My Walks of Life

our Abir will be speaking Mandarin very soon enough.

it will be included in their school syllabus aside from arabic language. it reminds me my old days thou. i was scholing in Anglo Chinese School (ACS) primary. was quite good in mandarin too. i loved the reading especially and of course spelling, more than english that time. my best friend was Ng Li Ping (wherever you are, thanks for helping me with the twisting tounge), sometimes i got better score than her. chinese seldom speaks mandarin at home, they rather speaks their own dialect like hokkien, hokchew and kantonis. those days, i was speaking mandarin with my classmates here and there. there were only 4 malays in my class, anyway. consequently, since Li Ping was on hokkien dialect, i adapted quite good with hokkien too. but not long few years, my mandarin was losing slowly. i had to followed my mom transferred to a malay school, and later i got into a boarding school which happened a religious school which when my language skills turned to arabic. talking about arabic, i love arabic too, as i love english. i don`t know why i didn`t like malay language that time. i shall blame on my bad grade, perhaps. i used to get B in malay compared the other two languages. did i tell you, about my PMR result? i got all A`s except malay language which is a big B. later i was very terrified and fed up with it and it did affected in SPM. i only got A2 in malay compared the other languages. anyway, no grudge. after 10 years now, i `m able to converse mandarin & kantonis at work, especially when it come with dealing with an ah soh (chinese aunties). i just love their surprised remarks upon hearing my kantonis accent. "waa...ni ker yi chiang hwa yi mei?" which means " wow..you can speaks mandarin is it?" i will normally reply " siu-siu ma, ah soh" which means " only little , auntie"