Skip to main content

Family

I figure I needed a new tag, called family. The reason is obvious. Anne is expecting and this new journey deserved to be blogged and documented. We don't know the gender of the baby yet. Many would ask if I prefer a boy or a girl and my answer would be that the gender doesn't matter. The baby is still part of the family regardless.

Yesterday we visited a senior uncle and his wife. They are my parents-in-law's good friend and fellow faith-mates. I like Mr and Mrs Wong. They are very wise and often in conversation with them I learned a great deal.

One of the things that's been bothering me is what should I converse with my baby? Should I speak Cantonese (a pasar Cantonese since in Malaysia, we hardly speak in proper Cantonese) or should I converse in English? I am not good at either. My English is not the Queen's English and my Cantonese is pasar. What would my child turn out to be? Would he/she turn out to be another one of those kids who speak broken English or worse, one who speaks a mix of two languages.

Mrs Wong, who has been teaching kids for 15 years, gave a very good suggestions. She said a baby could learn up to 6 languages at a time. She gave an example: A Japanese father and a Korean mother. The father would speak to the baby in Japanese and the mother in Korean. The baby would be able to understand and response to both languages. When he/she sees his father, he would automatically associate these sounds/intonations/language to the father. When he speaks to his mother, he would use this other sound. The baby may not know that he's speaking Jap or Korean but he knows the intonation he should use on a person (father or mother). Mrs Wong said they associate person/face with a language. If they had a maid, the baby would use Indonesia with the kakak. Similarly, a baby would also speak to his grandparents in their dialect.

The secret then lies in the fact that one must be consistent in the choice of language when speaking to the baby. Mrs Wong suggest that if I use English, I must use English throughout. And if Anne use Cantonese, she should be consistent. My mother should use Mandarin and be consistent also. Then, when the baby sees my mother, the baby would automatically use Mandaring to converse. The danger or confusion arises when I use Cantonese AND English when speaking to the baby. That is when the baby will have difficulty grasping and will have a problem expressing himself in the future - when talking to his father, should he use Cantonese or English???? Mrs Wong told me not to worry about the broken English. She said as the baby grow up they would learn that about grammar error and will naturally correct themselves. But if you use a combination of Canto-English, then the baby would not know how to correct himself.

What a relief.. now, I know what to do :)

Comments

  1. Autie Kimmie will speak Hokkien to the baby .... "kin nah, lu hor bor? "

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to