blog transfer

hello everybody,

i will no longer be using this Blogger site. my blog has been moved to:

http://huilinn.wordpress.com

so please change your links! =)

Thanks,

LINNNNN

Banana!

Yes, i am one.

I am one of those unlucky yellow souls stuck with a stubbornly white inside. It's unfortunate that such a lover of all-things-Chinese like me could also be orientally illiterate.

Whenever people ask me why i am unable to converse in Chinese (an annoyingly flippant question but i always answer it nonetheless), i simply tell them that i went to an English school for my entire life, that both my parents speak English all the time (except for the odd Hokkien input or two during their conversations), i've been speaking English since i began to talk, and as a result, i've never managed to pick up any Mandarin at all.

The last statement is correct, but only partially correct. did you know that i attended Mandarin classes from the age of about five until i finally stopped at 15?

Yes, i have indeed been learning Mandarin for at least 10 years, if not more. An utter embarassment!

So why is it that my grasp of the language is still so weak? I'm tired of all the misinterpretations concerning my Bananahood. Here's the real meltdown on why i, to put it as simply as possible, suck at Mandarin.

As i mentioned before, i had been studying Mandarin since i was a wee child. However the problem was my severely short attention span. I was unable to devote all my neurons utterly to one particular task at any one time. my brain simply had the tendency to think of other things while i was supposed to be learning my tong yi ci and fan yi ci. Instead of memorizing my cheng yu, i spent more time daydreaming or analysing the people sitting around me.

Another crucial factor was my being a sad little child desperate for friendship. Although i made friends extremely easily and indeed i had copious amounts of them, i still had the continual and underlying fear that i might lose them in some way. This motivated me to spend my time generously in earning their trust and making them laugh by doing comical imitations of any mutual enemies. Not only that, i often interrupted class discussions and teaching time by shouting out smart-mouthed remarks or pointing out grammatical english mistakes in our ke ben. Oh i must have been such a joy to teach.

As i recount those days, i can now recognize the agony i put the teachers through in having to tolerate my in-class antics (although i'm sure most of them would genuinely admit that having me in their classes was thoroughly entertaining at times). Oh those poor lao shis... Notice i did not add "underpaid", because THAT they most certainly WEREN'T.

So no matter how many classes i went to, the amount of Mandarin that actually stuck with me was a shameful fraction of what was taught to me. i now feel really bad about having spent so much of parents' money on Mandarin tuition.

but i will say one thing for sure: a lot of the vocabulary has stuck with me, so that's good =) it's just the stringing together of words that proves difficult for me. Since i came to Adelaide, my Mandarin's been improving little by little. Speaking it definitely helps.

So, hopefully by the time i return to Malaysia for the holidays, my Mandarin would have improved enough for me to impress my friends a little. HAHA. I just hope they don't expect too much =P