Singapore's Mother Tongue Struggle: How Bilingual Are We? | Talking Point | Full Episode
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- Ever feel stumped carrying out a conversation in Chinese, Malay or Tamil? Join Steven Chia as he puts his Mandarin to the test, by finding out how we can learn our Mother Tongue more effectively.
Under Singapore's education system, most of us have received 10 years of compulsory Mother Tongue education. But, are we really effectively proficient in it? In this episode of Talking Point, host Steven Chia uncovers just what it would take for our kids to be better in their Mother Tongue. Double hatting as a teaching assistant, Steve told stories to a class of 18-month-old kids as he closely observed them. Are these kids really learning and is there a need to start THIS early? Would acquiring new languages at a young age enable our kids to be more fluent?
And to find out how Mother Tongue learning can be made more fun and enjoyable, Steve even meets an 11 year old boy, who introduced him to a game he uses for his REVISION!
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Funny story.. I actually learned Mandarin speaking in the US working together with a bunch of Taiwanese.
Since then, I am always mindful to talk to my kids using mother tongue while being mindful that they will always converse in English in their school and work life. So, letting English run it's own course was a no brainer. Reading and writing Mandarin was the hardest part and they required extensive tuition classes for that. Of course the key is constant conversations. I only speak Hainanese with the kids, my wife only in Cantonese. Their cousins only converse in Mandarin. I always told the kids that their mother tongue languages and dialects are their secret language when they don't want anyone eaveasdropping into their conversation.
Now, my kids are in their late 20's, speak fluent English, Mandarin, Hainanese, Cantonese, Hokkien and Malay. Just make sure they have constant contact with family members who speak their mother tongues, and if you have an Indonesian maid, converse in Malay.
you did well! Many have that idea too but to carry it out effectively is tough!
@@Steven.Chia.Singapore Like they say.. no pain, no gain. Nothing succeeds without toil.
Surely, a mother tongue is the tongue of your mother? 🤔
I am a S'porean ,my siblings and i also speak English,Mandarin,Hainanese ,
hokkien,cantonese and one of my sister can speak teochew also because she is married to a teochew nang.
You've done a beautiful job in descending your cultures..! You are such an inspiration.
I scored As for Malay and Higher Malay, even took Malay Lit for O level. But right after sec school, I had no Malay lessons, no Malay classmates in JC and uni, no Malay colleagues. So over the years i’ve definitely lost my fluency in writing and flowery language. But I can still speak conversational Malay no problem. And most of the time, that is enough, unless i suddenly decide to go into Malay journalism.
Good to be bilingual and will be better if tri-lingual like English, Mandarin and Malay. My biggest regret cannot read, write Mandarin except simple spoken Mandarin. Many years ago went to China to enjoy the scenic places, don't understand Chinese culture and felt embarrassed when speaking to the Chinese people. China economy is booming and many opportunities to do business there. Loss opportunity of not knowing Mandarin.
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅😂😅😂😅🤣😅🤣😂😂😂😂😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
@@choonhockong8215 Absolutely agree. On personal level, I'm diligently revising and brushing it up.
it's hard. People are encouraged to speak english in every functional situations, there is no way to practice
I think it is good enough to learn the basics. When you actually need to learn the language, it will be easy to pick up and master
@@razzahling8951 the thing is, most working environment are filled with ppl from different countries so most of them don’t really speak proper English either 😂
I attended Nanyang thru my primary school years. I was made to feel absolutely inadequate. In fact teacher said “I didn’t deserve to be a Chinese” as I could not read nor speak Chinese. I therefore rebelliously chose NOT to learn the language. It wasn’t till I was away in Canada that I ever attempted to pick it up again. No bad superior teacher, no negative feedback. Just acceptance.
ouch! I went to nanyang primary too and it was tough but I was fortunate to have had some good chinese teachers. It's so important that they make the learning experience enjoyable otherwise we just end up hating the language! Glad you picked it up again! 😊
Nanyang used to be a Mandarin Chinese medium school until Lee Kuan Yew abolished vernacular schools and replaced it with English.
