I am Yew Hong, a banana. Hmm.... You must have recalled yourself with The Banana Songs from Despicable Me.
Minion holding a banana.
But no, not this one. I know Minion craze is severe now. Buying tonnes of Happy Meal just to get that plastic toys. But really, not about this, and I'm not crazy for that.
In Malaysia, the term 'Banana' is for Chinese people who don't have good command of Chinese language. It is like saying Englishman who cannot speak English. How pathetic is that?
This is basically due to the environment we live. Malaysia is a multi-racial country, so you can expect different perspective from every race. I was from national school all the way from primary to secondary. Therefore, I can say I was Malay-educated student. My English isn't as par as those pure bananas. I don't have countless vocabulary to put into my essay. Understandable writing is already a good sign for my essay writing. I live in Mandarin-speaking environment. Therefore, I can speak and listen pretty well, much better than my English. The problem is that I still cannot read Chinese characters. If I cannot read, definitely I cannot write as well. It was embarrassing when my Chinese friends laughed at my incompetence in this language proficiency.
For us to learn a language, we must understand the components to learn it effectively. There are 4 components of learning a language, just like English test in IELTS and TOEFL which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. But we must understand, in order to learn a language effectively, we must learn in this ascending order
Listening -> Speaking -> Reading -> Writing
Most people learn it the hard way, starting from reading to writing and then listening to speaking. This is what taught in most school in Asia. I believe the same concept applies globally. This is also the reason why we can see people who score well in their written test, but hardly utter a word during their conversation. Since I can speak basic Mandarin, I should move on to read Chinese characters now. Persistence with the correct material would be the best way to learn all the words.
The purpose for me to establish this blog is to gauge my performance in reading Chinese characters. Quite a large amount of Chinese people around KL area cannot speak basic Mandarin, let alone to read the Chinese characters. Nobody is born not to learn his mother language. I hope, by posting the correct materials and effective methods on learning Mandarin, it can help Chinese-Malaysians to pick up Mandarin as fast as they can.
Non-Malaysians are also welcome to learn with us too! See you.
