Learning the mother tongue

As a Chinese person in Australia, like many other descendants of immigrants here, there is not that much use for our mother tongue in everyday life. And although it is always good to learn the mother tongue, even now I have not attained a good ability in it.

It had started from when I was young, when my parents sent me to Chinese school. Due to not understanding the importance of learning this at the time, I did not try very hard to learn the language outside of class and memorize the characters and words. As a result, my ability was not very good in these years.

When I finally realized the importance of learning this, it was around the start of high school. But thinking ahead, I knew that my strengths lay in math and the sciences, and had already planned out my VCE subjects: English, Math Methods, Specialist Math, Chemistry, Physics, Biology (I had subsequently made a bad decision to not do year 12 biology in year 11 due to bad advice from some school teachers, so I didn't end up doing year 12 bio, but that's another matter). That brought out the maximum of 6 subjects contributing to my ENTER already (but cut down to 5 due to not doing year 12 bio :( ). And so I focused on the subjects which were going to be in my VCE thereon, because I wanted to get into medicine and it was hard to get into. So Chinese was a lower priority, even though I still attended Chinese school until the end of year 11, when to focus on the other subjects I quit learning Chinese in language school. As such, when I left high school, my Chinese still wasn't good.

Then came university, and I hadn't gotten into medicine yet. During the biomed course, I again had the opportunity to choose Chinese as a subject outside of core to do. However, after a while pondering, I decided that it was not the time. Since the University of Melbourne uses GPA as part of the ranking process to get into medicine, I did not want to jeopardize this. So apart from a social work subject in first year (because first year was weighted least in GPA calculations) which was supposed to help if I got an interview (I sort of regret that now though since it pulled my GPA down quite a bit), I chose things which were more to my strength, like economics and math subjects. As such, even then the best strategy was to yet again delay learning my mother tongue.

So as of now, my Chinese is still not very good. I do plan to improve it significantly in the future, but when I realized the importance of learning it, other more important goals in the short term, for getting into medicine in Melbourne, required different subject selections for me to maximize my chances. As such, for now I'll just have to stick with learning informally and hopefully pick it up more in the future. It would be nice to one day be able to visit the mainland (which I haven't yet) and not have to resort to using English to communicate due to lack of Chinese ability.