This comes from the perspective of a person (me) who can technically (it’s complicated, trust me) speak 5 languages. Here’s a little about me:
- My mother tongue is Chinese.
- I have had 13 years of formal education in Chinese, English and Malay.
- I learnt to speak Cantonese through Hong Kong movies and dramas.
- My family speaks Hakka, which I can understand but can’t speak.
- I’m currently studying mechanical engineering in Japanese.
- I just started learning German in Japanese.
Here are some of the advantages, struggles and thoughts I found about being multilingual. I’m not sure about all those “increased career opportunities” claims though, but I wish I could get a five-fold salary.
Learning a new language is easy
Let’s start off with a common one! Coming from someone who knows Chinese, arguably one of the hardest languages to learn, I find learning Japanese really not that hard.
Having 10+ years of experience writing Chinese characters undoubtedly gave me a huge head start in learning Japanese, so I really can’t brag about how easy Japanese is. However, being able to speak Cantonese just by watching TV might be a prove of this point.
Open for more information
Multilingual means I can do multilingual searches on Google.
When you are doing research or studying, knowing more languages won’t hurt. You can find way more tutorials and papers online in English than say, Japanese. When I have a hard time understanding a topic in Japanese, I always try googling it in Chinese and English, which most of the time gives me a better understanding. Okay, maybe because my Japanese sucks.
Knowing less language really limits the information you can obtain from the world, the internet especially.
Getting a bigger picture
We all have been click-baited by a news site before. Even if it’s about the same topic, journalists of different news sources will try to come up with titles and articles that are more likely to be clicked on and shared by their targeted readers.
In Malaysia, people of different races generally have very different cultures, religions, political views, and often, they speak different languages and consume only media of their own language. Because of that, so-called “news sites” will always filter or tweak the news to fit with what their readers want to see, religiously or politically, to a point where the bias is obvious.
It’s certainly wiser to get your daily news from different sources, even better if you read them in different languages, to get a bigger picture of what really happened.
Making friends through translation
You can make friends pretty naturally by being the translation guy, more effective than any conversation starter because they’ll have no choice but to talk to you. (not joking)
There are activities in my school which students from different countries will be joining. Korean who speaks Korean and Japanese, Taiwanese who speaks Chinese and a bit of English, Singaporean who speaks English, as well as Japanese who speaks only Japanese, but there was me, who can understand and connect them all!
Not just through translation, knowing extra languages can help make more friends from all over the world!
Always having a backup language
We all have moments where we need to talk to our friend without a third person understanding, mainly out of politeness (because what we’re about to say might not be polite enough, like talking shit). With a few languages in my pocket, I’m able to pull out the right language at the right time.
I can ask my Chinese friend, “几点要回？走咯走咯。” in a never-ending Hari Raya open house. I can tell my Malay friend, “Tak nak lah, mahal ni,” in an overpriced Japanese outlet. I can tell my spy friend, “- - - — - - — - —” over a bugged phone call.
Speaking in only one language is hard
I’m well aware of how messed up my languages are. My Chinese is mixed with Cantonese and English, and I can’t speak English without some sort of Chinese slang.
I’ve always had to flick the “Use only one language” switch on when I’m talking to people that only speak one language, like Taiwanese, American and Japanese. I’ll always have to think twice in my head whether they can understand a certain phrase I use, and try to find a “real” word as a replacement. That’s a struggle for me being multilingual but of course a very good training indeed.
I love my Singaporean friends who have similar backgrounds, which means we can speak Chinglish/Manglish/Singlish together, hooray!
Keyboard sucks
As a person who has to text in multiple languages, I have to tap the little globe icon on my phone keyboard to switch between inputs, namely English, Chinese, Japanese, and a handwriting keyboard whenever I can’t read a kanji.
It’s especially annoying when I accidentally missed the language I want to use next and had to tap another three times to switch it back, only to realize that I tapped too fast and missed it again. And repeat.
Multilingual FAQs
1. You can speak so many languages, are you a genius?
Seriously, I did not make this question up. I get this sometimes from my Japanese classmates, who are surprised to learn that I know so many languages.
No, I’m really not a genius. I know dozens of people personally who are like me. If you were born in Malaysia, being bilingual or multilingual is really common, I’m just lucky to have the chance to learn additional Japanese.
2. What language do you think in?
I’d say that I can think in the language I’m speaking most of the time, without needing to do translation in my head. If I’m just thinking random stuff without talking out loud, it’s primarily in Chinese, but with sprinkles of English words like how I normally speak. However, I realized that I process math in English no matter the language I’m learning math with.
3. Which language is the easiest/hardest?
To be honest, I really have no idea. Mainly because it’s been so long since I started learning most of the languages I know. It’s said that children can learn a language much easier than an average adult, so I guess all of them were pretty easy for 5-year-old me to learn.
If I have to pick one as the hardest, I’d probably say Japanese because that’s the only language I still remember the learning process. Anyway, I remember I struggled a lot in English spelling in kindergarten. Poem and classical Chinese in high school were difficult too.
4. CaN yOu SaY sOmEtHiNg In (language)?
Yes, thank you for requesting. No, I only do paid performance. How about saying something in Python? I know a saying that goes
print(“stfu”)
Peace.