A Language Learning
Experience
My name is Nicholas and my Chinese name is 成龍 and I was born in Surabaya ,
Indonesia. So, basically the first language I ever learn is Indonesian because I was born
there, but I also learn a little bit of Chinese because my parent’s descendant is Chinese.
My great grandparents immigrate from China to Indonesia. Because of this my parents
are speaking Chinese at home with me and my sister. But even though they speak
Chinese everyday, I never really speak it because my parents speak Indonesian mixed
with Chinese. So I was never forced to learn Chinese by them. From little I was taught
Indonesian grammar which I considered was quite hard. In Jakarta school, It is normal
for kids to learn Indonesia grammar because there are a lot of “preformative” in
Indonesia words. In my family, I have a lot of aunts and they used to live in a city called
“Medan'' and a lot of people there are immigrants who came from China. So they also
teach me how to speak Mandarin properly a bit by bit. Some of them also tell me that
when I grew older, I should be able to speak Mandarin because we are a family of a
Chinese descendant. Also from an early age I started learning English from school. I
really like to watch American movies so my English started to get better by time.When I
was around 10, I loved to play games and most of the games were made using English
and this is where my English really took a big step forward. Even though my English
language was quite good when I was small, my parents still think my grammar is bad.
So they called a personal tutor for me and my sister to learn the grammar the right way.
I will admit because of this I realized that my English at that time was not very good
because I spoke English grammar randomly at every sentence I spoke. I still learn
Chinese by speaking with my parents but they also think I need to learn more Chinese
words to expand my knowledge and they also decided that I need to take extra Chinese
classes outside of school. I studied Mandarin for about 3 years and decided to leave
because I didn't really like Mandarin back then but now after I came to Taiwan for
university, I regret it because I still can't speak Mandarin that well now. When I was in
the final year of my high school I hadn't decided where I would go to study university at.
At that time my sister went to Taiwan for university and my parents also suggested that I
also go to Taiwan because the living cost of Taiwan is quite cheap compared to
Australia and the United States. I also think that now every major company in Indonesia
is built by Chinese companies and other countries. If I can speak both English and
Mandarin fluently, I would have a higher percentage of getting a job. So that is why I
had decided I would go to Taiwan to pursue my studies so I can study Mandarin more
seriously than before and also to improve my English as well. On the first day I arrived
in Taiwan. I thought my Mandarin is good enough to speak fluently to the locals but I
realized that my Mandarin was far from good. They couldn't understand what I was
