Thursday, January 08, 2009

Multi Lingual

At best I am only bilingual : Bahasa Malaysia and English.

Rightfully, I should be able to command three more languages: Arabic, French & Mandarin.

Back in MCKK, we were asked to choose between Japanese and Arabic as our third language. I am not really sure what made me choose Arabic (I do believe I was trying to be more Islamic at that time, hehe) but I did quite well in my first two years. It helped that I had one year of Arabic at the "sekolah agama petang" so in form one, it made me look good ! However, as I moved up form (with SRP being the priority in form 3), I was neglecting the language and when I did took the SRP Arabic Paper in form 4, I was pratically marking the multiple choice answer sheet without actually reading the questions. Rugi tak belajar dulu...

In PPP/ITM, I took French. Yes, the thought of mastering the language of romance was a good enough reason to learn it. It was two semesters of "berbelit lidah" but I had so much fun learning it. Our teacher even gave us frenc name and mine was Jacque. It sounded cool, until I found out that Jacque in France is as common as Ali in Malaysia (No offence to the Alis, ya?) Lack of practice (yea la, kat mana nak pakai French in Malaysia ni ?) slowly diminish whatever proficiency I have in that language. Rugi tak practice...

I started work in 1998 and took my masters a year later. After completing my masters, perhaps due to lack of active social life (read: NO girlfriend), I decided to take the Mandarin class offered by the Language Academy of UiTM. At that time, I have two salesperson under me who are chinese-educated Malays and I thought with them around, I could at last have somebody to practice with. I took three semesters of Mandarin (which means that I am half-way through the Intermediate stage) and I was having a good time surprising some of my suppliers and clients when I spoke to them in simple Mandarin :)

Alas, due to lack of practice (my two salesperson left for greener pastures)... you know how this ends :)

2 comments:

Shahrulmiza said...

Aku pun tak take Mandarin seriously, setakat cakap simple2 tu boleh lah... we need to be focused, discipline and lots of practice in learning language... bukan untuk suka2 aje... hehehehe...

NLN said...

Miga,

Come to think of it, aku boleh practice dgn hang kan ? :)