Our Local Variety Show

Watched a very interesting variety show on Channel 8 this evening. I don't usually like variety shows and most especially chinese ones produced locally. I don't think they do a very good job on the originality front. Most of the shows copy the more creative Taiwanese or Japanese ones.
However, the one this evening was hosted by Mark Lee and was all about foreigners speaking our Mother Tongue, Mandarin. It was jaw cracking hilarious! I was amazed by the talents of the foreigners. They could speak Mandarin so well and most of them could even "get" our colloquail words and phrases. Phrases like "gila"(crazy), "salah"(wrong), "ponteng"(skip school/work) were used to test the foreigners knowledge of our local words. It was so funny watching them guess the words and form sentences based on what they had guessed.
I was impressed by the fact that these were people from Isreal, America, Germany, Korea, Japan etc and they made the effort to learn Chinese even though many of our locals are fluent in English and some can even speak 2 or more foreign languages.
Our local children have much to learn from them. I told Brandon that the American guy on the show speaks better Chinese even though it wasn't his 1st language and Mandarin is really not an easy language to learn. They could even read the Chinese characters!! That really impressed me.
Finally, towards the end of the show, the Isreali guy took out his local drum and started beating out a beautiful rythmn and our local Indian dance instructress danced a perfectly matched Indian dance to his Isreali drum beats! This is beyond language and shows how music transends all barriers.
I am now going to make time to watch this variety show every Tuesday at 8pm. And I should also revise my biased opinion of local variety shows. Maybe if Brandon watched more of it, his spoken Chinese may then improve..... I can only hope..... and watch more Mandarin variety shows!