Chinese: our mother tongue

Article:

http://www.straitstimes.com/ST%2BForum/Story/STIStory_151213.html

Review:
This article pertains to issues that are very near to the average Singapore Chinese student. Some find it a hassle to study Chinese and can hardly wait to drop it when they go to JC. This is even so when some of them are excelling at it and it is all because we students think that Chinese would not bring us far.

Then again, there are those students who lack this aptitude in Chinese, such as me. I do not hate the Chinese language or have any enmity with it. However, I just do not like studying the characters of this language. My grades reflect this lack of enjoyment for it. However, I do realise the fact that indeed I am a Chinese student. This is my mother tongue and has been passed down from one generation to the next. By losing this language, I am essentially forgetting my roots.

As many feel that Chinese is difficult to study, is it wise for us to lower the standards or just learn it without examinations?

I feel that this is not a solution. There is no point in decreasing standards as if one does not have an enjoyment studying Chinese, then he or she would not excel in it even if the standards were lowered. This lowering of standard would only seek to leave us lacking in the usage of our mother tongue and this would be a disadvantage in the increasingly bilingual world. Examples brought up by the writer would be that of China and Vietnam, where the people there yearn to learn a new language, it often being English.

So is it a question of Chinese being too difficult or a question of the students not making an effort? I guess that it is the latter. With perseverance, nothing is impossible. We see Europeans speaking Chinese, some even more fluent than us ethnic Chinese. Why is this so? It is because they make an effort to learn it, putting in time. It is no longer a question of anything being too difficult for one to learn, instead of it being too difficult for one to put in effort to learn.

Why don’t we try? Put a little bit more effort into Chinese and we will see that it is not impossible to excel in it. Maybe instead of decreasing the difficulty of Chinese, we should instead increase our efforts to overcome any learning difficulties that we face in our pursuit for greater heights.