Code Switching

I’ve just spent the last half an hour watching three Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武 interviews (lol), having read about him in the New Paper today (the shame!). The first was an interview in Cantonese, the second an CNN interview (video divided into 3 parts) conducted in English and finally one in Japanese. I’ve got to say this guy’s mastered the art of switching between languages. In the Cantonese interview, there are a couple of situations when he, unable to express in Cantonese, switches to Mandarin without missing a beat. I’m insanely jealous. If that happened to me, stutter would first come, followed by complete silence. It’s as if my brain were a receiver that’s been jammed by radio interference. Of course it’s not like I don’t understand at all when I’m spoken to in a language that out of my comfort zone (meaning: anything other than English). It’s just that comprehension ability does not necessarily mean the ability to express. Singaporeans in general seem to be really good at code-switching; I’m inapt, there’s no doubt about it.

Anyway, watching the first interview made me realise how awful my Cantonese has become. I believe I understood only 40% of it, bearing in mind that Kaneshiro isn’t exactly a native speaker in that dialect. The biggest irony is that I actually understood the Japanese interview better than the Cantonese one. To think that three years ago, I was obsessed over Cantonese movies, and through reading of subtitles in Chinese, taught myself how to convert words pronounced in Mandarin to their Cantonese equivalents (and vice versa). Over the last three years, my journey with the Japanese language has sharpened my ability to convert between the various On（オン） pronunciations to Chinese but has distracted me from my old hobby. Languages are such high maintenance skills: if you don’t use them you lose them.

Subjects: Learning the Japanese Language 日本語勉強

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武, language