Monday, November 22, 2010

Teaching of Chinese language

I met someone recently who come from a family with a strong background in Chinese education. He spoke strongly against the new method of teaching Chinese using Pinyin. The students focused too much in Pinyin and did not pay sufficient attention to the Chinese writing. He said that this approach would destroy the Chinese language and culture. According to him, this view is shared by many Chinese language teachers.

He further remarked, "Just because some elites have children who are not able to cope with Chinese, they are now changing the system to suit their own purpose!" This is a strong statement, but I sense that there is probably some grounds for this belief. To avoid this type of feeling, it is best that these types of issues should be openly discussed. It is bad for decisions to be taken by a few elites, making the other people feeling left out.

9 comments:

Parka said...

Isn't the purpose of pinyin to teach pronunciation?

I don't see how pinyin can destroy Chinese until the day people write in pinyin.

yujuan said...

May as well do away with teaching Chinese to students poor in the language. What a way in teaching a beautiful language without the script. Crazy.

Anonymous said...

Use of pinyin is only good for conversation mandarin but not for truly understanding what chinese culture is and its roots.

Hermit said...

Exactly what is the purpose of learning Chinese? If it is to learn the Mother Tongue, why not Pinyin if that is what helps students in the MT?

On the other hand, if it is to learn a culture, who are these traditionalists to push their agenda on these students, who are not interested in Chinese Culture, but just to learn a language?

PAP's Racist MT Policy, Part 2 - PAP is forcing Han Culture, not Chinese Culture, on us

ron said...

Open the doors to allow students to choose language of their choice:

Mandarin
Malay
Indonesian
Tagalog
Portuguese
Vietnamese
Korean
Japanese
Cambodian
Thai
Myamese
Hindi
Tamil
Bangladeshi
Nepalese

After all, do we not recognise a global audience?
Do we not allow these nationalities into our economy?

We cannot fear that we may lose our cultural & ethnic roots.
We have already lost it to some degree.
Let us embrace this and allow a natural evolution to take place.

The arguements for economic reasons is strong, yet the cultural and social aspects cannot be ignored.

silverybay said...

The joy and interest in learning a language, be it Chinese or others, is instantly destroyed the moment you make it an academic requirement.

Linguistic ability is like art and music. If you have it, you will find it easy. If you don't, you can try very hard to learn it just so you can pass your exams, at the expense of other subjects that requires critical thinking skills.

The elites are killing Chinese language by making it a mandatory for schools and giving higher weigthings to those who are proficient in it.

Language is not a thinking subject. Why should a primary school student be marginalise because he/she is not good in Mandarin?

Our children spend 10 years of their lives trying to master a language force upon them when there are so many instances of native English speaking westerners mastering the language in 2 to 3 yrs.

There is nothing wrong with our kids. They are just like any other kids around the world.

The problem lies obviously in the way that it is been taught and implemented.

Vincent Sear said...

Pinyin is a must, otherwise how to perfect pronunciation, check dictionary by pronunciation when you don't know the strokes, and type with computer keyboard input?

It's not Pinyin that's hampering the learning of Chinese. It's that the standard and method of teaching writing Chinese characters has deteriorated. It's the same with the examining stardard, which is practically all-MCQ except for a simple essay.

Chinese character set may look daunting with a few thousand to master to be functionally literate. But if the fundamentals have been properly built by Pr. 3 (that was my experience in my time), Pr. 4 onwards would be a breeze. Notice many elderly uncles and aunties with only Pr. education can read and write Chinese effortlessly whereas so-called O and A levels struggle.

hanglian said...

Using Chinese word processors on computers is very common nowadays, I'm not sure about how people in other regions input Chinese words, but using pinyin is a very common method we used here, so I guess the use of pinyin will just get more common because of that (in a sense that's writing in pinyin?).

I vaguely remember that the learning of the Chinese language was encouraged because of the talks about the rise of China, not because we are Chinese, so the focus is business and not culture.

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