SINGAPORE — Sean Chua grew up in a predominantly English-speaking environment. In fact, he used to fare poorly for his Chinese examinations during his secondary school days at Hai Sing Catholic, scoring C6s and D7s.

For Elston Sam, while studying at St Joseph’s Institution, the only time he had any use for Mandarin was in conversations with his grandparents.

Yet, both of them are now among eight working professionals selected to be advocates for the Speak Mandarin Campaign.

Their Mandarin-speaking capabilities have improved to the point where they are now tasked to give presentations in Mandarin or assigned to clients from China at their current jobs.

HOW DO YOU SAY ‘CLICK-THROUGH RATE’ IN MANDARIN?

A major turning point for them was when they went for a one-year stint in China, as part of an entrepreneurship programme, while they were studying at the Nanyang Technological University.

While Mr Sam, 25, thought his command of Mandarin was above that of his peers back in Singapore, he was floored during the first few weeks of his internship in Beijing.

“My first two weeks, the briefings, meetings, and documents I had to read, I couldn’t catch up with anything they said… It’s pretty frustrating. I could only absorb 50 per cent of what they said, and translate only 50 per cent of what I wanted to say,” said Mr Sam, who was interning at Jumei.com, an online cosmetics shopping platform.

Part of the challenge was because his colleagues were discussing very technical topics in Mandarin, terms which he never had to use in Singapore.

For example, terms like “click-through rate” or “conversion rate”.

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Mr Chua, 27, had a similar experience.

As part of the requirement of the entrepreneurship programme, he had to travel around China to pitch a startup idea to Chinese business leaders and investors.

One of the challenges he faced was learning the Mandarin terms of several technical jargons, such as profit, business proposal, voltage and resistance.

“Mentally it was all in English, and so I have to find the word,” said Mr Chua, who is a co-founder of startup company Sqkii and a consultant with tech giant IBM.

WHAT IS ‘WHAT’?

Another challenge was the differences between the Mandarin spoken in Singapore and that in Beijing.

“Everyone was speaking in internet lingo and the words they use are very different. For example, our ‘what?’ is ‘shen me’. They use ‘shar’. I was like, ‘what is shar?’” said Mr Chua.

“It took awhile for me to adapt. And they speak very quickly,” he added.

Both Mr Chua and Mr Sam said they also had to work with Chinese partners who came from different parts of China.

That meant different accents, different terminologies used for the same thing and also different talking speeds.

Mr Sam recounted an incident when he and his manager were having a video call with someone from Sichuan, which is a province in the south-west of China.

“After the first 10 minutes, my manager asked me whether I understood what he was saying. I said ‘I didn’t understand’. He was speaking way too fast,” said Mr Sam, who is now a product manager at ride-sharing firm Grab.

So how did they try to get around the language barrier?

For Mr Sam, he would always go for meetings with an Excel sheet, where he would compile a list of technical jargons in English and Mandarin.

For Mr Chua, he deliberately picked Chinese nationalities who came from different parts of the country to be roommates with, so that he could learn the various types of Mandarin spoken as well as cultures across China.

He would also rely on his Chinese business partner to help him hone his business pitches and practise.

‘YOU’RE A REAL CHINA MAN ALREADY’

Ms Chew Lee Ching, who is a committee member of the Promote Mandarin Council, said that native Chinese speakers appreciate when Singaporean Chinese make an attempt to communicate to them in Mandarin, as they know it is not their main language.

“When you speak well and the other party understands you well, it facilitates that sense of relationship building,” she added. 

As pragmatic people, Ms Chew also said that Singaporeans will be motivated to learn a language that is useful and important.

Hence, she believes that the interest in Mandarin among Singaporean Chinese would pick up, given the opportunities of doing business in China that are available.

As an entrepreneur, one major motivation for Mr Chua to practise his Mandarin was the vast China market.

For Mr Chua and Mr Sam, their Mandarin-speaking had greatly improved by the time they ended their stint in China, to the extent where the latter was mistaken to be from China while ordering at a food stall.

His Singaporean friends who were paying him a visit in Beijing witnessed the incident and told him: “You’re a real China man already.”