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When we’re outside and I talk to the kids in Indonesian, I usually get people, mainly older chinese folks, saying to me, ‘Oh … I thought you’re chinese. You look chinese.’

And I always would reply, ‘Yes, we’re chinese. We’re chinese Indonesians’, to which they’d smile and go, ‘Ooo…’

As much as I would love to speak chinese (mandarin) or my Hakka dialect, I’m pretty bad at it.

Okay, I can understand a little bit when people talk to me, but my speaking skills are so very far from good. My vocabularies are minimal and I just can’t seem to get the ’sound’ (intonation) right! (and let’s not go into whether I know how to write chinese characters!)

Being ethnically chinese, I do feel I should be able to speak chinese though. Well, at least I should know the very basic everyday conversation stuff.

And personally I think the more languages we know and master, the better. It helps broaden our horizons and allows us to explore the richness of other cultures.

For my case, I guess I could always ‘blame’ it on the fact that I was only fourteen when I was sent to Australia and thus I hardly spent time with my hakka-speaking family in Jakarta during my nine years of study there.

But then again, I’ve been here in Singapore - where mandarin-speaking people are just everywhere - for close to nine years, YET I’m still quite clueless about the language.

Yes I know it’s bad.

The other day Anya showed me the chinese books her teacher gave her. And as I flipped through the pages, I was SO surprised (read: shocked) by the level of difficulty she’d need to learn within this year alone. I mean, she’s still in nursery and she’s supposed to know (read, write and speak) all THAT!

Anyway, looking at the brighter side of things, at least I can use her books, learn from it myself, then help her with the lessons? Hmm.

AND SO.

As part of my resolution, I plan to be able to speak better mandarin by end of this year! And since going for a tuition with Vai tagging along is pretty much out of the question, I plan to pick up the language from interactive CDs and the many available online resources (lots of free ones too now!).

Oh, btw click here to see a very good site my hubby came across - www.chinesepod.com. You need to register to use the site, but it’s free! I especially love the clearly pronounced sound files!

Anyway. Now that I’ve announced it to everyone, I hope it motivates me even more. Heh.

PS: If you know any great online chinese learning sites, I’d love to hear about it!