本帖最後由 edith208 於 15-5-8 09:04 編輯
http://www.dailylife.com.au/life ... 0150502-1mydxn.html
There are all sorts of names for people like me: an Australian child of migrants who can't speak his parents' language. If you're brown or black, you might be called a "coconut" (dark on the outside; white on the inside); in the same way, I've been accused of being a "banana". That's right, there's a whole cultural shame-spectrum that revolves around fruit. Since I was a kid, Mum and Dad have spoken Cantonese to me and my siblings, and we've spoken English back. I can order yum cha and buy groceries in Chinatown, but anything more is a struggle. My record for a phone call with my grandmother is 12 minutes, and even then, it covered the usual: whether she'd eaten, how she'd fared at mahjong, and the unending mystery of why I'm not having children. How did it end up like this? Arguably, I'm lazy. But in my defence, Cantonese is also a tough language to master. Sure, 774,000 Australians speak it at home (it's the fourth most-spoken non-English language after Italian, Greek and Mandarin), but it also has anywhere between six to nine different tones (compared to Mandarin's four), no standard input for written text, and is regularly rated - alongside Russian and Arabic - as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn. Needless to say, I was horrified when I was recently asked to do a radio interview in Cantonese. After the radio producers sent me a list of questions, I rang my mum to help me translate my answers. When I recited them back to her, I sounded hesitant and confused, like a parrot that had been bashed. I was reminded of that scene from Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams pretends he's a migrant worker and says, "I AM JOB" over and over. That would be me. On the day, it was worse. My Cantonese-speaking hosts were patient- but in the same way speech therapists are patient when rehabilitating someone after an injury. I apologise if you're a Cantonese speaker who heard me on air. At least I know the word for "sorry".
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發表於 15-5-6 11:09
