Bi-lingualism at school a mistake ?
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rains:
... I want people who find Chinese tedious and difficult to learn to reply. Or perhaps I should start a thread titled 'Those who find Chinese difficult, please come in'. I really want to, and am interested, to find out the cause for the lack of interest and the root of the claim of difficulty in Chinese...
How come you ask me har? Then again, I don't wanna be a guinea pig for any kind of experiments... unless you pay really well. -
Chinese and English do not share the same scripts that’s why if we are good in El then Chinese will suffer unless we really put in loads of effort.
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tamarind and rains,
This discussion is taking an interesting turn. I wonder if it will be better to split it ?
I think I am ‘qualified’ to answer as I have observed and thought about it from my son’s perspective. I did reasonably okay for Chinese all the way to A-levels without any tuition or help. My big break was reading 金庸武侠小说. I read through them all, some twice…sometimes skipping meals and sleep.
For my son, here are my observations :
1) English - there are well-known and easily understood phonics structure and supplementary books you can get right from preschool level. Letterland, zoophonics, Oxford Reading Tree…blah blah blah. For Chinese, as tamarind pointed out, the correct way is to break the chinese characters into simpler characters. However, this requires work on the parents end to do lesson planning and research. There are no ready materials on the market. It took me a while to figure out and I only got as far as 部首 and some percentage of words before the P1 workload took over and I lost steam.
2) As there is no structure method to build up the vocabulary, it is difficult to get suitable books to engage the child. Even when I am reading with him, we have to stop all the time so I can explain the words and what it means and he generally forgets them and next time he sees the words, he asks again. This goes on and it is difficult to sustain interest in the stories or be very motivated to keep this up. I think the learning curve for Chinese is steeper than English. For English, most children can ‘read’ some simple readers by themselves very quickly and they are more encouraged and motivated to continue reading.
3) Writing chinese characters requires good penmanship or better penmanship than English. My son had 1 mark deducted in his P1 SA2 for not writing 竖弯构 perfectly - the shape and strokes of the word are there but the 弯 was too aburpt. His handwriting is untidy and big and he gets tired from trying to fit 上中下结构kind of words into the square.
4) Lastly and perhaps most of all, we don’t speak English at home. We usually watch English programmes too. I love watching 还珠格格 too but the storyline is not so suited for children. The last few chinese programmes my son watched with me were 清宫风云 and recently some translated Korean family dramas. Right now, there seems to be nothing suitable. -
rains:
Ermm, rains, I side-tracked a bit, k? Your kid need to brush up on oral/listening skills too. Have you seen this?hi tamarind,
My kid is 9 liao. She's fine at P1 and 2, but at P3, the lack of a good foundation starts to show. Her results are not consistent, and I was shocked to know that she didn't know how to write the characters in the index at the back of the textbooks.
http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2418&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=2f8d6b3f2522279b21d2e4d8bbecdba7 -
Wow, a lot of interesting discussions at this thread over the last 1 week and I have missed all the actions...
Glad to find so many people here who feel the same way about Chinese; that as Chinese, we must learn Chinese, difficult or not. :celebrate:tamarind:
I agree almost whole-heartedly with what Tamarind has written on this thread. However, I do think there is still a degree of learning Chinese word stroke by stroke in the beginning. Yes, young kids have superb photographic memory (as claimed by many right brain enrichment programs), however, I will only agree that it helps in word recognition but not in writing the word itself. Hence, it is not difficult to find young children who can read simple Chinese sentences. But to write each of the word independently without practice, that kid must be a genius in my opinion. All of us started learning how to write by writing the strokes and putting them together, one word by one word. Only after one has attained a certain amount of vocabulary is he able to break down a more complicated chinese word into smaller parts, and obviously those with better grasp of the language would be able to find better ways of remembering new words and how to write them as compared to those who don't. Hence the old \"joke\" typically in a chinese class is \"有边读边，没边读上下。”
In fact, I was very surprised when I first found out that people remember Chinese characters by the individual strokes. It was an encounter with my MIL who is Chinese, but does not know the Chinese language. When I asked her how to write her daughter's name, she said \"One stroke to the left, one stroke from top to bottom, etc\". :roll:
The correct way to learn Chinese characters is by breaking up into simpler characters. I believe that most kids between the age of 3 and 6, have the ability to take photographs of Chinese words and store them in their brains, as a result, they are capable of learning hundreds of Chinese words using very little effort (without any ting xie). I observe this ability not only in my kids, but also in many other children in their Berries enrichment class (I stand outside the classroom to observe them every week). Kids lose this ability when they grow older. That's why most adults find Chinese difficult to learn.tamarind:
People are happy because they feel vindicated. However, one must remember that MM comes from a peranakan background, it is not surprising that he finds Chinese difficult to learn after hitting adulthood. Like what Tamarind said, the golden age to learn any language is when one is young.
I don't know why people are so happy when they read what Mr Lee Kuan Yew said in the newspapers. My first thought was \"Die liao, the Chinese standard is going to be much worst\". I have a feeling that they are going to concentrate on listening and speaking skills, and the recognition of Chinese character is going to be pushed to even later, for example, to P3. At this age, kids are going to find Chinese characters even harder to learn.
