Foreign Language is one of the toughest subjects to learn at school, especially if you don't have any interest in that particular language. My grandparents came from Fujian, China. I was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia and although Indonesian is the primary language taught at school, my grandma refused to talk to me at home unless I used her native language, Chinese-Hokkien. For a child mind, that was too much. As an adult, I'm forever grateful to her. Some of my cousins do not even understand the spoken language. Soon, my parents also want me to learn Chinese-Mandarin. Boy! That was tough. I hated sitting down in living room with my private tutor for three hours lesson on Sundays morning when I could run off and watch cartoons instead. My parents gave up after couple months and said, "We hope you pick up the language when you are older." I did pick up the language later on and in a way more fun than sitting down for 3 hours on every weekend.
As early as I can remember, I was around five or six years old, my grandma started to rent Singapore drama series - each serial is an average 20 episodes. The dialog used was Chinese-Mandarin with English subtitle. Sometimes, I would sit down and watched with her, but since I didn't know the language back then, I couldn't care less. Nevertheless, the pictures and music did catch my attention and grandma would start teaching me a few simple phrases in Mandarin, such as, "Good Morning", "How are you?","My name is...." The easy baby languages if you will.
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