My Thoughts on the Chinese Language

Recently, MM Lee gave his comments on the Speak Mandarin Campaign. As a Chinese teacher and a lover of the Chinese language, I welcome such support from our government with both arms.

In our family, we try to speak in proper language. My parents speak to Jaimie in proper Cantonese, myself and my in laws speak to Jaimie in proper Mandrain (because the 3 of us are Chinese teachers!) and Clement in proper English. There are many times we slipped into the casual mode and started to speak in Singlish/ mixing 2 languages but we tried as much as we can to speak properly.

Recently, we realised that Jaimie is speaking more and more of English. She is using a lot of English to express herself. We were happy with her ability to communicate in the English language and we are still happy although Clement and I have decided that we will do some adjustment with the home language used.

Clement is the only person speaking to Jaimie in English. As for me, sometimes I do too but most of the time I still speak Mandarin. We started off this way with the intention of allowing Jaimie to learn 2 languages at the same time. However, as MM Lee suggested, it is better for BOTH parents to speak in Mandarin to their children at home even if they are effectively bilingual. We see his point. As you can see, the number of adults using Mandarin to communicate with Jaimie to the number of adults using English is about 3:1. However, the use of English in the social and school environment is strong that Jaimie is gravitated to speaking in English more. If we do not do some adjustment at home as MM Lee had suggested, Jaimie will probably lose her interest in the Chinese language in a few years' time. By then, it will be too late to revert the situation.

Many people think that Chinese is more difficult to learn than English. Indeed, with each chinese character is a picture on its own and it has no phoenics to assist in the learning, it is relatively harder. The Chinese language is a right brain language because it requires more pictorial memory of the brain while English is more of a left brain language. Perhaps that is the reason why some people find it difficult to remember the strokes.

Personally, I really hate it when people associate the importance of learning Chinese with the economic rising of China. No doubt that is one of the reasons and motivations but I do not like it at all. In my 12 years of teaching, I have never once used that as a reason to encourage my students to do well in the language. I do not even discuss with them why must they pay attention in my class. The richess of the Chinese culture, the stories behind each idiom, the origins of the words are enough to captivate them and make them not-hate the language. In fact, a lot of my students told me that they had never known that Chinese is such an interesting and fun language and they looked forward to Chinese lessons. And I can proudly tell you that the percentage of my students achieving distinctions in major exams is quite satisfactory.

I am not being a show off here. I am just sharing the fact that to learn a language well, you need to first like the language. That goes the same for everything, actually. Hence, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a "difficult language".