Wo ay hiao gong Hokkien (I can speak Hokkien)

I just read this on the ST online: http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_360438.html
Pretty interesting piece on how more young Singaporeans are learning the Chinese dialects these days. Finally a positive piece from the ST online that didn’t make me snigger, and strange that it was written by the senior political correspondent and not someone from the social or education beat.

When my semi-retired Chinese tuition-teaching mum first told me she was asked to teach Hokkien to a doctor and a kid whose dad thought he should “connect with his roots”, I laughed out loud. I thought maybe these people have nothing better to do and too much money to spend. Reading this article, I’m heartened that at least the younger generation is trying to retain some form of culture on our bubble island. Don’t ever accuse us westernized youths for abandoning our roots for modernization and globalization. I read the comments after that article and it seemed to me that the LKY diehards are claiming that if LKY cannot master the dialects then the rest of us Singaporeans can’t. What BS. Growing up in a family that spoke Mandarin and Hokkien and having a babysitter who only spoke Teochew to me, I do not claim that I am a master of them all. In fact, I’m more confident of expressing myself in English than the other three, and I can hardly understand my grandmother since I call what she speaks “Old Hokkien” (think old English with the “thee” and “thy” and “aye” and you’ll get what I mean). But I think I can at least carry out a decent conversation in Mandarin and can understand the “street Hokkien” of the Singaporeans. Just don’t ask me to decipher the classical Hokkien that my grandmother speaks and the Taoist funeral priests chants in their prayers during my grandfather’s funeral. But yes, my point being that I don’t see why we cannot learn to speak more than 3 or 4 languages (to me dialects are individual languages themselves since they all sound so different). While we may not be masters of them all, but we should at least be able to understand and hold a decent conversation. Afterall, isn’t what languages are about? A way to communicate with others?

Cheers to those who choose to “connect with their roots” and I promise not to laugh out loud if my mum tells me another kid wants to learn Cantonese from her too...