An Attempt At A Chinese Devotion

I am still suffering from the trauma of this morning - having to do my scheduled devotion in MANDARIN.

Alright, that was an exaggeration; it was not that harrowing an experience, just a trifle upsetting at the beginning of it all. Seriously, I had planned on an English devotion, and I was intending to talk about the poem 'If' by Kipling. However, it being a scheduled Mandarin day, I had to try my utmost best to deliver a devotion in Mandarin instead. It was to be a summary devotion on the theme of 'Gentleman', and I had settled on the Confucian ideals of a Gentleman for my topic.

To be honest, I have not been using Mandarin much in communication nowadays, though I used to be quite proficient in it. I mean, I had scored Distinction in my Chinese, used to be in Hwa Chong JC, and we conversed in Mandarin there. That's all gone now; the end result is quite apparent - I couldn't really be fluent in the language this morning. This time, I had tried to speak without a prepared script, having had a worse experience last year when I tried to read a Chinese devotion. Well, this new approach, or rather attempt, was horrible ... i was seriously halting at the beginning, desperately trying to clutch at any Chinese vocabulary and idioms I knew. I then realised that I was still thinking in English at that point, and that would never do. But it was indeed a long moment of awkward desperation. Finally, my mind began to process in Mandarin itself, and I finally managed to start rambling in the Chinese language.

Subsequently, the momentum just got going. It was hilarious, now that I can look back upon that experience and laugh at it. At one point, I had been on the verge of reverting to English. And I had never really paused in that manner whenever I spoke to the boys publicly. I mean, I would usually go on and on and on. Well, that sort of re-emerged towards the later part of my devotion, when I finally warmed up to using Chinese, and I actually gained momentum. I began to sound more urgent, began to speak more insistently, and was rolling forward in my words. Yet, when I was getting all charged up, I realised that I had no more time, and had to end it. So, that was what I did, and due to my inadequacy of vocabulary, the closure was abrupt, quite unlike my normal style. It was, to quote DL, that I virtually applied a brake to end it, even though I still had loads to share.

Morale of this story, or experience: language simply has to be constantly and consistently used for one to be truly proficient and fluent in it.

And this just illustrates and reinforce the point that I have been trying to drive into my students: language prowess are not acquired overnight, so just keep reading, writing and speaking, and write those journals fervently and fanatically!