In the latest news, there is now a debate going on about the new proposed revamp of the Chinese syllabus and examination structure. This is to help those who are not proficient in their mother tongue and to give them a choice whether to take the subject into account if they do well for all the other subjects.
This is good news for the English-speakers who struggle with their mother tongues. But what about those who are more proficient in Chinese? Would it not be unfair? Or would it be because the English-speakers are generally the more affluent and better-educated, and the Chinese-speakers are not, hence the focus is on the better-educated and not on the not-so-educated?
For your information, my parents are Chinese-educated. They were from Chinese schools, when the Chinese medium still existed here before all schools became standardised into the English medium. They did all their subjects in Chinese. They did Chinese Literature. They only did English as a second language.
But did my parents lose out? Definitely not. They still achieved enough grades to go to the university for English-school students, instead of entering the university for Chinese-school students. Did they struggle? Definitely. My mum told me of professors from England who speak English with a thick accent and she always had to try to follow what they were speaking of.
There were no lecture notes, no slides. The professor spoke and the students just had to take down notes. Photocopying was unheard of in those days as one sheet was very expensive. Textbooks were unaffordable. The only alternative was to camp in the library and take down notes from textbooks.
But did she fail? No. She went on the Dean's List every year and graduated with top honours, outshining even those from the English-medium schools. So who said one need to be proficient in a certain language to survive?
Okay, the context here is on the Chinese language. The thing is, this is not the only generation of students who struggled with the Chinese language. Ever since the seventies, more and more people are becoming more and more educated, thus speaking only English (the language of educated people) and stopped speaking Mandarin. Hence their younger generation grew up not that proficient in the Chinese language.
But we still survived. We struggled, we cursed and swore, we had funny way of pronouncing words, we used words in all the wrong context. But we still passed in the end. Even though our (as in me and some of my friends) proficiency of the Chinese language is still very shallow and superficial as compared to say my parents, still we did not do that bad a job out of it.
Now with modern technology and students getting smarter and more outspoken, are you telling me they cannot cope when we could?! I find this totally ridiculous. So if students then struggle with Mathematics, is anyone then going to take that out of the examination altogether? Or struggle with science, or even English, would these subjects then be taken out?
The irony is that more and more Westerners (Americans, British, et al) are dying to learn Chinese. Some even want to major in Chinese in university. Now the China market is booming, in order to carve a niche, one must be proficient in the language.
Here, we are given bilingual education since young, and people are saying they want to drop the Chinese language because they find it hard to cope? Which subject is not hard? I find all my subjects hard. I find examinations a torture. But we still gritted our teeth and went ahead. Or has society grown to such a state that people give up at a slight difficulty? What kind of message are we giving the kids? There are harder things to deal with when they grow up, if they give up over such a small thing, how are they going to achieve bigger things then?
I have a cousin who is also English-speaking. He could not speak Mandarin to save his life. His parents sent him to Australia to study before he even finished his secondary school. Yet when there was an opportunity for him to go to Shanghai to work, he took it. The last I conversed with him this Lunar New Year, he was rambling away in Mandarin. I would not say his Mandarin is that perfect, but it is much better than before, even with a bit of the China slang.
So who says one can never master a language? It only depends on how determined you are and how you choose your life. I only regret I did not take up a third or fourth language, otherwise I could at least make conversation in a few other languages instead of being almost mono-lingual.
There are so many people in the world who wants the opportunity to study Chinese. We really should count our blessings and not take the education we have for granted.
This is good news for the English-speakers who struggle with their mother tongues. But what about those who are more proficient in Chinese? Would it not be unfair? Or would it be because the English-speakers are generally the more affluent and better-educated, and the Chinese-speakers are not, hence the focus is on the better-educated and not on the not-so-educated?
For your information, my parents are Chinese-educated. They were from Chinese schools, when the Chinese medium still existed here before all schools became standardised into the English medium. They did all their subjects in Chinese. They did Chinese Literature. They only did English as a second language.
But did my parents lose out? Definitely not. They still achieved enough grades to go to the university for English-school students, instead of entering the university for Chinese-school students. Did they struggle? Definitely. My mum told me of professors from England who speak English with a thick accent and she always had to try to follow what they were speaking of.
There were no lecture notes, no slides. The professor spoke and the students just had to take down notes. Photocopying was unheard of in those days as one sheet was very expensive. Textbooks were unaffordable. The only alternative was to camp in the library and take down notes from textbooks.
But did she fail? No. She went on the Dean's List every year and graduated with top honours, outshining even those from the English-medium schools. So who said one need to be proficient in a certain language to survive?
Okay, the context here is on the Chinese language. The thing is, this is not the only generation of students who struggled with the Chinese language. Ever since the seventies, more and more people are becoming more and more educated, thus speaking only English (the language of educated people) and stopped speaking Mandarin. Hence their younger generation grew up not that proficient in the Chinese language.
But we still survived. We struggled, we cursed and swore, we had funny way of pronouncing words, we used words in all the wrong context. But we still passed in the end. Even though our (as in me and some of my friends) proficiency of the Chinese language is still very shallow and superficial as compared to say my parents, still we did not do that bad a job out of it.
Now with modern technology and students getting smarter and more outspoken, are you telling me they cannot cope when we could?! I find this totally ridiculous. So if students then struggle with Mathematics, is anyone then going to take that out of the examination altogether? Or struggle with science, or even English, would these subjects then be taken out?
The irony is that more and more Westerners (Americans, British, et al) are dying to learn Chinese. Some even want to major in Chinese in university. Now the China market is booming, in order to carve a niche, one must be proficient in the language.
Here, we are given bilingual education since young, and people are saying they want to drop the Chinese language because they find it hard to cope? Which subject is not hard? I find all my subjects hard. I find examinations a torture. But we still gritted our teeth and went ahead. Or has society grown to such a state that people give up at a slight difficulty? What kind of message are we giving the kids? There are harder things to deal with when they grow up, if they give up over such a small thing, how are they going to achieve bigger things then?
I have a cousin who is also English-speaking. He could not speak Mandarin to save his life. His parents sent him to Australia to study before he even finished his secondary school. Yet when there was an opportunity for him to go to Shanghai to work, he took it. The last I conversed with him this Lunar New Year, he was rambling away in Mandarin. I would not say his Mandarin is that perfect, but it is much better than before, even with a bit of the China slang.
So who says one can never master a language? It only depends on how determined you are and how you choose your life. I only regret I did not take up a third or fourth language, otherwise I could at least make conversation in a few other languages instead of being almost mono-lingual.
There are so many people in the world who wants the opportunity to study Chinese. We really should count our blessings and not take the education we have for granted.
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