I watched the play HOTEL by W!ld Rice last weekend.
It was easily one of the best plays I’d seen in a while: Awesome storyline, witty script, superb acting, and loads of deep concepts about Singapore’s identity/history to think about.
Not just that, but the actors spoke in nine languages. Nine! They flawlessly switched between English, Mandarin, Malay, Japanese, Urdu, Cantonese, Hokkien, Tamil and Tagalog – many of which they had to learn from scratch.
Now, as someone who’s shamefully terrible at his own Mother Tongue, it got me wondering: How did these actors get so good at learning a completely new language? (The dialogue-heavy play spanned 5 hours, so they had a looooot of lines to memorise).
In fact, it spans beyond just languages alone. Think about areas like getting fit, waking up early, presentation skills, sales, video editing, programming… and investing. So many things in life that we want to ...
...