Jan 12 2010
Leong Ching on how Mandarin should be taught
What do I think of the Singapore education system in Chinese? I think our Chinese is bad, in the same way our English is, only perhaps worse. Singaporeans are effectively illiterate in two languages – in English as well as Chinese. In my daughter’s spelling and dictation list, there was a sentence that read “His crimson red blood spilled out” Come on lah, crimson is already red, it’s like saying “violet purple” or “more faster”.
The latter is something you would know if your English is middling, but “crimson red”, only if it is fairly good. So, and here is my point about Chinese, our Chinese is mainly only good enough to recognize the “more faster” kind of error (level 1) as opposed to “crimson red” level 2. Eg, we often see “播电话” whereas it should be 拨 . For the Chinese (ie from China or Taiwan) it would be a level 1 error but for us, it would be level 2 (I think)
The fact that I am typing this in English of course, shows that my Chinese is too awful to be used, even for blogging. I have three kids in the education system. I would be happy if their Chinese were good enough so that they can recognize level 1 errors as a matter of course and level 2 ones if they pay sufficient attention.
My three suggestions for schools:
1. Pinyin is a crutch. We ought to start the kids on recognizing words, and we ought to do that from kindergarten. In Primary One, kids start their Chinese with Pinyin. I am not sure that this is the best way because it makes Chinese derivative.
2. We ought to take the same care for Chinese that we do for English – this means, having Chinese books easily and cheaply available, and encouraging more school book stores to stock these.
3. We ought to have more exchange and immersion programmes with China. Eg, for many primary school parents, there is no way for us to send our kids to China for three weeks into a local school there, outside of our children’s schools planning such programmes. Why doesn’t the MOE tie up with some primary schools there and have an open admission – where any parent from any school can sign up?
Leong Ching is a former broadcast and newspaper journalist and a mother of three children aged 9,7 and 5.
