Since I was born in China, I have quite some experience with different languages or shall I say dialects? Chinese is a language with many dialects so I grew up in a town that spoke one of those many dialects. Chinese has two mostly spoken dialects, Cantonese and mandarin. I grew up in a province where Cantonese was the main dialect spoken by everyone and also I watched a lot of Hong Kong television channels which were mainly in Cantonese so naturally I picked up on that as a second dialect. Then I attended a pre-school in China where I learned mandarin which became the third dialect I picked up on. After spending five years of my life in China I moved to America where I was exposed to a whole different language, English. I had learned some basic English in China by watching Disney movies and learning the alphabets at my pre-school but that was all. When I came to California I was put in the English Language Development class in first grade. I really don’t remember learning English to be a difficult task for me maybe because I came to America at such a young age. Being in this new English speaking environment, I learned to speak English pretty quickly and lost my accent. I’m really thankful for my parents for moving to America when I was so young, since it gave me more opportunities to be exposed to this new language. However I realized there’s also a downside to being exposed to a new language. After moving to Los Angeles I began to lose my mandarin speaking skills which is a shame because it’s the most spoken dialect in China but fortunately I am still able to understand it. Afraid that I won’t completely forget how to speak mandarin my parents sent me to a Chinese school where I learned how to read, write and speak it which did help me remember it. Then in middle school through high school I decided to challenge myself and took on Spanish. Up until now I have taken four years of Spanish but even after that I am still not confident enough to speak it. I remember my high school Spanish teacher told me something very interesting. She stated that people can only be able to produce sounds they have heard before a certain age, after that it will be very hard to learn. She said that to the class because everyone was having trouble rolling their “R.” She said that those who have not heard it before when they were young would have a hard time doing it but i don’t know if its true or not.

Two main languages are spoken in my household, Cantonese and a Chinese dialect that rarely anyone speaks even in China, the only people that I know of who speak this dialect are people from my hometown which is not very big. Occasionally I would speak English in my household but only to my little brother or cousins who were born in America. I don’t think I have ever experienced a time when language was a burden to me. In fact, knowing more than one language or being bilingual is an advantage because it gives me more opportunities to communicate with different people and understand them and this skill will become handy when I’m looking for a job in the future. However, there are times when I think being bilingual can be troublesome because I am always asked to translate letters in English for friends and family who don’t understand English and act as a translator, this can be a bit bothersome at times but I’m always happy to help anyone in need. Anyways this concludes most of my experiences with languages and I hope there will be more experiences to come.