When you are in relationship with someone who is from a totally different culture and background from yours, it is sometimes unavoidable or to an extent, a must, to learn, accept and respect each other’s cultural differences in order to make things work. Being in a relationship this long, I’m sort of used to his German dialect and he mine. Sometimes I’ll accidentally utter some mishmash of normal German words laced with his dialect, which he thinks that I’m trying to irritate him with his own dialect .

During our visit back to Ipoh last year, he complained to me that I don’t teach him enough Chinese words. So I took up the effort to teach him a few important Chinese words, which I think are quite relevant to a foreigner trying to learn some rudimentary Chinese, like ‘wo ai ni‘ (you know what it means ), or ‘wo bu zhi dao‘ (I don’t know), or ‘wo bu ming bai‘ (I don’t undertstand) etc. Well, nothing too complicated. I thought that from that trip he learned quite a lot of Chinese words, but to my surprise and utter annoyance, he picked up ‘Manglish’ faster than Chinese!

So when he tries to antagonize me nowadays, he’ll add some ‘lah‘, ‘loh‘ or ‘aiya‘ to his German It’s a pain to the ears even to listen to that. Furthermore to us Malaysian, you know when you use ‘lah‘ to which prose and when it’s better to use ‘loh‘ to complement a sentence. You don’t just simply add ‘lah‘ to any sentence, which he is! To one point, I gave up explaining my intuition about speaking Manglish to him. Talking about being exasperated here .

Then yesterday I tried to teach him some more words like ‘hen hao chi‘ (It tastes good), so that he can praise me for my cooking skill . After explaining to him what that means, he asked me what do you say when you have stomach ache