Languages [75/100]

When it was just my parents and my brother and I, we spoke Mandarin. It was my first language, which is good because I can speak pretty fluently for most colloquial conversations with the vocabulary of a 4 year old. Not so good was I didn’t know any English when I started nursery school, and I cried so much they kicked me out.

My parents both speak Taiwanese and would sometimes speak it to each other when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. My brother sort of picked it up after enough conversations that they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. I never did.

My paternal grandmother was Japanese, and my paternal grandfather was Taiwanese. They spoke to each other in Japanese mostly, but also in Taiwanese to the rest of the family. They used to visit a few times a year, and often we’d have my grandparents and a few cousins and aunts and uncles staying with us for a week.

“Ohayo” and “Oyasumi nasai” are pretty much the extent of what I confidently know to be Japanese. Everything else I recognize falls into a bucket of maybe-Japanese-maybe-Taiwanese stuff that I sort of understood in passing.

“Douzo” I just found out is Japanese, though I never knew what it officially meant — it seemed like a polite term to use before eating. I also heard a lot of “do xia” which is my own pinyin spelling of the Taiwanese dialect pronuncation of “duo xie” which means many thanks. My favorite and most useful phrase in Taiwanese is “tia bo” which just means, don’t understand. I used it repeatedly when my grandfather had a stroke a few years back, and he started speaking to me on the phone in Taiwanese, not remembering that I didn’t understand.