Dear Cikgu Dr Elmi Zulkarnain Osman, my husband and I are really grateful to you for teaching our child. Thanks to you, he got an AL1 for Malay. Your lessons are always so lively, energetic, humorous, fun and EFFECTIVE. Terima kasih.
In my opinion for Mother Tongue, emphasis has to be put away from grades and more to practical usage. Singaporeans generally don't write academic papers in their mother tongue so why should we learn it in a heavily academic manner? Still being bilingual is very important in raising open minded children
@言行一致 , Probably still relevant in Taiwan, when elections come up. Politicians and their aids there are always scrambling to find opportunities to paint their opponents for plagiarism, hiring ghost writers to do the research, seminars, and write up the supposed thesis, or even dissertation (as some lady politician's involvement in LSE Ph.D. dissertation), while some of the accusations turned out to be fact and post-graduate degrees revoked. So, yes "academic papers" are very relevant in Taiwan nowadays.
One would reckon after 2024, when the party involved in the LSE Dissertation thing steps down from her post, there is bound to be a whole lot more "relevancy" coming up regarding "academic paper." Some Dr. Peng (not the medical doctor, but Ph.D.) in Taiwan and his associates and friends might be able to bring forth more findings (possibly forensic kind thereof) on that. 🤣🤣🤣
Are many academic papers written in Taiwanese hokkien? @@lexneuron
I thought you were brave with all your food challenges Steve… but I really take my hat off to you here! To read to a group of kids and their parents for this programme… wow! RESPECT!!!
ha ha...thanks!
The phrase "mother tongue" is wrong. What has the languages imposed on us have anything to do with us. My Mother spoke to me in English. Her mother spoke to her in Teochew, and so on. Mandarin is just a foreign language imposed. Similarly Malay is an imposition on all the malay community. The bulk are Javanese, some are Bugis. Only Tamil people are learning their own language.
Do we need to learn, yes. The best way to learn, used to be Channel 8 7pm Drama, the 8pm show and the 9pm drama. However I feel if we are going to use such a false term like mother tongue instead of second language, or Mandarin, we do not have the full picture and the basic honesty in accepting why we learn this. Not for an imposed culture, rather because we use it as a lingua franca.
Yeah thats the problem with singaporean they lump all of different ethnic group to only 3 categories: Chinese, Indian, and Malay. Although there is hokkien, teochew, hainanese, cantonese, hakka, etc but lump together into 1 category as Chinese. The other is Indian there is tamil, punjabi, gujarati, sindhi, bengali, etc and also lump into Indian. Another one is Malay there is malay, orang laut, javanese, bugis, banjar, minangkabau, etc and yet they call them only as malay.
mother tongue mean the stronger side in your home language. yes mix marriage main to be - an example some mix hainanese with hokkien. how do u expect both of them talk mix. surely the parents will pick up the strong language to communicate...
@@fazhanshariff9853 the only Javanese young kids know is Nasi Rawon.
@@MrBoliao98 i am not javanese - my paternal grandparent mix of Malay/Arab & my maternal grandparent mix of Chinese/Boyanese. So my parents choose to speak mother tongue at home: English, BM & Mandarin.
@@minks4431 Not sure about the other races , but other than for the Chinese Peranakan, it’s not problematic for most Chinese Singaporeans of different dialect groups to identify ourselves as “Chinese” (the ethnicity, not the nationality).
Also, Mandarin has been the lingual franca for Chinese officials since around 1300s, and is seen as the unifying language of ethnic Chinese. In pre-independence Singapore, Mandarin was already adopted as the medium of instructions in privately funded Chinese schools. So to the vast majority of older Chinese educated Singaporeans, speaking/ learning Mandarin is just a natural extension of their identity as ethnic Chinese. Mandarin is not and has never been a foreign language, and it is hardly an imposition.
I find it hard to be convinced by those who argue that their Mother Tongue is xx Chinese dialect and therefore refuse to learn Mandarin or find Mandarin difficult to learn. I grew up speaking Teochew only, and still dream in Teochew up to this day, but I had no problem learning Mandarin in school. In fact, I see the two languages as complementary due to their vastly similar vocabulary (same Chinese Characters but pronounced differently) and language structure. I think it would be the same for all the other major Chinese dialects in Singapore.
