Malaysian Chinese

Got to know a couple of China students from Multilanguage Day. I always have this feeling that China students don't think we, Malaysian Chinese know how to speak Mandarin. Whenever I try to speak Mandarin to them, they would answer in English. My newly found friends were surprised to hear me speak, and totally awed when they saw that I could read and write Chinese... ~_~ I feel like they just found out that monkeys could actually climb trees.

Read a piece of articel about Malaysians, or rather Malaysian Chinese. In this article, the author mentioned how China people would exclaim in astonishment when they found out that we can actually speak Mandarin; and the Westerners would remark in awe that our English is not bad at all! It suprises them to find that Malaysian Chinese can actually speak a lot of languages.

The author expressed his doubts about how sincere these comments really are. Seriously, if we really look at the people around us, the majority of people speak broken English and Mandarin. Most of us aren't particularly good in Mandarin, neither is our English. If that is the case, why would these foreigners give us such compliments?

Well, English is not our first language, so the Westerners tend to lower their expectations of our English. As long as you can speak fluently and they can understand what you are saying, your English is good enough. The same goes for our spoken Mandarin. The native Mandarin speakers don't expect too much since "the Malaysian Chinese" don't grow up in a Mandarin speaking environment.

True that our English is a lot better than most Japanese and Koreans (real torture to listen to them speak English), but it is still far from good. And we are indeed better than a lot of Chinese in other countries who didn't even get the chance to speak their mother tougue. But do we content with "just able to get by" level?

While we learn other languages for interests, why don't we continue brushing up these 2 main languages that we should master, especially Mandarin/Chinese. We are Chinese, we have to know our roots so that others will not look down on us. We have to show them that we, as Chinese, we know how to read and write our mother language.