The struggle with learning Chinese

Learning Chinese has not been the most exciting activity for most kids. That was actually an understatement. More commonly, it has been described as boring, difficult or even trying. Having accompanied my son on his a few years of education journey in the Singapore education system, I concluded a few obvious reasons for the prevailing yet regrettable dislike to the Chinese language. Please allow me to state the obvious.

Firstly there is simply not enough exposure for the children to practise listening and speaking of Chinese, which is fundamental in learning any language. Despite the heartfelt call of the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew, most of the families here don't speak Mandarin at home although the parents have the ability to. At school, kids talk to each other in English too. For most kids, the only time they are exposed to Chinese are during Chinese lessons and tuition classes. This level of exposure is simply not enough for learning any language.

Secondly, Chinese is not easy to learn. Let’s compare it against English. A few lessons on phonics is enough for the children to be able to pronounce most simple words in English. The sight words are not difficult to memorise either as there are only 26 alphabets after all. As such, it is relatively easy for children to be able to read simple story books by themselves once they reach a certain age. For Chinese, it is a different story. To read a Chinese book with a comparable story line is much more difficult. It requires the reader to know most of the words in the book. This proves not easy even for those in the higher primary. The children typically can memorise well the words taught in the current school year. But they soon forgot a considerate number of the words learnt when they advance to higher levels simply because they don’t use the words frequently enough. The memory retention part is the hardest. Some parents asked their children to memorise the words one by one. This approach is ineffective as the words make little sense without meaningful context. Therefore, in my opinion, the only way to keep these words in memory is by using them repeatedly in meaningful context, i.e. reading story books. So this is a chicken and egg problem which is very difficult to solve given the current environment.

The third reason is that there is tremendous pressure for the kids to score Chinese exam well. Learning Chinese at kindergarten age could still be fun, when kids hear simple stories, recognize and write handful of characters, learn some simple phrases and even recite a few poems. Some kids may develop genuine interest in the language. As they progress from kindergarten to primary school, the increasing pressure from school and parents slowly changed all that. It is common sense that the best way to kill an interest is to apply some pressure to it. Instead of story-telling and song-singing, children were given practice paper and assessment books. All of these, of course, is because of the pressure to do well in the PSLE, which I shall not illustrate further.

As a result of the above reasons, most children will lose interest in learning Chinese eventually, and some even develop resentment or fear to the subject. This of course will do little good to their exam scores. Most parents attempted to "solve" this problem by sending their children to tuition. It might have helped to some extent to bring up their exam scores, but for most, tuition does not really bring back the interest lost. Interest and environment, in my opinion, are the most important factors in learning a second language. Language learning after all is really boring, if it does not mean much other than to pass the exam!