My children speak Mandarin fluently. My daughter went as far telling her interviewers that she is one of the very few in Singapore who command both Chinese and English very well. How did they do it?. When they were borne my wife spoke with them in Mandarin from day 1 whereas I spoke with in English. That would help them create interest in reading Chinese. English is never an issue as they will learn fast because all subjects are taught in English. Many children have difficulty with Mandarin because the parents make the fundamental mistake thinking that knowing English will move them ahead of the pack. How wrong. Even my 3 year old grandchild is fluent in both languages. Her father, maternal grandpa & paternal grandma speak to her only in Mandarin & the rest of us in English. So no problem for her. If there is an Indonesian maid, ask her to speak to her in Bahasa. In their adult years Chinese and Indonesian will also become important languages.
2/3 of our public school students in my town in Minnesota USA start elementary school in an immersion program - either Spanish or Mandarin. They don’t start studying in English until 4th grade. Many are fully proficient with native accents in the foreign language when graduating from high school. What an advantage for them!
thats second / add language
not mother tongue
The so-called English schools in SG does nto help either, because people are shamed for performing well in MT. As a person who grew up in a Chinese speaking family (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien) i have no issue with speaking, but just could not score in tests. I genuinely love the subject but was always average on mandarin exams with an average of Bs despite fluency in the language. When i look around at my fellow peers, many struggle with even the basics of ordering food, and some of them even outperformed me in exams!
I think the key issues for learning a Mother Tongue language is that, it is taught in an environment where you have to memorize to score and get good grades out of it. I think what can be changed is that they can learn mother tongue but in a way where they learn the basic formalities of speaking the languages as well as the vocabularies. On top of that, students/kids are already coping with many other subjects in school so being able to learn another language is really a talent. At the same time, mother tongue exams will induce stress onto the kids and they will not like the language. Some of the parents are rather harsh on their kids when learning another language because it is their family's local language and they are forced to learn it. While some say it may work wonders by forcing your kid to study everyday and going for tuitions every week, it will seem like a torment to the kids and they will not have fun learning it. In summary, they should change how the education revolves the kids' life and create a more conducive and fun environment so that at the end of the day, they will feel accomplished about learning something new.
I grew up in an English speaking household & w/o being able to hear authentic mandarin conversations, it was tough to figure the grammar out or build up a varied vocabulary. Coupled with possible ADHD (I’ve never been officially tested, but noticed I’ve similar traits as my son who has been diagnosed with it), learning Mandarin has been an epic struggle. Ironically, it was briefly dating a more Mandarin speaking person who loved Jackie Cheung in my early teens, and then growing to follow the popular Taiwanese singers like Jeff Chang, Panda Xiong, Valen Hsu, Faye Wong that started my foray into picking up the language. I chased Qiong Yao dramas like 青青河边草 too and started to try to read their novels to my MT teacher’s delight. Sadly, Taiwanese dramas aren’t the flavour of the month now. The Hallyu wave means parents are mostly watching Korean dramas. That means kids have even lesser opportunities to listen to Mandarin at home (when the telly is on or the music is playing). The only person who somewhat spoke Mandarin to me as a kid was my Mama when I stayed at her place for school hols, but even then, she spoke more Teochew (so I can speak a smattering of the dialect) than Mandarin. However, my kids have grandparents who are English speaking too, meaning my kids have had zero chance of utilising Mandarin at home. Supplementary classes barely help as they are only once or twice a week.
My question is why have we dialled up the level of difficulty of Mandarin in our syllabus so intensely when more kids are coming from English speaking homes than ever before? By setting the bar so high, a huge group of students have a hard time playing catch up and eventually just grow disheartened and give up on the language. In fact, the piling pressure turns an initial curiosity and desire to pick it up into a deep seated resentment and phobia for others. Then we need to ask ourselves, what are the Caucasians doing right that their kids are picking up reading & speaking Mandarin faster than some of our kids? Could we merge their teaching style with ours to find a new way to teach Mandarin?
