While you are here already, its easy and very tempting to just relax, lay back and sip your (much too sweet) Singapore Sling. Don’t. You are in South East Asia and what better environment will you need to start learning Cantonese, mandarin, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, or what ever Asian language you might be interested or in need for most? Got it? Today’s Job market is more then tough and every line you can add to your CVs skills section will give you an advantage towards your competitors. This is an opportunity you shouldn’t let slip away like this. (Read: Guide To Singapore Language Schools)
There are many language schools in Singapore, differing in price, quality and teachers skills or probably most important, endurance when it comes to teaching an AngMoh any Asian language…
Before You Start An Honest Warning
You should get honest and important information from the frontier. Me. I quit learning french in colleague after 6 years and still get looked at when trying to order a simple baguette (at least correct spelling) on every Paris trip. That should give you an idea of my “skills”. I can remember every line of my favorite movie and the most complex mathematical equations, but languages? Anyway, Japanese should be it, was my decision after my last (truly awesome) Japan Trip and so my (new) failures began.
Being European learning romance languages (such as Spanish, French, Italian, German etc…) is in many points much easier because they kind of build on similar grammar, similar words and similar pronoun cation.
However….Asian languages do not. They are ANYTHING but similar to any romance language you came across before.
Is That A Word Or Did You Just Sneeze?
My girlfriend is from Hong Kong and gave up on me pretty quick, not so my Japanese teacher…but 
already after the first lesson i was devastated i was close to giving up. I realized that i just lost 20 years, finding myself again in preschool, the ABC lying in front of me, meaningless, without making sense to me at all…what are all these curves and lines supposed to be, looks stupid, lets draw a tree.
Starting At Zero
Seriously, you will start at Zero. There’s no difference in learning the word “mama” when you have never heard it before then to any other Asian word (that you have never heard before). Be prepared to make yourself totally ridiculous, the sound and pronouncation will be like learning to breath under water. New. And difficult. And it will be even more difficult, to remember all the new words, letters and sounds.
How can i not mix up every second word when its written the same way and differs just by how i let the air out between the 4th and 5th letter?
Get Rewarded
Be strong, make a fool out of you, you will get rewarded, i am at my 10th lesson now and i (at least imagine) i can already understand words when the nice schoolboys swear at me in the MRT. I then say something totally random in mandarin and at the next stop the seats next to me are usually free again.
4 Comments for this post
Dec 2, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Learning Mandarin is for the long haul, learning Japanese as well; think about that as well.
I don’t think is such a good environment for learning a foreign (non-english) language:
- Long hours work
- The best way to learn a foreign language is to hear it spoken everyday; in Singapore one hears english, singlish, mandsinglish, malayglish, hokkiendarin, cantonedarin; one would be confused.
Dec 13, 2008 at 4:23 pm
You missed out Hokkien and Teochew, two of the largest dialect groups here in Singapore. To use a favourite Singlish sentence, How can??
:))
Dec 13, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Sorry I meant to say “two of the largest dialect groups and spoken languages here in Southeast Asia, not just Singapore”.
Jan 5, 2009 at 3:13 pm
German is not a Romance language! Romance languages evolved from vulgar Latin. Examples: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Occitan and Catalan. Counterexamples among European languages: English, German, Dutch, Russian etc. Check the wiki entry for “Romance languages” or, even better, any introductory book on linguistics.
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