MATURITY INC
Self-taught 250 Days+ French Learning As A Hong Kong Chinese
A bilingual striving towards trilingual by Duolingo — The difficulties I face
Dear friends who are not educated/ growing up in Hong Kong,
You may not know that Hong Kong Chinese is priviledged in learning English for years, compared to China. Growing up in Hong Kong — the ‘international trading hub’ where its district called ‘Central’ is similar to ‘The Wall Street’ in the USA — we are learning English and Chinese since kindergarten. We write in Chinese, but speak in Cantonese and the truth is that we know ABC, but usually are weak at speaking English, interacting with native English speakers, except for some children especially trained, eager to learn and are living in an English speaking environment. The fact is that we are always giving an image of being sooooo shyyyyyyyyyyy.
Ahhahahha, many Hong Kongers deemed that this is the failure of our education system. But who knows…Let me tell you more.
The system is structured in this way: kindergarten (whatever years, nowadays many Hong Kong parents pushed their children into pre-school and playgroups), secondary school 6 years, university 4 years.
The delivery languages for each kindergartens and secondary schools depend, usually Cantonese, or English, nowadays maybe Mandarin Chinese…..In form six (the sixth year of secondary school), we all have to take a public exam called HKDSE in order to get into our preferred local univerities, except for those who aim at getting into those outside Hong Kong, they will take IB or GCSE. But, local universities usually deliver their lectures in English.
I have been learning French on Duolingo for 250+ days, and one day when I was writing blogs on medium, I found that I have somehow mixed up english with french — the subject verb agreement, especially the S. This is a trapppppppppppp. Je (I), Tu (You) usually follows with verbs ending with s. These mistakes start to grow in my brain: ‘You gives me’ instead of ‘you give me’. LOL I just can’t help with it.
Picture from https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/4d610cd642d5b59f3b1996555d2ec49cb3ae8ceb/14-Table1-1.png
For french, verb forms and masculine/ feminine is basically the most difficult part, to me. But the learning process in Duolingo is amazing. I just can’t stand with the fact that the 250 days fire streak gets dissappeared one day if I give up.
So, what is the most difficult part in learning English as a Hong Kong Chinese.
I just can’t help with prepositions.
ALSO, we dont know how the mother tongue speaks in English in daily life, if we don’t watch movies or dramas…
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