英語學習：我如何平衡香港多語言環境

　　本文作者從小生長在香港，父母是客家人，年輕時定居香港。在家裡，父母用地道的客家話和有幾分蹩腳的粵語和她交流；在學校，所有科目的老師都採用全英語授課；生活中，商場、菜市場、地鐵站都充斥著粵語；香港回歸以來，普通話也納入了學習的科目。在多種語言之間，她是如何平衡的呢？學習多種語言不可怕，最難能可貴的是四種語言(或者說是兩種語言和兩種方言)都能較為精通。這麼多年的語言學習經歷，給她最大的感觸是語言環境很重要。

　　Background – My Language Profile

　　I was born and brought up in Hong Kong with Cantonese being myfirst language. My parents who were raised in mainland China came toHong Kong in their early twenties. They only started learning Cantonesesince then and they both speak Hakka when they communicate with familiesand relatives back in their hometowns。

　　With constant exposure, I came to be able to understand and speakthis dialect at the age of nine. Apart from learning languages at home, Iam also exposed to English when I started kindergarten education at 3years old. Learning English as a subject is a continuous processstretching

　　through kindergarten (3 years)， primary school (6 years)， secondaryschool (7 years)， university (3 years; my major is Translation &Interpretation) to present. Putonghua is also another language learnt inclassroom 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 consciouseffort in my early childhood. My parents chose to communicate with me inCantonese over Hakka is probably because the former is widely spoken inthe city. Learning Hakka is also an unconscious process as neither haveI paid effort in acquiring the dialect or did my parents force me to doso. It happened naturally since I was constantly immersed in theHakka-speaking environment。

　　Learning English and Putonghua at school is also not decided bystudents or parents as the two are part of Hong Kong school curriculum.In Hong Kong, English has long been regarded as an essential tool forsuccess in studies and in the workplace. Putonghua has later begun togain attention in the course of time when the handover of Hong Kong toChina 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 drillingexercises back in primary school. For example, we had to do exercises offorming questions from declarative sentences; to memorize and reciteirregular verbs and comparative & superlative forms of adjectives;to read aloud storybooks after teacher』s demonstration in oral lessonand so on。

　　In secondary school, we moved on to develop our listening, writingand oral skills. Teachers would mark our comprehensions and evaluate ourperformance in oral class. The trial-and-error process allowed us tolearn from our mistakes in a more active manner. My experiences oflearning Putonghua also consist of similar teaching methods with greatemphasis placed on audiolingual approaches such as reading textbooksaloud and practising pinyin。

　　Difficulties in Learning English and Putonghua

　　One of the difficult aspects of learning English falls into themastery of intonation. English is a stress language while Cantonese is atonal one composing of six tones. Hence, the intonation of Cantonesespeech is rather flat on the whole. With this gap between my first andsecond language, I suffered some hardships before I mastered theintonation 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 thefact that there are similarities in pronunciation of some charactersbetween Cantonese and Putonghua, there is time when such strategy fallsastray

　　and results in misunderstanding (one classic example that myclassmates 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 myparents and relatives in fluent Hakka. But native speakers of Hakka cantell I am not a local resident with my accent. Although communication inHakka is not a big problem, I find huge difficulty in reading aloud inthe dialect. If somebody gives me a newspaper and asks me to read itout, I would have to think hard and try to recall the pronunciation ofeach character。

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

　　Rewarding Experiences

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

　　Conclusion

　　If I decide to learn a new language now, I would try to immersemyself in that language-speaking community or at least to watchprogrammes or listen to songs in that particular language besidespractising the grammar. After studying languages for all these years, Ihave found that sufficient

　　amount of input, especially oral inputs, is very important for astudent learning that language. Learning efficiency would be greatlyincreased if one is surrounded by the language environment。