this is my first impression of the chinese local when i came upon this land some 8 months ago. this is so because back in singapore, we would address each other by (first) names only but here in china, friends would call out to each other names in full (last+first names). to a singaporean chinese, if someone were to call you that way, it’s probably something bad that you have done 😛
have not had the time to dig out the reason behind this observation and a chance arises when we were required to do a mini assignment for the cultural linguistics module. hence i used the chance to dig out some materials from the internet to get some preliminary observations. here’s the report (written in Chinese) that i handed up 2+ weeks ago.
if you are a 新加坡华人reading this post, it may interest you, though be minded that the findings are very preliminary, and further research using sociolinguistics methods with large samples is needed to uncover more about the phenomenon.
– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom 🖖