本文作者從小生長(zhǎng)在香港，父母是客家人，年輕時(shí)定居香港。在家里，父母用地道的客家話(huà)和有幾分蹩腳的粵語(yǔ)和她交流；在學(xué)校，所有科目的老師都采用全英語(yǔ)授課；生活中，商場(chǎng)、菜市場(chǎng)、地鐵站都充斥著粵語(yǔ)；香港回歸以來(lái)，普通話(huà)也納入了學(xué)習(xí)的科目。在多種語(yǔ)言之間，她是如何平衡的呢？學(xué)習(xí)多種語(yǔ)言不可怕，最難能可貴的是四種語(yǔ)言（或者說(shuō)是兩種語(yǔ)言和兩種方言）都能較為精通。這么多年的語(yǔ)言學(xué)習(xí)經(jīng)歷，給她最大的感觸是語(yǔ)言環(huán)境很重要。

Background – My Language Profile

I was born and brought up in Hong Kong with Cantonese being my first language. My parents who were raised in mainland China came to Hong Kong in their early twenties. They only started learning Cantonese since then and they both speak Hakka when they communicate with families and relatives back in their hometowns.

With constant exposure, I came to be able to understand and speak this dialect at the age of nine. Apart from learning languages at home, I am also exposed to English when I started kindergarten education at 3 years old. Learning English as a subject is a continuous process stretching through kindergarten (3 years), primary school (6 years), secondary school (7 years), university (3 years; my major is Translation & Interpretation) to present. Putonghua is also another language learnt in classroom setting from Primary 5 to Form 3 (5 years).

Speak or Not to Speak - Why Studied These Languages

The mastery of Cantonese and Hakka happened without conscious effort in my early childhood. My parents chose to communicate with me in Cantonese over Hakka is probably because the former is widely spoken in the city. Learning Hakka is also an unconscious process as neither have I paid effort in acquiring the dialect or did my parents force me to do so. It happened naturally since I was constantly immersed in the Hakka-speaking environment.

Learning English and Putonghua at school is also not decided by students or parents as the two are part of Hong Kong school curriculum. In Hong Kong, English has long been regarded as an essential tool for success in studies and in the workplace. Putonghua has later begun to gain attention in the course of time when the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was approaching.

‘Repeat After Me’ - Learning Languages in School

Language teaching in classroom setting consists mainly of drills and rote learning. I remember doing a lot of English grammar drilling exercises back in primary school. For example, we had to do exercises of forming questions from declarative sentences; to memorize and recite irregular verbs and comparative & superlative forms of adjectives; to read aloud storybooks after teacher’s demonstration in oral lesson and so on.

In secondary school, we moved on to develop our listening, writing and oral skills. Teachers would mark our comprehensions and evaluate our performance in oral class. The trial-and-error process allowed us to learn from our mistakes in a more active manner. My experiences of learning Putonghua also consist of similar teaching methods with great emphasis placed on audiolingual approaches such as reading textbooks aloud and practising pinyin.

Difficulties in Learning English and Putonghua

One of the difficult aspects of learning English falls into the mastery of intonation. English is a stress language while Cantonese is a tonal one composing of six tones. Hence, the intonation of Cantonese speech is rather flat on the whole. With this gap between my first and second language, I suffered some hardships before I mastered the intonation of English.

I also found difficulties in acquiring tone in Putonghua. I tend to ‘borrow’ the sounds in Cantonese when I am using Putonghua. Despite the fact that there are similarities in pronunciation of some characters between Cantonese and Putonghua, there is time when such strategy falls astray and results in misunderstanding (one classic example that my classmates and I often made is mispronouncing ‘忘’ [tone four] as ‘亡’ [tone two] in ‘我忘了’).

Self-evaluation on Language Proficiency

My Cantonese is at native level. I can also communicate with my parents and relatives in fluent Hakka. But native speakers of Hakka can tell I am not a local resident with my accent. Although communication in Hakka is not a big problem, I find huge difficulty in reading aloud in the dialect. If somebody gives me a newspaper and asks me to read it out, I would have to think hard and try to recall the pronunciation of each character.

I would say my English is proficient for studies and work. There are not many problems in reading, writing and communicating in English. However, sometimes it is hard to understand slangs or idioms when chatting with native speakers. I am capable of using Putonghua to exchange ideas with my classmates but I still have to work on the pronunciation especially the retroflex consonants as they are not present in Cantonese.

Rewarding Experiences

In order to encourage us to practise our writing skills, our English teachers suggested that we could try to send contributions to the student section of local newspapers (SCMP and The Standard). My classmates and I were lucky enough to get some pieces of our articles published in the papers. The sense of achievement of reading an essay of your own in the paper is beyond words.

Conclusion

If I decide to learn a new language now, I would try to immerse myself in that language-speaking community or at least to watch programmes or listen to songs in that particular language besides practising the grammar. After studying languages for all these years, I have found that sufficient amount of input, especially oral inputs, is very important for a student learning that language. Learning efficiency would be greatly increased if one is surrounded by the language environment.

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