak more than one language, Mandarin
would be it. I found it hard to learn this particular language since it is not
my native language. Clearly, I was born in a Malay family that did not know
much about this language.
I had a hard time learning the language
since it is not my first tongue and I rarely have friends who can speak
Mandarin. This language also is quite hard to learn due to the complicated
writing system and the confusing intonation sounds. But that does not keep me from
learning this language. From my understanding, this language has so many
similar words during the conversation. But it has different meaning in each
words, so in writing, the characters will be different from one another. For
me, the focus is to master the tones well, so that I can pronounce each words
accurately. In fact, learning new language is not something that can be done
overnight, I have to go through each and every process by reading all of the
books that I could possibly find. But, I did not collect and put them on my
shelf as I am not a good reader. I would probably borrow it from the library
and jot down some of the words that I am curious to know. When I am pretty
satisfied with the words that have been writing on a piece of paper, I then
move on to the next process which is doing some researches on the internet. It
really helps me to boost up my knowledge about this language by finding a
meaning, watching videos, learn how to write and talk using this language as
well as how to master it over time.
I will not deny that I did face a few of
challenges in learning this language. One of them is the amount of time that I
spent to learn Mandarin. Since I am a college student, a college environment's
freedom and flexibility can derail me sometimes to master my own
time-management skills. Having left high school's rigidly structured schedules
behind, I often struggle to balance academic, personal and other commitments
after arriving on campus. I faced with so many competing demands on my time,
sometimes I simply gave up and let the situation take its course. In addition,
I have been dealing with a lot of assignments, until it comes to the point of procrastination.
Usually, during weekend, I would spend my time for around 30 minutes to do
research about this language because on the other hand, I could not keep myself
away from socializing with my friend. So, time distraction happens to me most
of the time.
Next, there are so much of memorizations and
ambiguities about this specific language. Each words involves memorizing the
meaning, pronunciation, tone, and characters. The process of learning to read,
write, listen, and speak a character is exhausting. And there are so many of
them that needs to be remembered. But in spite of having difficulties to
memorize the words, I actually quite interested about one thing. Basically,
during my TITAS class for my previous semester, I have been taught that if the
character has a water split symbol to it, it actually symbolizes the elements
of water such as river, sea, raindrop and so on. Furthermore, speaking about
ambiguity aspect, Chinese language is famous for having tons of homonyms and
lack of grammar structures. For me, this makes it easy to get started but
fairly hard to get a good outcome especially in spoken conversations where
characters do not clarify the meaning.
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| Photo 1 : A video about learning Mandarin from Facebook. |
Moreover, as we all clearly stated, after we
are facing with a lot of obstacles, then comes the solution. Basically, I overcome
this difficulty by building my relationship with someone who is familiar with
Mandarin language. I am lucky enough to have one of my roommates who has the
ability to speak Mandarin well. It is not that hard to merge ourselves together
to share the information about this specific language since we have already
known each other for around 4 months now. He is also quite helpful and since he
went to a Chinese primary school, things get easier than I expected. He also
teaches me how to use each words properly and pronounce them correctly as to
keep myself away from doing mistakes.
Finally, I would like to wrap up the whole topic by saying it is undeniable that learning more than one language is wholly positive and such a privilege for me. If people were multilingual, the world would ultimately be a happier and more prosperous place.
