One obvious advantage to be multilingual...You can talk BAD on people on their face w/o "worrying" that they understand you.The RISK?That person might actually understand what you are saying!I had a short trip to New York, and apparently, as a chinese, I spent alot of time venturing Chinatown. And obviously, I can't use cantonese or mandarin to talk "bad" about people (folks, its a "tradition" here to use canto/mandarin to talk bad about
Mat Salleh) since most of the people in Chinatown is Chinese, so naturally my friend and I digged out our "buried"
BAHASA MELAYU and utilized it! Well, our BM were so
KARAT! yet still understandable la. Who cares? as long as we
faham each other,
boleh la.
Here is the interesting part,
We ( 4 of us) were having lunch in this typical-chinese-only-restaurant. For some unknown reason, we kept on chit-chatting with our
karat-punya BM. So a friend of mine who is not really fluent in Cantonese spoke to the waiter in Cantonese to order food. After that we continue our chit-chats, suddenly my friend told us,
"Eh, u dengar tadi apa meja sebelah cakap pasal kita tak? Mereka cakap kat dunia ini banyak orang multilingual. Tapi ada sesetengah orang suka menunjuk-nunjuk dan pura-pura faham bahasa lain." And obviously that group of people made a stupid assumption on all of us based on my friend's not-so-fluent cantonese.
Since that group
menyemarakkan our api,
All 4 of us with a volumized tone, continue our chit-chatting in fluent CANTONESE, this time. and we "won". That group of people
dengan perasaan yang sangat malu, terkejut and whispered "they really can speak and understand Cantonese!!!" -
PADAN MUKA-
so, the moral of the story is: Be careful on Multilingual People, especially in city like NY
P.S: BM is not a safe language to use in NY, too. Because we met alot of dont-look-like Malaysian Malaysian and also Indonesian.
Berhati-hati semasa mengunakan Bahasa Melayu~
