30 May 2011:
билингвизм
Yesterday, I had a little Twitter conversation with an ex-schoolmate. One minor thing we were talking about was effectively bilingual.Frankly speaking, a few years ago, I would proudly declare that yes I am someone effectively bilingual. Now? Hmm, I'm not so sure if I can still say it.
Like what I said yesterday, I used to focus more on Chinese, then focused more on English. Now, you can probably say I am 兩竅不通. Seriously, sometimes I find myself wondering why, and since when, did my bilingualism standard drop till so low.
Previously, I was able to switch easily from English to Chinese, or from Chinese to English. (I do not mean Singlish, where English, Chinese, and dialect is brought in.)
I still remember a time a few years ago when I was searching through my fridge for something to eat when I thought of a sentence in English. I tried translating it to Chinese, and it was rather difficult. Then, I thought of another sentence in Chinese (totally different one from English). I tried translating it, and I did it almost instantly!
This left such a deep impression on me, since I could never find out why I can only translate "one-way". Now, I am much better at translating, but I still find that my standards have dropped. And because I have focused more on English since the start of the year, I find that my Chinese vocabulary is slowly fading off. Not as common ones are being forgotten now, such as ... tie pin? I know, most people won't use it, but still, I used to know it. Ugh.
And so I abruptly end my post. By the way, it's something I've never tried before, but I am going to translate (manually, not running it through Google Translate) my entire post above into Chinese. Here goes.
昨天，我在推特上與一個舊同學進行了小談論。其中談到的小話題就是雙語程度。
老實說，要是幾年前，我能肯定地稱自己是個精通雙語的人。現在？我不大確定能否這麼說了。
就如我昨天所說的，我之前一直注重華文，之後注重英語。所以，現在我是名副其實的兩竅不通。說真的，有時候我會自問曾幾何時我的雙語程度會降至今天這樣，而且，為何會這樣。
之前，我能夠很輕易地從英語轉到華語，反之亦然。（我指的不是新語，即英語、華語、方言一同摻進去。）
我還記得幾年前，我在翻找冰箱有沒東西吃時，想到了一句英文句子。我嘗試把它翻譯為華語，相當的困難。之後，我想了一句完全不同的華語句子，翻譯為英語，這下子就很容易。
這給我留下深刻的印象，因為我始終不明白為何我的翻譯只能「單方面」的。現在，我在翻譯這方面好多了，但是程度還是算下降。而且因為我在年初時就已經轉而注重英語，我發覺我的華語詞彙已經慢慢的被忘記了。比較不常用的如……領帶夾？我知道大多數的人不會用到「領帶夾」這三個字，但是，我曾經知道的。嗄。
我就這麼結束我的文章吧。對了，我將嘗試一件「前所未試」的事情，即把以上的所有字翻譯（不是完完全全使用穀歌翻譯帶過完事）成英語。開始了。