Inability to Speak Native Tongue Fluently?

I think we have similar problem. Most of third generations of chinese in Indonesia dont speak mandarin anymore. There used to be joke "chinese that dont speak mandarin probably come from Indonesia" due to our government discriminatory policy that forbade Chinese to speak, write, or read anything related to Chinese during the past.

Even though I born and live in Chinese family, we hardly speak mandarin with exception my father and his cousins who still speak chinese. My mother herself is able to speak dutch, it's pathetic that none of these languages inherit to me.

Even though recently I have begun to develop feeling of proud being Chinese and having plan to study my ancestor culture in future, I dont have any plan to study Mandarin for meantime because I heard it's very amazingly difficult.

I also dont live in community where there is a lot of chinese speakers around, so learning it now is totally obsolete. I guess Japanese and German are enough for me.

Anyway omnislash, I think you should try not forgetting your mandarin by keep using it everyday instead of english, because you have chance to be bilingual somehow =P.

Just like you, I have friend that has fluency over british english since she was raised in England during her junior high school. Now she is totally clueless when she must write in Indonesia instead of English.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by vemp

Well, most kids today mix tagalog with english, which sounds annoying. It's like singlish. "You know kasi eh, I'm so gutom na, eat naman tayo doon!" And with the HUEG influence of American pop culture in here, it's no wonder people are starting to have difficulty in speaking tagalog. I don't get it why they speak english when they can talk in tagalog or in dialect(bisaya).

Argh, those people test my patience out . I really hate it when these people speaks any of (insert language here)glish. A lot of teenagers here think "it's damn cool to show off my fluent english by speaking the mixture of english and my own language". Youngster these day think that speaking Indonenglish is much cooler than speaking our own native language. What a shame.

There's nowhere I can't reach.