Chinese Learning (continued)

The difficulty level is not an issue to students turning off Chinese. According to my experience as Primary School students, I suspect the main factor is that the teachers who are teaching the kids are too old-fashioned and cannot appeal to the students at their level.

As I mentioned earlier, I am a very fortunate kid. My teacher back then was a humorous teacher, and he would make a joke out of every word, and strangely because we find his jokes funny, the words have silently clinged themselves to our "sponge minds".

My level was a fortunate one, I should say. The chinese teacher next door played pop songs in class after discovering the students' passion in pop music. He then explained the meanings of words in the songs. I think this is a very creative solution.

The other levels had old-fashioned teachers, I remember, who instructed (forced) the students to memorize and write the words 50 times should they get it wrong in tingxie. Our scores, to my upmost delight, were always much better than them. They have to spend more effort than us yet the result is worse.

This reveals that kids nowadays (sadly including me) are more and more spoilt by their parents and demand more. They will give up easily and turn the language off if the lessons are not interesting, unlike the old days.

In order to help the students in their chinese learning, we have to change our strategy:

• Hire more new and younger teachers who experienced boring lessons in the past. They would understand how the students feel.
• Require them to plan lessons flexibly with the modern trend in a ever-changing world.
• Test out what the students like and have interest in
• Plan the lessons in a flexible way according to majority interest (e.g. pop song) so that the students wold be interested in the lessons.
• Once the students interest is captured, they would enjoy the language and their learning ability would be enhanced during the learning process.
• The students' interest would change every class and level, so teachers selected must be flexible and have at least a sufficient knowledge in modern technology and trend

Compromising on difficult level of chinese is not the long-term solution, but we can be flexible and appeal to the students' interest by engaging them at their level.