Questions:
- Is English my second language or third language?
- Am I a native speaker of Mandarin?
I'm Chinese from the mainland of China. Hokkien aka Taiwanese is my mother tongue. I started learning Mandarin since I was seven years old when I was almost admitted to the grammar school.
Except for talking to street vendors, shop owners, family, neighbors, most of time I speak in Mandarin. The inner voice of mine is Mandarin most of time. It's a bit of difficult for me to try to express myself in complex ideas in Hokkien. I would say my English is more fluent than my mother tongue Hokkien, because when I write or say something in English, and I usually mostly don't have to translate my words from Mandarin to English mentally.
Hokkien is generally considered as a dialect by Chinese linguists in the mainland of China, while it is considered as a language among many Western linguists as I knew.
Mandarin is an artificial language based on Beijing dialect and Hebei dialect. Just a few people, in term of portion, actually can speak Mandarin perfectly if without training in China. Those professional news anchors of Mandarin who were almost all corrected with their accents in their majors relevant to broadcasting or journalism etc. in universities.
People in the north of China generally mostly can understand with each other in their dialects, and it is something like Dutch speakers can understand the low German dialect of some German speakers. Yet, Hokkien is very difficult for other Chinese people to understand if they don't speak it.
Mandarin has four tones, while there are seven tones in Hokkien.
I used to say I am a native speaker of Chinese. I think the word of 'Chinese' is perfect for me, because Chinese covers all kinds of different dialects in China.
I just looked up the definition as below from an online dictionary, and I don't think if I can call myself a native speaker of Mandarin. If so, I would say 99% of Chinese people cannot call ourselves native speakers of Mandarin which is an artificial language.
of NOUN
a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood:
A few days ago I wrote 'English is my second languge on the forum', now I am not sure.
After I thought them over again and again, now my own answers to myself are:
English is my third language.
I'm a native speaker of Mandarin. (Generally)
Would you please share me with your opinion about them?
Thank you for your reading!
Edit for solecisms.