The languages that shaped Zing Tsjeng

Zing Tseng - journalist, author, and co-host of BBC's Good Bad Billionaire - grew up navigating Mandarin classes in Singapore, a Cantonese-speaking home, and the glorious linguistic chaos of Singlish.

In this episode, she and Sophia trace the languages that shaped her: from a teacher who told her "foreigners speak better Chinese than you do," to discovering, decades later, on a trip to her ancestral village in Xiamen, that she was far more fluent than she'd ever believed.

They get into why Singlish is a Creole (and why that matters), the colonial logic behind Singapore's "Speak Good English" campaigns, what billionaires and language learning have in common, and why ordering a coffee in textbook-perfect sentences will get you nowhere fast.

If you want to buy my book, How To Kill A Language, that's here: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/13258/9780008723729

If you want to buy Zing’s amazing book Forgotten Women, that’s here: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/13258/9781914240690

This is a Viralect original podcast created by Sophia Smith Galer. This episode was filmed by Omar Mehtab, edited by Abraham Dein and Seren Jones was the Executive Producer.

Head to www.viralect.com to find our services and tools, and if you've got an iPhone, search "Sophiana app" in the App Store and take advantage of your free month using the code WORDFORWORD.