YOU DON ' T LIKE MASHED POTATOES ? ?? you monsterEdit I hope people understood I was joking . <| sep |> No problem , I love talking about languages . I don ' t know about genius but I really love learning languages , it ' s a hobby of mine . Currently my goals are learning French , Dutch and Norwegian , I ' m not too great at them yet but I understand a decent amount ! I ' m Australian and my mum was from a part of China where they spoke Cantonese mainly but she also knew Mandarin , the most well known Chinese language . My father was an ethnic Chinese minority from Indonesia and they spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese together at home since their English wasn ' t so good . They would speak either Mandarin or Cantonese to me and I would answer in English . I quickly learnt to differenciate English from Chinese because that ' s the main language used in society here and people wouldn ' t understand if I used Chinese with them but as a kid I would use all three in normal conversation , sometimes in the same sentence , yep . My family does occasionally switch languages in the middle of a sentence , it ' s a linguistic phenomenon called code switching . I still have problems differenciating Cantonese from Mandarin because my parents understood and spoke both they ' re considered dialects culturally but different languages linguistically and I never had much interest in speaking them so I generally just spoke English back to them . This led to funny incidents like other people assuming I didn ' t understand Chinese and talking badly about me in front of me or just asking a question in Chinese and being surprised when I answered in English when I didn ' t even realise they had asked in Chinese ! In a way I guess all 3 are my native languages , it ' s not like I can turn my understanding of them off . So I didn ' t really struggle to understand any more than people struggle to understand their native language . I might have asked what a word means more but I think that was it . Because I don ' t have trouble understanding , I don ' t notice what language it ' s spoken in and that probably means me replying in English . whatever language I know the person understands . For example I met a family friend who lived in France who was originally from China and my mind set the language limits to French , Chinese and English and we switched sometimes in conversation .