Gardening with Wilson

I have finished my second Mandarin talk this year just now at the Geylang East Community Library. The crowd was satisfactory only maybe because it was not widely publicised. I guess after much practice of using my much unused Mother Tongue lately, using it for the presentation is now a lot more fluent for me. The presentation of the gardening session went relatively smoothly.

The presentation slides I did were mostly pictorial fearing that the library computer may not have Chinese language support. The sharing session ended right on the dot as well.

However, after the sharing session just now, I somewhat do not feel good about it. Usually after every successful sharing session, I tend to feel elated, if not, gratified, to have been able to dispense knowledge to help others in the gardening hobby.

Thanks to Shirley who has helped me to take some photographs during the session but I noticed something strange about myself as well – I keep having audience to face my back… Hmm… That’s wierd!

I still feel somewhat not too used to using Mandarin as the language to present my talk. One thing I noticed I could not really express myself as well compared with if I were allowed to use English. The sharing session just now appeared to be a little monotonous. It could have also be the topics that were being discussed as they are mostly technicalities that are required for starting a garden, such as how to choose a good location and steps to build a raised bed for vegetable gardening.

My English talks tend to be a little more lively with jokes from my personal gardening experiences that often perk up the crowd in the mostly an hour long sharing sessions. A friend of mine suggested me to use our local colloquial language, Singlish, which is a fusion of English, Mandarin and even dialect for my talk but I refrained as that may confer an unprofessional image to my audience.

I guess perfection comes with more and more practice. I just hope my Chinese audience give me some time and room to improve so that I can make my future sessions more lively and interesting.