Memoir - You Sound Funny

Rewinding back to when I first migrated to Australia in 2009, I was fresh from Singapore. I was born in Malaysia to Malaysian born parents and lived there for five years, and then lived in Singapore for another three years, so you can expect my accent to be very different to an Australian accent. I had the typical Malaysian – Singaporean accent with slang words just randomly chucked into sentences like “lah”, the mispronunciation of words such as “want” for “one” and “or not” for “anot” and the shortening of words like “gostand” instead of “go stand”.

My family and I moved to Australia with the excitement of living in a western country and in hopes of leading a better lifestyle. At the airport upon our arrival, I exchanged looks with my brother who was also in awe in the way that people were speaking and in the way they sounded.  

Starting school was a rush of excitement and fear. I went to a small local private school called St. Bernadette’s. There were people with different ethnicities which was comforting because it made me feel included but what got my peer’s attention was my foreign accent which stood out among their loveable Aussie accent. For a short time, this accent had formed an identity for myself and truthfully speaking, I wasn’t proud of it.

My friends were very friendly and accepted me quickly but what I was sensitive about was that they had turned my accent or more specifically me into a bit of a laugh and automatically thought that I was an extremely smart kid. My teacher took on that stereotype as well. In subjects like math and science, I wasn’t given as much attention per say since he assumed that I would not need any assistance; to be honest I didn’t need help but still. In English however, despite my good command of English, my teacher constantly kept checking on me and making sure I understood everything. I was grateful for his special treatment but at the same time got annoyed by it as well. This experience had inclined me to be more self-conscious about my accent and I got frustrated with myself, for being different. Personally, I think that being different is a good thing but in this situation, I found it to be a hindrance not only in my learning atmosphere but in my social interaction as well.

This issue caused me to become quite shy and quiet, which unfortunately affected my social interactions with friends and only worsened my teacher’s sympathy for me and my English. Fitting in this new community started becoming a lost hope until one day I noticed myself asking my brother “what are you doing” instead of my usual “what you doing” and said it in a dodgy Australian accent. It was such a small accomplishment but I got back the optimism I had when I first wanted to be accepted. From then it was just a matter of communicating with people and being exposed to the accent and the language that Aussies use. 

It took me over a month to properly develop my accent but once I did, I had regained my confidence and it enabled me to communicate with my friends without having the fear of being ridiculed. As a bonus, the special treatment I received from my teacher started to decline. Some might say that I should be wishing for more special treatments like what my teacher was providing me with, but I was just stoked  that I had finally fit in.







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