Jul 23, 2008

Intro by Nick

Hello everyone, especially to this blog's co-writers, I'm very thrilled to write this blog with you guys...

I'm Nicholas Cripps, was born and raised in Manila till I was 12, then moved to the Gold Coast, Australia in the year 2000. Luckily I was old enough not to forget Tagalog when I moved to Australia...I recently graduated with a BA, and hope to teach English in Japan and China before I take my Masters.

My love affair with foreign language learning started when I entered high school, as Japanese was compulsary for the first year. I was so scared because I was told by my parents that learning a foreign language is hard, and so I would probably not do well in Japanese, and should make sure I studied hard in my other subjects to get my grades up. It turned out that I loved learning Japanese, and I did pretty well in it. Haha... I never saw that coming...

The next language I attempted was Cantonese in 2002, as my favourite city is Hong Kong, and my best friend here in Australia is of a Cantonese-speaking background. However back then, there were too few resources to study Canto, and I gave up because I thought it was too hard...

...So I took up Mandarin because it was easier, and there are so many online resources and books to help. I love Taiwan pop music, so it was and still is a great incentive to learn the language. Now armed with Mandarin, I'm going to take on Cantonese again in my spare time.

Finally, there's Korean. I was in love with this Korean girl during my final years in high school, and so I started learning Korean! Sadly she didn't feel the same way, and so I never really had any big incentive to learn Korean, except maybe so I can understand food terms...

I want to learn Spanish too, just because I have an advantage of being a Tagalog speaker... but it just doesn't have the same appeal as the abovementioned languages...

The only thing I love more than language learning is cooking, eating and singing! You might find that a lot of my future posts will be multilingual ramblings about food... haha.. And I love Karaoke...

Sorry everyone for the long self-intro....

Here are links to my three other blogs:
一个菲律宾人的故事 中文简体篇
一個菲律賓人的故事 中文繁體片
ニコラスによりますと 日本語のブログ

皆さん、こんにちは。ニコラスと申します。皆と一緒にこのブログを書く機会が有って、本当に喜んでいる!これからおもしろいエントリーを書くように頑張るよ!
我很高兴跟大家写这篇博客!希望大家能够喜欢我在这里将要写的文章。
여러분,안녕하세요! 나와 같은 외국어 공부를 좋아하는 사람들을 만나서,정말로 기뻐요!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to meet you, Nick! I am always impressed by people who try to learn any Chinese dialect, whether or not they succeed.

I invite you to ramble on and on about food and eating as much as you like ;) :D

- Bouks (from KoreanClass101)

Nick said...

Thank you nenuphar, Chinese is my favourite language group... especially Mandarin and Cantonese... I feel other dialects are way too hard...

james said...

Yay a Tagalog speaker! Gaano katatas ang Tagalog mo?

Nick said...

Maraming nagsasabi na matatas ang Tagalog ko, pero madalas napapa-Taglish ako, kasi ganoon naman magsalita ang pangkaraniwang tao sa Pinas eh...

Theresa said...

Hello and welcome to the blog! It's really nice to have you here with us. Looking forward to your posts! :)

Ed said...

Great to have you here, pare! (Hehehe...) Maybe we can do a couple of collaborative entries on stuff like partial reduplication and infixation - I have lots to say on those subjects.

I love rambling about food, too. Where do you want to start first? Pinapaitan at dinuguan o lumpiang Shanghai at pansit Canton? ^^

maxiewawa said...

Salaamat po!

欢迎!いらっしゃい!어서어세요! Welcome!

Ed said...

And yeah, the whole Spanish thing - I personally am bothered when people start describing Tagalog and other Philippine languages as basically "easy (to learn) if you know Spanish and English".

Nothing could be further from the truth - you still have the Austronesian grammar to worry about! It definitely kicks ass, but it's challenging. Verb-initial order, a "focus" system that goes beyond active vs. passive sentences, reduplication and infixation that encode verbal aspect and mood.

It's interesting to see that most of those grammatical strategies are minimized in Indonesian and Malay, but in older languages like Old Javanese and Balinese, they were still being used.

Nick said...

To Ed,

I'd love to write about linguistics, but I actually don't know much about it... which is why I'm thinking of reading up on linguistics before I decide what I should take my Masters in 4 years...

I definitely agree about what you said about Tagalog/Spanish... I think Tagalog is actually a pretty hard language to learn... but I think a Native Tagalog/English speaker should find learning Spanish easier... easier not easy! But only in terms of vocab, I hate verb conjugations, in any language!