Oatmeal Cookie Day/Hairstylist Day/International Guide Dog Day/Honesty Day
2008-04-30 @ 8:22 p.m.

Bought only one book at the Liang Court branch of Kinokuniya, which has a terrible selection really. Anyway, recently I've been looking through some of my old French stuff. I even started reading my French Bible again, and I generally understand it, in part because I know what it's saying in English. That raises an issue that I've thought about occasionally: Let's take the simple case of someone who is bilingual, like all Singaporean children are supposed to be after going through the local education system. Note that bilingualism here should be understood in terms of a person having achieved competency in two languages (which I'll label A and B for convenience), although not necessarily to the extent that the person is equally fluent in both. What matters is that a sufficient level of mastery is attained such that the person can communicate in either language. For those of you who are bilingual, consider at the cognitive level if you are closer to being a compound bilingual (for whom words and phrases in A and B that mean the same thing are associated to the same concepts) or a coordinate bilingual (for whom words and phrases in A and B that mean the same thing are associated to different concepts). One sign that you're closer to being a coordinate bilingual along a continuum of bilingualism (because the distinction between the two is now typically viewed as being too sharp) is that you use A to think through B, sort of like keeping up an internal running translation. (Those of us who went through years in the MOELC probably understand what that feels like!) Personally, I'm closer to the compound end of the spectrum, as I usually don't find myself having to consciously translate concepts by thinking through English. Or at least if I am thinking through English, it's happening at a subconscious level.