Can someone explain to me in very simple and pragmatic terms why I should spend a single sec trying to learn my dialect (Teochew) than to learn an actual useful language like French or German in addition to English and Mandarin?
A lot of people get all hostile about “remembering your roots” but I can’t remember a single instance in my life where I was paid for being able to do what my ancestors did. My grandfather used to have oil lamps, do I have to learn that? He drove a manual shift car? Should I learn that? Once he got sick and he picked some random wild plants from the side of the road and made tea out of it instead of eating his antibiotics. He died without having eaten a single pill that was prescribed to him by a Mount Elizabeth doctor. Should I learn that?
There needs to be a system by which people pick and choose which aspects of our ancestors’ lives we ought to learn from. What is that system? Based on usefulness? What is the metric?
It’s funny people advocate for things that isn’t fundamentally helpful to the actual struggles of life, most of which are material. Please let us advocate first making a living and then you can learn whatever obscure language or tradition if you have spare time.
Here are what netizens think:
- Learn what that interests you. Some people are interested in their roots so they want to learn the dialects. It’s to join in the conversation and be part of a tribe. I am hokkien so when I go Taiwan it’s so nice to understand hokkien. Not so good when I went HK since I don’t speak Cantonese or understand cantonese.
- Who knows one day you need to do business in 汕头 and it might be your ability to speak Teochew as a Singaporean that helped you clinch the deal of a lifetime. One should never say any language is useless. But if you feel it is useless, no one is forcing you to learn it.
- Learning a language connects you to more people, so yes it’s useful. Teochews are renowned for their business acumen and some have spent their entire lifetime speaking mainly teochew. Whether you wish to get in touch with your roots is up to you, just don’t belittle others who pick up the language to do so. Pragmatism is good but no need to get others on your bandwagon what.
- You wanna learn then learn. Dont wanna learn then dont. Nothing to do with oil lamps or eating random plants to cure sickness. Your grandfather’s gen’s mentality and knowledge not the same as now. You compare what? Lame.