~May Your Light Shine :D~

Friday, November 23, 2007

So following the boom in China's economy in the recent years as we all have seen, Chinese (the language) has become increasingly important in education as well as in our daily lives. Students from my generation who were pushed from young to speak English(because at that time, English was more important) are now suddenly forced into unfamiliar waters, that is, made to learn Chinese.

I'm not saying this is bad, because it isn't.

But how many of the students you know, minus the PRC scholars, are actually willing to learn Chinese and improve their grasp of it? Not many, from my observation.

Chinese is possibly the hardest language in the world, both in speech AND in script. And many of us are put off by the thousands of different complicated characters we're made to read. Sure, you can make a student improve his/her Chinese, but is the student WILLING to? Do they really think of Chinese as an important language, or is it merely to score in exams? Are they even grateful that they are billingual, or are they angry that they have to study 2 languages instead of 1?

So now, since you have heard my many criticisms on many many issues, I shall now come up with a suggestion.

It might not be 100% fool proof, but it worked on me, and there's no harm trying.

First off, to make the student improve his/her Chinese, the student has to be willing to learn it. And to be willing to learn it, the student has to be grateful that he/she can actually speak and read it.

So now, how do we trigger this gratefulness that we should have for our mother tongue?

My solution? Learn a 3rd language.

I know most of you are thinking that I'm crazy. I mean, what if the child gives up on Chinese and goes to learn the 3rd language instead?

But if you have ever tried to learn a language that you didn't grow up hearing and you are foreign to, you will understand that even if the language is EASY to learn, the words don't come as naturally to you as your native tongue. You have to be constantly exposed to the environment till you gradually develop a natural instinct towards the different words from that language.

Sometimes, when you hear a person speak that language, you have no idea what the person is saying because when you speak in a language that you're familiar with, you tend to slur a little(happens to everyone. In Chinese we always pronounce "xin" as "xinG". And in English, 'You are' becomes "You're) and if you are new to the language, you will not undersand a single thing because it is not pronounced accurately enough, even if it sounds perfectly logical to a person who is native to it.

And the sentence structure is entirely different as well. You might learn the basic sentence structure, but if you want to make small-talk, or string many verbs and nouns together, you realise that you don't know where to put them and more often than not, you end up making multiple grammatical errors.

Don't assume learning a language is easy. It's more than just memorizing.

Ever since I picked up a 3rd language, I really began to be grateful of our billingual policy in Singapore. If we are born speaking CHinese(no matter how lousy it may be), we will have that natural instinct for it and improving a language is a lot easier than learning it from scratch, at any rate.

So you want students to willingly learn Chinese and improve it and be proud of our Chinese heritage and language? Go learn a 3rd language, or at least, try learning one.

Only then do you realise how lucky we are to be born speaking Chinese, supposedly the hardest language in the world.

My Kitchen blogged at Friday, November 23, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...