Refraction

My Cantonese sucks.

I’m not being modest; that’s a statement of fact. If you asked me to have a conversation with someone wholly in Cantonese, without any English at all, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Especially if it came to something like, “So, what do you think of university?”

I still consider my Cantonese comprehension to be better than my French, though.

Recently, I came across a blog entry (I’m afraid I’ve lost the link) of someone who travelled through Europe. This gentleman had been immersed in German at an early age (but subsequently lost much of it) in addition to having studied French academically for several years. He remarked that he had to work really hard to understand French; he couldn’t let his attention wander in the least, or he’d lose the conversation completely. Conversely, when he understood a German phrase, it was practically instantaneous. (BAM would be the correct sound effect to use here.) By the end of his trip, he concluded that his German had improved markedly, while his French only showed marginal gains.

I believe that it’s not necessary to learn a language depuis la maternelle (as about half of my French class seems to have done…) in order to achieve near-fluency in it. But if studying for years didn’t help him, then… what exactly is the point of such instruction?

Speaking from personal experience, I go tongue-tied whenever I need to speak in French. Oh, I can stammer my way out of things, but there’s always gesticulation and sometimes even (gasp!) the use of franglais to bail me out. Ask me a similar question in Cantonese and I’d probably be much more confident in answering. (Unless it is the aforementioned university question, in which case I stammer in English, too. Unless it’s been raining.)

Obviously I’ve been exposed to Cantonese my whole life, and French for a comparatively shorter period of time. My parents speak Cantonese at home, not French. That might account for the level of comfort. Yet, in terms of vocabulary, I would say that my French vocabulary is probably larger than my Cantonese. My skills in writing Cantonese hover at around a kindergarten level (verified by a friend who grew up in HK and declared my most advanced Chinese school books to be her grade 1 texts), while in French they’re definitely higher. I can struggle through a French novel, but I wouldn’t dream of picking up anything other than a children’s book in Chinese.

All in all, it seems my French is better than my Cantonese. I’m still more comfortable conversing in my “mother” tongue, though. So, the question for all the multilingual readers of my blog: Do languages that you learned through limited immersion come more easily to you than those that you learned at school?