<p>Well I completed French V by junior year, and because I had no more courses to go on, I have opted to take a Third Year French conversation course at the University of Southern Maine (it was the highest I could find ...), and I am taking French phonetics next year (but it's a spring course, and as such I have not formally registered, though my current professor will be teaching that class next spring too).</p>
<p>I actually only joined the French club this year, but I don't think I have lost out much (a lot of the stuff they do is non-rigourous) -- hopefully that won't be a major issue. </p>
<p>My interest in linguistics was really a convergence of several factors (some which had been lingering since age 5). Now that I look back, I was probably on a collision-course with it by sophomore year, although I hadn't known it yet! </p>
<p>I'm a cross-migrant between Singapore and the US, so I speak a semi-creolish dialect of English (Singlish) with major Hokkien and Malay influences. It was always bashed by my government (and pretentious wannabe-posh folks) as "broken English" though, and in my attempts to defend my treasured dialect against unwarranted attack and also justify the idea that it had its own grammar, I ended up researching things that led me on a collision course with linguistics. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, investigating word etymology and comparisons between English and French had led me to Proto-Indo-European, and before I knew it I was mentally internalising sound changes.</p>
<p>Some of it was a mixture of dealing with cultural hegemony and childhood development. I would say that I knew that I was on to something when I noticed certain syntax similarities between French and Singlish (that English did not share), especially in the use of topic-prominent disjunctive pronouns and various other particles, even though French and Singlish could hardly be related. </p>
<p>It was also strange thing when I found out that Singlish particles had fixed contour tones, like in Chinese. I had pronounced Singlish unconsciously with the contour tones. I had unconsciously perceived contour tone -- but I had always been consciously unaware that the tones existed. As a cross-migrant who had my acquisition of the Chinese language cut short with my migration to the US, I had been struggling to relearn Chinese, including dealing with tones. Imagine my amazement when I realised I had been speaking a tonal system fluently all along! (There aren't many minimal pairs regarding tones in Singlish, but it sounds really funny if you use the wrong tone, or no tone at all [like the Caucasian tourists, who end up sounding weird!]) I had not realised that my ancestors had not only borrowed their own vocabulary into their own form of English, but a system of tones to go with the particles as well!</p>
<p>The reason why that I hadn't recognised my own dialect as having tones -- though I hadn't needed to be taught tone and thinking back, had realised I had picked it up in kindergarten spontaneously -- was because it had never been covered in a textbook, not a grade school textbook anyway. My government's hostility (as well as that of the ruling upper class) to Singlish had not helped either. </p>
<p>Coupled with the realisation of how as a migrant I had unconsciously picked up the subjunctive (especially its colloquial use), but had never been formally taught it, this inevitably led me to the subject of language acquisition, I think.</p>
<p>Sooner or later after reading too many articles about how to pronounce certain exotic consonants, I bumped into phonetics, where I discovered things that surprised me yet made childlike sense (and naturally children and languages go together), like /g/ and /k/ being articulated at the same place, or vowels being altered by tongue height -- I had always perceived vowels to be shaped by the shape of the mouth, especially since that's the most visible aspect of vowel distinction, and I realised our tongues had been so well-trained to the point of reflex that we normally did not feel much our tongues while speaking. </p>
<p>Sometime last year, I made the realisation that linguistics was the combination of all of these fields. "Oh, so that's what linguistics is!" Before, I had the impression (partially due to society and the mass media) that linguistics was about studying foreign languages and that linguists were essentially dedicated polyglots, or worse, people who sat in their rooms memorising lists of words. </p>
<p>It kind of feels like destiny. I actually only decided that I wanted to major in linguistics in the end of last year, but it seems like a field that has been waiting for me all my life. </p>
<p>Anyway, do you think if I somehow organised these reasons into a good essay, I'd have an even better shot? </p>
<p>Also, I'm curious if there have been others who discovered linguistics through the same routes. I assume there must be quite a bit of people who go, "well, I was researching word origins one day...."</p>