The Long-term strategy to Chinese Learning

After weeks of MM Lee's new strategy to chinese learning, the argument still lingers on. Many support MM Lee's opinion, saying it will benefit them because chinese learning would be much more fun and interesting.

I beg to differ. Compromising on the learning standards is not a long-term solutions. It is age-old wisdom that a good disciple is only trained by a strict teacher. Similarly, only high standards of chinese learning can season a bunch of students with high standards of chinese.

By lowering the standards because MM Lee thinks old chinese learning is too "difficult", the students' standard will also decline, and slowly it will be a vicious circle where the students will even find the newly lowered standards increasingly difficult.

Creating a vicious circle is definitely not the long-term solutions; compromising has never been. Instead, the government should constantly seek to improve and raise the difficulty level of chinese learning especially amidst the rising of China.

MM Lee has expressed his regret that chinese standards were too "difficult", and in the old times, they had to memorize words without even knowing the meanings of the words.

I am sure Ting Xie nowadays are much better. At least, when I was in Primary School, my teacher explained to us the meanings of the vocabulary very thoroughly, and this helped us understand and remember the words easily. In addition, his lively examples were interesting and this made the lesson fun and engaging. This can be one of solutions to this problems.

Some argue that times are different - according to statistics, more and more students come from english-speaking families, and they lack chinese speaking with the parents before going to Primary School - which is the foundation to the learning of a language - and cannot immediately skip the speaking part to learn the next level of writing.

I heartily agree with them that learning a language requires speaking mastery first, and students nowadays have no exposure to chinese speaking, that is why schools need to settle it for them and have not enough time to do more difficult things like writing, thus lowering the standards.

I was a fortunate one - my father speaks english, while my mother speaks chinese to me. For those who have english-speaking families, I think the chinese-speaking part should be done in the nursery and kindergarden stage from peer influence (those who have chinese-speaking families) and teacher. Learning this foundation during Primary School would be a little too late.

For the matter of making the lessons more fun and engaging so that the children would not turn off the language at a young age, I think there are alternative solutions to lowering the standards.

We can engage them at their level. Kids nowadays enjoy computer games tremendously - why don't create a interesting computer game like Freddie Fish in chinese learning edition, where they can learn vocabulary through the fun process of playing.

At the end of the day, the learn what a normal boring lesson offers them, yet brings back a simple message: Chinese Learning is fun, I am looking forward to the next Chinese lesson.