Bi-lingualism at school a mistake ?

[ankhlet.06013gmail.06013com]

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?

ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:

[mathsparks]

Em:

ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:

Me too...loads of them from our trips to china...all sitting in the bookshelf..still brand new..collecting dust.

[cafelatte]

Em:

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?

ME :lol: LOTS OF THEM :lol:

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.

[MMM]

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.

[rains]

mathsparks:

Ermm, rains, I side-tracked a bit, k? Your kid need to brush up on oral/listening skills too. Have you seen this?

http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2418&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=2f8d6b3f2522279b21d2e4d8bbecdba7

I went to that site. But so boring leh. Even I don't have the patience to sit down there and listen till it finishes. Thanks for sharing though. Appreciate it. I'll try to like it.

[rains]

Thanks for the contributions!


So far, the reasons behind difficulty in learning Chinese are:
1) lack of immersion (environment factor)
2) not used to the language (which goes back to no. 1)
3) amount of memory work involved ie. strokes, pronunciation
4) lack of relevance
5) lack of the knowledge of teaching/learning Chinese in a structural way

Thanks! Do keep them coming in!

Regarding no. 5, actually, I remember learning Chinese in a very structural manner when I was in P1. The very first words that appeared on the first page of my textbook were ‘人，口，手’, with the pictures right beside them.

It’s something like the ‘Peter and Jane’ series approach. It built up a child’s vocabulary by expanding on existing vocab and adding new words, or related words. I thought it was a very effective method. But of course, our kids are learning '人，口，手’at probably nursery now. Their P1 textbook looks like my P3 textbook. My sister was looking thro my kid’s P3’s 好词好句 and she asked me,"Is this list for P5? I don’t know how to pronounce this word."

I don’t know why there’s a need to make Chinese so detestable and unattainable when the old method worked.

[kiasimom]

Hi rains,


That is because Singapore wants to attain Number 1 in everything!!
So our children canot escape this fate too.

[tamarind]

rains:

I don't know why there's a need to make Chinese so detestable and unattainable when the old method worked.

That's why I wrote that when I saw my girl's P1 textbook, I almost vomited blood. MOE does not know how to teach Chinese properly. Fortunately I sent both my kids to Berries since they were 4 years old.

My blog shows a few pages of the Berries teaching materials for their N2 class.
http://tamarindvillage.blogspot.com/2008/05/learning-chinese.html

MOE really should learn from them. Berries materials use the same method as Peter and Jane. A few new words are introduced in every chapter and these are repeated over and over again in every chapter so that kids can have lots of practice.

I can imagine those kids who have never attended a good Chinese enrichment class, will face a lot of difficulty learning Chinese in primary school due to the bad teaching materials.

rains:

3) amount of memory work involved ie. strokes, pronunciation

Learning Chinese characters by remembering the individual strokes is NOT correct.

Kids should start by learning to write the commonly used 部首 : 亻, 扌, 辶, 氵, 犭, etc as well as the simple Chinese characters. These become the building blocks of more complex Chinese characters. I never have to remember the individual strokes.

We should also learn Chinese as groups of similar characters, where only the 部首 is different. It is much more effective to remember Chinese words this way.

Read this webpage (in Chinese) :
http://kg.ftedu.gov.cn/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=2623

I used to have excellent Chinese teachers who explained these things to me. I have a feeling that the quality of the Chinese teachers in primary schools nowadays are much worst than those who taught me.

[tamarind]

Busymom:

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。”

You have brought up a very good point. It is true that kids can recognize far more Chinese characters than they can write. Yes writing will require a certain amount of practice.

However, as I wrote above, kids should start by learning the 部首 and the simple Chinese characters first. This is also how the kids learn in Berries. My younger boy is only average, but he has no problem learning these with minimal practice. Berries do not require kids to do daily homework. We only let him read the Berries materials everyday. By exposing him to the same words everyday, the images are imprinted in his mind.

Also, read this webpage
http://kg.ftedu.gov.cn/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=2623

三、多识少写减轻学生负担
《课标》中明确指出：在第一学段（1—2年级）明确提出要“多识少写”。这样做的好处是：其一，“识写分开”，既可以避免字字要求“四会”，造成学生学习负担过重，又可以防止“识”、“写”相互掣肘，而导致认不快又写不好。其二，“多识”，有利于学生尽早、尽快、尽可能多地认字，以便及早进入汉字阅读阶段，给他们打开一个生活经验世界之外丰富多彩的文体世界。

According to this article, kids should learn as many Chinese characters as possible, writing can come later.

Busymom:

However, how many of them really buy Chinese books? For me, the challenge is always to find suitable Chinese books for my children.

I have about 200 Chinese books for my kids at home. But these are not enough. It is difficult to find good Chinese books in local bookshops like Popular. However, I have found excellent books at http://www.dangdang.com, and I am going to order many books from there

[kiasimom]

Hi tamarind,


What Chinese books will you recommend for P2 and P4?