The Boohoo on Chinese Learning

Things that tell you that this is it..

When you type a piece of work for one and a half hour. Then you went to open a word doc to check on some reference for about a minute. You return to the monitor bar to look for the first document. And realise it wasn't there And you hadn't saved it at any juncture.

wtf..

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Grouses aside.

Yesterday I was working on another piece on work, and I was stuck for a while. I was trying to say - In addition to whatever was presented during the last meeting, we've got new stuff tht we got to add in and these are the new stuff blahblahblahblah.....

The problem is of course I cant really put that in...and there must a word that means everything I wanted to say in all that. In the end, the thesarus was my saviour and I settled for "addendum". I already was sqeezing my brains out to try not to use repeat the words used in the doc and that was when I wish my vocabulary set is more formidable. When I was driving home (yes I think most of the time when I was driving) I was still pondering over words like "adjunct", thinking that one can only get to learn to use those words if he ever devour the dictionary as a whole - go through all the words in the dictionary and drilling them into the the brain for storage, to be pulled out when the need arise.

I recall my vocabulary set were first nurtured through all the list of words we were forced to study for spelling tests, got stretched a bit more during the Lit classes in secondary school, got nudged forward by GP..I thought my vocab will be enough for reading frivalous fictions, but eventually nothing would beat having to churn out 20 over pieces of job descriptions within 1 month for project at work. My vocabulary jumped leaps and bounds with words like "metamophosis", "convoluted", "exacerbated"...sometimes I wish I had learnt and spell all these words when I was younger.

Hmm..hey..that seemed to be what all the boohoos were about on MM's apology on Mandarin, on his policy of adopting a rote-learning process for 听写，默写. With the influx of writers to the forum, one cant help but think that Singaporean Chinese were an oppressed lots, forced to go through communist styled drill-schooling to learn the language they were imposed on just cos their forefathers came from China. Like a curse.

OK, I cannot comprehend what is so different was that from the spelling we had to do when were in primary school, and how come nobody complained about spelling test? I remember rote learning all the letters of the words in the spelling list, not knowing what the words mean sometimes -at least there is 造句in Chinese class then. And was English class interesting last time?? Dont think so. We were still required to read sentence by sentence in class, do comprehsion by picking out the line to copy from the paragraphs, and hand in handwork in compositions like it's another pain in the ass.

It could be easier for me cos I grew up with 联合早报. But having come from a Mandarin speaking family with non-too educated parents, English should have been a struggle for me, but it wasn't. Of course, I cant hold a proper conversation in English for nuts until I was in JC, though I did written English sufficiently well to make it all the way. Of course it became easier along the way cos English became the main medium for school work and projects, but still I would say that looking at my background, since I know zilt english before I started school, I would have find it so hard to learn in school where everthing is in English, I should have refused to study cos I dont understand anything and I should have dropped out of school by primary 1.

What if the subject, instead of Chinese, had been something like Maths? Some people simply cant understand the concepts, even though it's laid out in plain English, and struggle to keep up with the advancing curriculum. What to do? Remember all the workings by heart, even if you dont understand the rationale behind it . Trust me, it can be done. I have done that for at least the last 4 years of my institutional schooling, without understand how the hell is integration is ever going to useful in reality. My maths teachers weren't of much help, but writing formulas and workings on and on. I was probably scarred for life when I had to go to a teacher when one of my homework had a few wrong calculations (the rote learning didn't work, the formular was all screwed up). He went through once with me, and when I told him that I still didn;t understand, he went,"How come so easy you still don't understand?".

If I had a choice, I would have dropped Maths if I could. But of course I couldn't. In the end? I survived. If I dont remember wrongly, my AO Maths was a respectable B3. All rote-learning to make sure I can have a chance of that ticket to go to university.

Rote learning for Chinese seems to be the bane for Chinese class. I still remember the time when we had to memorise the paragraphs and then try to reporduce everything in 听写默写. No difference from spelling. But then Chinese is a language that is so endowed with pictorial meanings - 单手旁，船字旁，草字头etc..默写basically drills your mind in memorising the lines, getting used to the phrasing and structure in the process. Without these two, how long of creative learning of deciphering pop song lyrics, going through newspaper articles will it take for kids to be able to articulate his thoughts in proper structured Chinese in writing?

Anyhow, I just think it's not fair to only blame the way how Chinese was taught and that how the teacher made it boring that you are hampered and scarred for life. Accept the fact that you were simply not proficient to begin with, that the child you were then refused to learn and you blame the teacher for your inability to ever learn that subject.

Of course creative learning is still way more fun that rote-learning, But if the need calls for it, there still nothing wrong with 听写默写。