Chinese language woes

Just finished reading Yew Ngee's rant about Chinese language learning and thought I'll address some of the issues here as I believe this is something that is not unique to Yew Ngee. In fact, I can empathise with some of his frustrations, having struggled with my Chinese before and seeing how my own daughter is barely coping with the language, despite coming from a bilingual family.

I am not sure what your Chinese teacher has told you about the changes to the way your MT exams are going to be like and I am not entirely well-versed with the details as well. But here's what I can gather from news reports.

MOE wants to move away from rote memorization of Chinese words as that is what kills the interest in many students for the language. I mean, how exciting can learning a language be when all that is required is memorising lists and lists of words? Do you know that in English, we do not have a list of English vocabulary that students MUST learn in order to pass exams? (The WordPower program is a GM program, not an MOE one). Do you ever wonder why most students find learning English not as dry as learning Chinese? One of the main reasons is because of this need to memorise so many words.

MOE wants the Chinese language to be taught in a more lively, vibrant and interactive way. So out goes the vocab list. However, that leaves students in a lurch because they don't know how to study for Chinese and they hate reading Chinese newspapers and story books.

This is how I would study for Chinese now, given the cataclysmic changes to the syllabus that have left so many of you high and dry. I would NOT ditch my vocab book. I would still study it, although I may not want to laboriously memorise every single word. And I will accompany it with reading newspapers or story books. This may require come compulsion on my part. I will target to read 1 article a day first, and it will be something simple and manageable to start with.

Yew Ngee is right, if your vocab is very limited, then reading Chinese newspaper is super frustrating. So there is no way you should throw away your vocab book and still hope to read a piece of Chinese article. That means your 9 years invested in learning and memorizing the vocab are not wasted! Don't believe what other people tell you that you have been utterly taken for a ride. How can learning words that form the core components of a language be considered useless?

Not everyone is adept at bilingualism. LKY's journey in learning Chinese is not typical of everyone. I struggled with CL1 (Chinese as 1st Language) in my first 2 years of secondary school. The rote memorization almost killed me. (We had to memorize chi yu and the cheng yu zi dian!) I have read fewer than 5 Chinese novels in my whole life and I don't listen to Mandarin pop songs. I read Lianhe Zaobao only to do newspaper cutting. But I watched the Chinese news on TV everyday. It was only in Sec 4 that I saw some improvements in my Chinese grades. Looking back now, if I had not been forced to memorize the chiyu and cheng yu, I wouldn't be able to appreciate watching the Chinese news so much as the language used would be beyond me. I eventually scored an A2 for Chinese. A nice reward, in spite of the many frustrations.

Having said this, my experience may be unique. Maybe I'm strong in language learning. I see my daughter struggle with tingsie and reading and I have many many gripes about how Chinese is being taught now. But I tell myself that in the worst case scenario, she will do CLB. I see no shame in doing that because I really don't think everyone is cut out to be effectively bilingual. My bigger hope is that the planners in MOE will study this issue in greater depth and find a solution to make learning Chinese less painful.

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We can have a class discussion on this so that we get to hear from the others how they deal with this problem. Our system is definitely not perfect, and I am glad you are finding your voice in articulating your feelings. I hope you won't feel defeated already though. There is still a light at the end of the tunnel. So lets all help one another to find it.