I grew up with it as an immigrant to the US. I arrived in Brooklyn, NY at 8 years old and started public school there. I’m basically a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, no translator tools necessary lmfao. English is actually my primary language, I’m a US Citizen now.
As for Cantonese and Mandarin, I can express my self using basic 2nd-grade level words + some vocabulary I learned while looking up the online dictionaries for some terms. I can recognize most of the basic characters. But if I read a text from someone that has more education than I did, and they use higher level vocab or like colloquel terms, then I’d actually be stuggling to reading Chinese and might have to read very very slowly or have to use Google translate to verify I understand it correctly.
Ah, well then hello fellow American! It’s great that you have retained understanding of your childhood languages. I took German in highschool and probably know about enough now to get myself arrested, or more likely just laughed at and I know none of the Irish Gaelic my family would have spoken when they emigrated in the mid 1800s.
I grew up with it as an immigrant to the US. I arrived in Brooklyn, NY at 8 years old and started public school there. I’m basically a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, no translator tools necessary lmfao. English is actually my primary language, I’m a US Citizen now.
As for Cantonese and Mandarin, I can express my self using basic 2nd-grade level words + some vocabulary I learned while looking up the online dictionaries for some terms. I can recognize most of the basic characters. But if I read a text from someone that has more education than I did, and they use higher level vocab or like colloquel terms, then I’d actually be stuggling to reading Chinese and might have to read very very slowly or have to use Google translate to verify I understand it correctly.
Ah, well then hello fellow American! It’s great that you have retained understanding of your childhood languages. I took German in highschool and probably know about enough now to get myself arrested, or more likely just laughed at and I know none of the Irish Gaelic my family would have spoken when they emigrated in the mid 1800s.