Linguistic journey of a polyglot wannabe

中文版

As the title of this blog implies, I love language and languages.

Growing up as a Malaysian Chinese, it is usual for me to understand several languages. My parents are of Teochew (Cháozhōu) origin, but I grew up in Mandarin speaking environment, speaking Mandarin as my first language. I can understand some of the Chinese topolects like Teochew or Cantonese, but the only Chinese language I am able to speak is Mandarin.

As a Malaysian, I have considerable working knowledge of Malay and English. I first became interested in foreign languages when I was in secondary school. I taught myself basic Japanese at that time. I am still able to read katakana and hiragana, and have basic knowledge of the elemental Japanese.

Through a Chinese encyclopedia, I got to know about Esperanto, and subsequently took an online Esperanto course. I never complete the course, but through my own reading, I still have a basic knowledge of the language.

In my university years I took French as my major, and English as my minor. I also passed my DELF (Diplôme d'Études en Langue Française) Niveau A4 in my university years. Since the university required us to take another foreign language course, I chose Spanish. I completed 3 semesters of Spanish, but since graduated I have neglected my Spanish, and it becomes quite rusty now.

I also audited 3 semesters of Thai, 1 semester of Korean, 1 semester of German and 1 semester of Persian. In the Persian class, I was the only non-Muslim student. These courses only offer a very basic introduction to these languages.

After I graduated, I went to Thailand as a visiting student in the Silpakorn University. I participated in Thai and French language courses.

In my spare time, I also taught myself elemental Italian by reading Margarita Madrigal and Giuseppina Salvadori’s excellent little book See It & Say It in Italian. Since I understand French, learning another Romance language like Italian is not difficult.

My French also enable me to understand certain International Auxiliary Languages like Interlingua at the first sight. I can read Interlingua without much difficulty.

Being an egyptophile, I read through Mark Collier and Bill Manley’s How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs to teach myself Middle Egyptian. Now I move on to James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian to study more about the language, but to date I have worked my way through only the first 9 chapters of the book.

I also briefly looked through Volapük grammar, but now I forget almost all I know about the language.

Because of my interest in Qabalah, I learnt to read Hebrew, but to date I can only recognize some proper nouns. Without niqqud, I cannot read most of the Hebrew words.

I thought it would be fun to learn Latin, so I bought a copy of Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Latin. It is not a bad book, but seems to lack of something. I hope I can get a copy of Wheelock’s Latin soon.

If there is any chance in the future, there are more languages that I wish to learn, and some of these languages are: Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Avestan, Classical and Modern Greek, Haitian Creole, Coptic, Finnish, Hausa, Hindi, Hittite, Irish, Khmer, K’iche’, Nahuatl, Old Norse, Quenya, Russian, Sanskrit, Sindarin, Swahili, Tagalog, Tangut, Tibetan, Turkish, Vietnamese and list goes on.

Sometimes I lament that there are so many languages and so little time. I suppose this is the dilemma faced by most of the language lovers. My aim now is to strengthen my French and Thai while continue to study and explore other languages. I wish to be fluent in every language, but apparently I am not able to live long enough to achieve this goal.