My Child Turns Three / Language

My firstborn turned 3 years old a week ago. If there's one thing I notice in him, it's his ability to use proper grammar in his Malay language and his memory. His English is nowhere near "natural", and I guess for this year it has to be a change of language for our home use.

Amazingly, I did a non-motivated research on this ability. A psycholinguist, Pinker, from Massa*chusetts Institute of Technology says that a three-year-old toddler is "a grammatical genius"--master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language. Peter Freeman, a fluent six-language speaker states that "In the first 3 years of a child's life, they acquire most of their native language, and they do it with no textbooks, no drills, no flashcards, no explanations and no language software. They learn by interacting with people and their surroundings."

Research has shown that there are First Language Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition, however, since this research was done in a single-language speaking world (ie. USA), we'll change it a bit to Mother Language Acquisition and Secondary Language Acquisition. Purely via observation, in Malaysia, if you're a malay, you learn malay at a high successful level and english at various level (depending where you live) by the age of 12. For Chinese, in the Klang Valley, at 12 they are fluent in Chinese (and/or dialects of their parents), ok in Malay and quite bad in English. Amazingly, for Chinese who pushes English language as an important aspect to their children, the child ends up being fluent in English, ok in Malay and ok in verbal Chinese (and/or dialects) but are usually unable to read/write chinese. I have not enough experience with Indian compadres to make a conclusion of my observation for them.

Is a new language really hard to learn? I think most research are true, that if you want to learn the language, you have to live where the language is being spoken, and nothing else. You learn Chinese in China. In Malaysia, even if you live amongst Chinese, you will not learn as fast because you'll be going through a "translation" course with your Chinese, while in China it's a Do-Or-Die situation whereby both don't speak the language. I mean, of course there are English speaking chinese, but I'm pushing more towards the really non-English speaking ones.

Another is being in love with the language, most common example is loving to watch Japanese anime and slowly learning the language due to repetition... and it's good, because then you'll learn the normal speaking of the language and what phrases are usually used. If you were to use a book, it would be too formal. You wouldn't want to talk in Malay "Apa kamu buat di situ?" instead of "Kau buat apa kat situ?" or "Apa kau buat tu?". So, these videos are quite a good source of learning, though it's also quite slow.

My favourite method of learning, since a non-English speaking friend is almost non-existence in Malaysia, is to listen to their phone conversation. At least then you can see how sentences are structured, how words are used differently provided you do have a little bit of experience in SOV vs SVO.

SVO is Subject - Verb -Object which is commonly used in English, such as "I hate this". Most common used in the world are SOV - Subject - Object - Verb, such as in Chinese "I, this, hate!" which would sound a little like Yoda, though he actually uses OSV like in Star Wars's "Your father, he is" or if you were to pull his whiskers, he'll yell "Die, you will" and cut you up.

I'm not gonna post about languages here, just enough to note that while learning a language may seem difficult, like a friend says, we usually just use less than 1200 words, and actually use less than 300 different words on a daily basis. (I can't find a source to prove it during the time of this blog, but I've read it somewhere before). But I think, after learning words, and the SOV, SVO, etc.... in just a few weeks of common repetition, we can make a decent conversation with it.

Which is why I don't understand the hoo-haa about mastering English to get a good job. The Japanese (incidentally I received an email from Japan today asking to meet up about my job), doesn't mind bad English, as long as the message gets through. So I really think that as long as messages get through, there's really no need for a superb English speaking employee unless they're involved in producing white documents.

Back to my son,... he'll start English. Poor him.

True Friend

I like that saying "A good friend will bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "Damn we f****d up!!!"

Last week, on Wednesday and Friday respectively, I met two true friends. One I've known for 16 years and another for 14 years. It was like an audit, on how we've grown and what we've achieved the past 10 years, and sadly, I'm way below par. But at least I realised that, and I'm happy I did. Audits like this, only true friends can do it. Pure direct no-filtered comments. Take it with stride, and you know deep inside, they do care for you and that's why they're very strong with the remarks.

I have to admit, I know one fault about myself that I never mentioned aloud, but was mentioned aloud by BOTH of them! Talk about knowing me! I have the problem of not completing what I started. I start too many things without completing what I've started before, then I'd have multiple incomplete projects. TL, one of them told me to just take in 2-3 things and complete per year. LS on the other hand, brought up a very interesting theory. My inability to complete what I've started may not be to the fact that I'm afraid that my completed project will not be up to par. She said that it's not that I may not be good enough to complete the project with success, but I may not be good enough to even complete it in the first place. That's a nice eye opener. I somehow cannot argue with that. Looking deep inside, yes, I think there is a fear that I fear that I'm not good enough to continue the journey to completion. Which is VERY bad.

What I've learned from them. You know, I tried to be 'cool', or go with the flow of what 'cool' people say... especially on new years resolution. I've not had any new year resolution since 1994! This stems from people's comment of "Why wait to new year?? Resolutions can be made on any day." That's the problem. The "any day" never came up. So I start off something at the spur of the moment without having a good resolution to it.

I've known all along that Goals must have Expected Outcome and Deadline. But everything that I started have an Expected Outcome but no deadline, not even a milestone, and that's the wrong way to go. Now I'm feeling hypocritical, coz' while I thrive on goals within my blogs, I'm not properly setting my own goals.

With the two meetings with my two true friends, I revisited my projects, and really have to be adamant that I need to shelf quite a lot and only concentrate on 2-3 at a time. As hard as that may be, to shelf projects, at least 2-3 gets done. Doing too many things at once, nothing gets done.

I learn something great last week. I hope you do too.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

I acknowledge, understand and support the usage of KPIs in anyone's career, as it is a good tool to gauge a person's competency over time. However, I feel that while it helps give a clear 'goals' that lead to a 'bigger' goal for the company, there are one setback I faced a few days ago during a discussion. This setback does not bring to a disadvantage to a company, but it does lessen the overall result of what a company may get.

As a real example, few days back we formed a team to do a specific task. Now, this task involves meeting some people with the hopes that they meet up with us, and thus invest in us. This huge event have several teams set-up, and while our work do not overlap other teams, the results may. For instance, another team is in charge of a bigger scaled picture, to get huge organisations to meet up, and then to invest in us.

Our team, is supposed to go to 'other' places and secure a meeting and hopefully they invest in us. The problem here is, the sentence of "Team A has secured 'number of meetings' and 'amount invested' as their KPIs". This means that should we have the meeting, just because we're in the same company, the meeting number or the investment goes to Team A. To try to focus it down to just "Our KPI will be meetings and investment from organisations in this 'other' places" cannot work, because they may meet with us now. Then they take their sweet time, and six months later approach the organisation as a whole and Team A gets the KPI.

So in the end we dropped the KPI, and concentrate (and try to find other KPIs that other teams did not include into theirs). I find this lessen the earning power of the organisation, but for the sake of having a value placed on the team, it has to be done. Or else the team do the work, but it is never reflected as another team takes the results we obtain, then at the end of the day, our team gave 'nothing' to the company. Also, shared KPIs cannot be accepted anymore as our team was one of the last to be formed, sort of an afterthought.

Now, that s*cks. Hehe.... finding unique KPIs is quite a challenge.