50. If I can do it, so can you.

Wow – blogpost Number 50! I never imagined at the start of this project that we would get so far. To keep the tradition of a guest blogger every 10th entry, I have asked Yoh, the systems engineer for Sulantra.com, to write a piece describing his own personal journey learning languages. Fluent in four, he has direct experience using our website and has even tested his ability to communicate in Khmer on the streets of Siem Reap in Cambodia. In other words, he is the ideal author for this special entry. Enjoy!

If I can do it, so can you.

by Yoh

The first time I heard someone call me a polyglot, I felt very uncomfortable. To me, a polyglot is someone who is crazy about learning languages and extremely multilingual. I am jealous of real polyglots. I wish I could be fluent in a new language in 3 months as some websites say you can. To be honest, I have very limited interest in learning new languages and my experience of learning Mandarin, English and Japanese was definitely not an easy journey.

I was born in Leshan, a small city in Sichuan Province, China. There are many dialects in Sichuan and each city has its own, but they say the Leshan dialect is the most unusual. Some researchers say the pronunciation of Leshan dialect resembles an archaic form of Chinese from the Qin Dynasty, the first imperial dynasty of China. Every time I went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, I struggled to speak standard Sichuanese because some of the locals there couldn’t understand my “ancient” accent.

From elementary school to high school, the pinyin test was always a nightmare for me. Pinyin is the phonetic writing system for transcribing Chinese characters, which uses the Roman alphabet. It was designed for Mandarin, not for dialects. Having local teachers whose accent was not any better than mine teaching me how to read in Chinese wasn’t helping too much. I was expected to use only Mandarin in Chinese lessons, but I didn’t realize how bad my pronunciation was until I went to college in Dalian in the north of China. There were students from all over the country and Mandarin was the official language. It took a while for me to get used to speaking Mandarin properly. My English teacher in college, Miss Zeng, told me later that she could not understand me sometimes in the first couple of months because of my thick Sichuan accent.

One day, Miss Zeng approached me about entering an English speech contest. I thought it was a joke. “You don’t even understand my Chinese sometimes, why me?” I asked.

“Because you look harmless and I am too afraid to ask other students. According to the people in charge, each class must have at least one student to join the contest. You have to help me…”

Miss Zeng was a new teacher, and we were her first group of students. We got along with each other very well from the first day. I really liked her so I decided to accept the challenge. For about 3 months I worked very hard on my speech with Miss Zeng and another lovely English teacher, Megan from America. With their help, I surprisingly won the English speech contest, even with my “standard Chinese” accent. Okay, I have to confess that I suspect the amount of time I spent in the office of the English Department did make a good impression with the judges who were also working there.

As in most Chinese colleges, there were no English classes after the second year. What a relief! I thought I didn’t have to learn languages anymore. But I was naïve and it was too early for me to rejoice. During a serious career counseling session with Miss Wang, another teacher whom I respected a lot, she strongly suggested I learn Japanese, which would give me an advantage job hunting in Dalian where there were a lot of Japanese companies. She was right. I wouldn’t have been able to get a job offer from a Japanese company and come to work in Tokyo if I hadn’t taken Japanese classes in college.

So now you see why I feel uncomfortable when people call me multilingual. I was never aiming or dreaming to be able to function in 3 new and different languages. I picked them up because I had to. Even now I still have an accent in most of my languages and constantly encounter new words I don’t know. But I am happy that I have learned these languages, which opened many new doors and are helping me to see more of the world every day.

The only advice I can give people who want to learn a language is that, once you commit to it, you have to bring everything to it. The more time and energy you spend on it, the more you will get in return. It’s that simple. I am not an overly intelligent person and my background didn’t seem suited to language learning. If I can do it, so can you.