Chih-Yang – I agree that it’s possible to learn >1 language well. It just requires the right environment and encouragement.

As an anecdotal story, I was at a clinic this morning to see my doctor for the knee injury (yes the same injury). A man was at my side commenting on The Sunday Times front page news about using english as a aid to teach chinese. Well, that man’s reaction was typical of the masses, he snorted and said, isn’t that diluting the chinese language and making it less chinese.

I disagree with MM Lee saying that a person can only master one language well and not two. He has always placed a limit on what the human mind can achieve based on what one is born with. He was wrong then on chinese, is he right now on it? I doubt so.

Regards
Chih-Yang

I find it a very significant concession and tacit admission, that the Chinese prefer to learn English. Presumably the Chinese find picking up English to a reasonable level of literacy takes a far shorter time than the rest of the world (or even the Chinese themselves) picking up Mandarin.

Personally, I’d like to see the Chinese language complete the reformation that began with pinyin and simplified characters. Lu Xun and even Chairman Mao and Premier Chou realised that the reforms they made was just a halfway house to a fully-realised new Chinese writing system.

The Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese and even Mongols (in other words, all the former satellites of the ancient Chinese cultural/hegemonic system) have abandoned Chinese characters for easier systems that don’t require decades of painful rote learning to work towards functional literacy.

I predict the soft power of China and the globalisation of Mandarin learning will only come about after a second reform of its writing system.

While I think it is critically important that Singaporeans (including non-Chinese) learn to communicate in languages other than English, we should not assume that the US and Europe are going to disappear tomorrow, and China is going to be the next superpower. In all likelihood, we will never see China taking over the West in our lifetime. Hence, English should still be the primary language for us. In fact, many PRC Chinese are working hard at learning English, to the point where some analysts have speculated that China will one day be the largest English speaking country in the world.

I suggest that the real problem with the teaching of Chinese may not be in terms of method, but the cultural ballast that is attached to the teaching of Chinese.

Here’s a little bit of history to why this whole Chinese debate still dogs us.

First of all, the origins of the bilingual/bicultural elite issue.

After the series of defeats that the old Chinese elite (Those who founded Nantah for example) suffered politically, the PAP had to make concessions to this demographic that they had thus disenfranchised so far in order to maintain the legitimacy of their rule.

This concession was the SAP (Special Assistance Plan) School programme. It fundamentally destroyed traditional vernacular Chinese schooling in Singapore BUT it allowed the old Chinese elite their say in the body politic in terms of crafting and designing educational policy. The PAP in terms would gain their goal of producing the “bicultural elite” needed to maintain the status quo in Singapore at a time when the political debate was framed in terms of “Asian Values”.

The SAP school programme, that was supposed to produce the “bicultural elite” that LKY hoped for, backfired in part due to the large autonomy that each school possessed, there was no such thing as a singular SAP school culture. The rankings for the schools also differed widely. Maris Stella ranked 33rd nationally while The Chinese High School (my alma mater) always ranked 2nd or 3rd. My brother went to River Valley High School: the teaching methods differed greatly from Chinese High. Dunman, Anglican and CHIJ St Nicks, all share very different school cultures from each other, and from TCHS. In the end higher-end neighborhood schools like Bukit Panjang Govt High for example, sometimes ranked even higher than SAP schools.

With that in mind also, we have to look at greater political changes in Singapore. What was, for example, the political background behind most of the old Chinese elites?

During the “glory days” of Nantah, the Chinese elite tended to have a very Communitarian, naive, “Malayan Socialist” oriented vision of society that just could not fit in with the realities of governing Singapore and the realities of life. My alma mater being Chinese High, I remembered a teacher who would tell us about far-off events like the Allies’ sacking of Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion and remind us all that to be Westernized was to follow the rule of “bandits”. Such was the mindset you were implanted with in SAP schools by the teachers.

Their worldviews were fundamentally shaped by the legacies of the May Fourth Movement and the anticolonial struggle: and these formed their cultural ballast. Have you ever seen a Chinese textbook in Singapore? Especially at the secondary level, there are generous inclusions of works by leftist Chinese writers like Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Mao Dun, and older Chinese elites like Nanyang Siang Pau edtior Lian Shi Sheng. They are preachy, moralistic and overly serious. Honestly, not a lot of fun. People do not like being talked to and lectured on how to live, how to behave, how to BE Chinese. Is it any surprise that whole generations did not grow up liking Chinese culture or having a favorable stance towards “Asian values”? I think not. On subconscious level, that sort of preachiness and moralizing I think turned a lot of people off. Nobody finds it hip, cool or “happening” to be left in a pile of anachronisms.

On the other hand, Singapore globalized so quickly, and we were so inundated with Anglo-American pop culture, that I believe that had a big part to do with the comparative success of English in Singapore.

My suggestion is this: the greatest tool to get people to pursue a language, any language, is power. Hard power and soft power.

Larger than any social force, Singaporeans are ultimate followers and love to pursue trends. I sincerely believe that the relative success of English in Singapore was in large part due to the success of Anglo-American cultural and economic power worldwide.

Singaporeans pick up the language that allows them to work in Anglo-American banks, understand Hollywood movies, popular songs, and popular economic and social texts. China being poor for nearly the entire 20th century, simply could not have that kind of cultural power. Hong Kong and Taiwan, despite being impressive signallers of economic growth, were simply small fry next to the might of Hollywood, Anglo-American economic power, and the allure of Western liberal democratic values they represented (and of course were also suppressed in this part of the world).

MM Lee is however right about the use of multimedia. But it’s important how this is done as well.

If you want Singaporeans to pick up Chinese, it’s simple, show them more examples of Chinese soft power. Import more PRC movies, watch more PRC cartoons (they’re getting better), read more PRC comic books (there are a few good ones already). They must listen to Jay Chou and Zhang Zhen Yue with the same kind of fervor they do for Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. The fact that Chinese soft power still has its limits and has nowhere approached the dynamism of Anglo-American soft power is going to a problem we will run into, but such an approach will only be a minor hindrance to Singaporean attempts to learn Chinese once they are exposed to Chinese soft power.

The reason why Chinese has become an issue again is simply due to the sudden rise of China, and the fact that the Anglo-American West is now in a very, very deep funk economically. This was not a scenario that was present at the start of the bilingual era.

The sudden economic growth of China was not a foregone conclusion at the time bilingualism was implemented, and the reasons were more cultural and social, than economic. It is now that we have come to realize the defects, and the limits, of such a policy.

That way, we can build on a wealth of established evidence in identifying and choosing strategies that may have a better chance of working, instead of doing this hit-and-miss.

It’s a courageous thing to experiment on our own children with something different from what doesn’t work, but they’re not going to be too thankful if it doesn’t work at all, or if we’re going to apologise to them a few decades down the road that while the intention was good, the execution in need of some refinement… This puts us no better than our own leaders and their oftentimes misguided social experiments.

How did we get distracted by taxi uncles? My bad probably for bringing up that example. I had blogged about my wife and I each speaking to our daughter in different languages in order to make her effectively bilingual. This is different from what many parents — who are usually of the SAME language background — who try to mix languages in the hope that their kids will respond in the language they are spoken to. I’ve seen much evidence that this does not work. I can’t be sure my method will work, but I’m experimenting with something different from what doesn’t work. If you know of a better way, do let me know.