Hence, the first step to tackle our kids' problem in learning chinese is to start from our pre-school Chinese education.tamarind:
In my case, it was a matter of \"no choice\". Other than Chinese books (and mostly in complicated Chinese), I haven't got anything else to read at home when I was young...
After the age of 6, it is more important to develop the interest in learning Chinese, so that the child will be self motivated to learn. Parents must find a way to let kids think that Chinese is fun and fascinating.
In my case, it was 小甜甜(Japanese manga translated to Chinese), 小叮当, Hong Kong TV series, especially the sword fighting ones, stories from the Chinese classics, etc. When I was older, I read as much as I could, all the 金庸 novels, all the 亦舒 novels, etc, and also listening to Chinese pop songs everyday.
These days, parents are so knowledgeable and stock up plenty of good English books at home for their children to read. However, how many of them really buy Chinese books? For me, the challenge is always to find suitable Chinese books for my children. Things have certainly improved since I have DS as in I have noticed more chinese books are now available in our bookstores for children below the age of 1 (during DD's time, I only managed to find books that are suitable for her - and this I mean without han yu pin ying - in China). Still, my wish is that bookstores here would stock up more Chinese books for our young readers. -
rains:
I'm just wondering if those who find Chinese difficult could share exactly what's difficult about it.
To me, it's the amount of memory work involved. Now as I read thru some Chinese pre-school books with my daughter, and mind you, the same books ad nauseum, I can't remember certain characters I must have read many times before if not for the hanyu pinyin above these characters. Also, accurate pronunciation of many characters escapes me too. Till today I can't remember if left is to be pronounced \"zhuo\" or \"zuo\".
My problems arose cos I migrated to an English speaking country at 10yrs of age. Altho my parents wanted me to continue with my chinese, once a week lessons just were not enough. Either an OLD ANCIENT guy was trying to drill me in san zi jing or luan yu (BORING!), else I was attending Sat classes that had Taiwanese textbooks with their bo po mo fo, their version of hanyu pinyin (what, more new stuff to learn?? and in traditional characters no less :!: ). Slowly the Chinese language became irrelevant to me since I used it only to talk to my mum (dad knew English).
Conclusion? Environmental motivation can play a tremendous part in language acquisition. To get your needs and wants across to another party, you must communicate, and if only one language suffices, why learn another? Today I get by just fine in Singapore knowing English and my broken Chinese. Even most Chinese educated wait staff know enough English to understand my orders. To get me to re-learn Chinese is such a total turn off since using the little I know doesn't give me joy and ease in communication, unlike English.
Admittedly I am now motivated to revise my Chinese again for my daughter's sake. Retrospectively, knowing Chinese would've given me a step up in some areas of my life. I'd like the same for her cos when she hits adulthood, I believe China will be as huge an economical and cultural influence to Singapore as the US is now.
Interestingly, I only started learning learning English in kindy (er, apparently only 1 yr of kindergarten in my time). So if I'd stayed on in Singapore, who knows how my language skills would've turned out? -
Busymom:
ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:
These days, parents are so knowledgeable and stock up plenty of good English books at home for their children to read. However, how many of them really buy Chinese books? -
Em:
Me too...loads of them from our trips to china...all sitting in the bookshelf..still brand new..collecting dust.
ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:
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Em:
Me too! LOTS of THEM too ! Some are hits and some are miss but I am glad to say we do use most of them.
ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:Busymom:
These days, parents are so knowledgeable and stock up plenty of good English books at home for their children to read. However, how many of them really buy Chinese books? -
Personally, I still don’t believe that bilingualism is a mistake. In fact the 1st time I step into China 2 years ago, I remember thanking LKY for enforcing this bilingual system. This enable us to be bilingual and much envied by our Chinese counterpart. YES China is growing bigger and the Chinese are catching up too. But the issue with them is the lack of that kind of "bilingual" environment. So though they know how to read and write perfect english, as they don’t use the language as much in daily life, they struggled to make a conversation. These was the latest observation I had in my recent trip.
There was this highly qualified China lady who just joined the co. Her boss’s boss is a Australian and she happened to be visiting the site. Her Australian boss told me that she sort of understand what this China lady is trying to say but she doubt that the China lady understands what she had said. She felt that the retention rate is low because this China lady just wasn’t used to listening to the language.
I never fail to use my "Singapore Chinese" with my China colleagues. Despite my limited business vocabulary and sometimes having to substitute that with english words to illustrate the point, people appear to understand me. I can sense that kind of "relief" on my china colleague’s face when I speak to them in chinese. They are like "oh you know how to speak chinese, that’s good". Some even told me in my trip last week that they just felt closer to me as I am able to speak to language and asked which part of china my ancestors came from. Well… we are after all chinese.
The unfortunate part of chinese language learning as in all learning, there are some difficult parts that people might have to live with to better understand the language and culture. So this is something that individual probably need to overcome (just like my era). But compared to the china chinese, I feel that the singapore chinese is alot simpler. They have alot of descriptive words (owing to history) that personally, I’ve never heard of.
Yes, we are lucky as the grandmas can only speak "broken" mandarin to the kids so the kids are force to use the language. On the other hand, I personally feel that as parents, we need to create that kind of environment and support to encourage chinese language learning. It’s all in the mind, if you think it’s difficult, yes, it’s going to be damned difficult. You are just setting up barrier for yourself… Haha just attended a psychology workshop last week so alittle "motivated" about brainwashing oneself.
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