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misslinguistic

Founder: Meridian Linguistics
Likes: Learning languages, 📸 my drink
From: US
Home: Beijing
Current📍: Singapore
Links, bio ⬇️

Have you felt the effects of the splinternet?

I’m really loving this temporary Singapore life…I’m spending a lot of time in the Botanic Gardens, having plenty of meals with friends and family, and working from either the office or from cafes in the sun ☀️. I still speak Mandarin here and there since most Singaporeans study it in school.

But with so much of my life still back in China, I really feel the effects of the splinternet. While many people inside China have to use VPNs to access Western websites and apps, people outside of China often have to toggle their VPN country TO China in order to use Chinese ones! So to access Chinese filesharing, spreadsheets, messaging, video streaming, news websites…one can spend a lot of time toggling.

I know that China isn’t the only country experiencing this “splintering”…have you started to feel the effects of national borders on your internet browsing yet?

Back on my булшит I found a great tutor for

Back on my булшит

I found a great tutor for Russian, who is speeding me through the basics. I studied Russian many years ago but have forgotten much of it since, which is always an awkward place to be as a language learner. Our lessons feel like the study equivalent of a powerwalk: she drills me not just for accuracy but for speed of retrieval. I hope to be back at my B1 level by November, B2/C1 by 2023 💪

App (since I know you'll ask): Goodnotes. Great for copying and pasting from PDF textbooks.

My happy place…I’ve been in Singapore for arou

My happy place…I’ve been in Singapore for around a month now, but have already gone to the Botanic Garden six times 😁 I love putting on a podcast in a language that I’m learning and just walking for as long as I can…

Malay is one of Singapore's four official language

Malay is one of Singapore's four official languages, and is the home language of 13% of Singapore's residents. Only 13%? This still blows my mind: after all, Singapore WAS Malaysia until its independence in 1965.

My own last brush with bahasa melayu (Malay language) was when I lived in Malacca (Malaysia) for 1 month in 2019. I studied Malay for an hour every day with a tutor, which mostly consisted of her "fixing" my Indonesian until it came out Malay. My attempts often left her hysterical.

Here in Singapore, the Malay is yet another flavor, peppered with Hokkien. It swiftly dissolves into capable English as soon as I am revealed to not, in fact, be Malay.

I finally finished reading my first Chinese novel!

I finally finished reading my first Chinese novel! 许三观卖血记, by 余华，is great for Chinese learners since the writing style is so straightforward, not poetic.

This was a great day: a foggy walk around Singapore's Botanic Gardens, then a coffee and a book while the rain poured down ☕️

Now to find my next Chinese read!

One of Singapore's many thriving languages is Hokk

One of Singapore's many thriving languages is Hokkien: a language that originates from China, but that is about as similar to Mandarin as French is to Spanish.

The fun thing about Hokkien is that it pops up everywhere: you'll hear it in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and of course in Taiwan. Taiwanese is, in effect, Hokkien.

Of course each region has its own flavor of Hokkien, and sometimes the flavors are almost mutually unintelligible, but they all originate from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou in China's Fujian province.

This last weekend, my husband and I split a pair of AirPods and ambled through Singapore's gorgeous Botanic Gardens, listening to an excellent China History Podcast about the history of the Hokkien. It is very likely that once we took out the pods and sat down at a cafe, we heard the sounds of Hokkien all around us. Unfortunately even if that had happened, I wouldn't have known...I can't yet distinguish Hokkien from Hakka or Teochew: two other Chinese languages that are spoken by significant numbers of Singaporeans. Stories for another day...

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