That’s why there is streaming & differences in Normal Chinese, Higher Chinese & foundation papers. I took the Higher Chinese O’level over 10 years ago, you can get an A1 and that standard is still laughable compared to native mandarin speakers in Taiwan/China/Malaysia.
being bilingual is a skill and a treasure we should cherish and preserve
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
yes sure
but beware when its force fed by CCP
Dialects > IN
Mandarin > OUT
@kingcook lmao why are yall so fking whitewashed. go study mandarin and learn some basic malay while ur at it. knn bodoh kau
Unfortunately my parents were strongly discouraged to speak to my siblings and me with their true mother tongues (or dialects).
why?
why?
What is your dialect? At least Mandarin? Ok 吧？
Shame!
Cause the government think "dialects" are useless. You can see the way the government use the word "dialects" to refer different languages when they are in fact is a language on its own right. That mean they just see them as inferior languages compare to the the so call mother tongue when their parents dont even speak that language but forced to speak that language. I think the government should not named them as mother tongue but second language, and why the learning must based on race? When actually their parent dont originally speak that language at all?
For majority of ethic Chinese people in Singapore - mandarin isn't the mother tongue. It's a dialect from Northern China which has been adopted as the national language of China. Our Mother tongue would actually be the Min nan language or other languages from the south of China.
wow,my mother tongue is also Minnan language ,it is one of the Chinese dialects, it is totally different from mandarin,
All the propagandas from chauvinistic Chinese got the majority of Southern Chinese to relinquish their original mother tongue.
Mandarin was force fed, dictated, shoved down throats
beware the Communists/ CCP agenda
Mother tongue is for the home / "mother" to decide
< Speak Dialect Campaign >
Dialects IN > Mandarin OUT
Northern Chinese are very different from Singaporean Chinese
The problem with Singaporeans parents (those born in the 1980s) are fearful or have misconceptions that kids could not cope with more than 1 language. Those of us I the Pioneer Generation or Merdeka Generation could easily manage formal languages, English and Chinese / Malay / Tamil and our own dialect mother tongue plus other dialect mother tongue. It’s a matter of exposure and practice. Let the kids go to school to speak their formal education languages and at home speak in your own mother tongue dialect (Teochew / Hokkien/ Cantonese / Hainan / Hakka etc)and also English plus 2nd language. The brain will know how to manage without getting confused.
Yes, we lack the environment to use all these languages! Would love to be fluent like my parents! But also because we are largely exam oriented these days. So the intention behind learning the language is sadly pretty much just for exams
@@Klavissimo Yes, I got A for GCE 0 level literature Many of my classmates got As for English and a number are SAF scholars notwithstanding we were from a Hougang school which students including our Malay schoolmates spoke Teochew. The school environment back then the teachers converse in proper English among themselves and with students. We don’t have Singlish back then but we had Pasar English used in markets by hawkers to communicate with non dialect speakers. My school also had produced ministers, MPs & top civil officers in the government agencies.
Hi Steve, By the way, my dad was born in China and only primary education in Teochew back in the village. He came to Sg at 16 to work as cookie, but he self taught / learn to read write and speak English & Malay. He is effectively trilingual. At home he spoke Teochew to us. My siblings are all effectively bilingual and could speak Teochew. My eldest sister and brother could even read write in Teochew.
it's true that some children raised in polyglot environments will start speaking later, but think of it like early mental exercise. children's brains are very moldable, and training their brains early on from childhood will only bring good to them later in life.
@@gasun1274 i don't think it's true. I think children would not even recognize it's a different language. The only problem would be when they start recognizing which word is in which language. So that people in school can understand them.
People can just take their own initiative to play a game like VRchat
The funniest part is that I've met Singaporean Malays learning and practicing Malay language in Kampung Melayu world as well as Singaporean Chinese going to the Chinese bar to practice Chinese
People have to take the initiative, effort, and time to properly learn to converse in multiple languages
Children can learn their mother tongue quite late and be fluent at it..... Last time I only spoke English and hated speaking Mandarin, but later on my parents bought a TV box from China for me and forced me to watch cartoons from China. That was when my Mandarin exponentially improved. Now I am so good that I can write essays and even write lyrics in Mandarin. After my Mandarin has been settled, I had to settle my Cantonese. My family occasionally spoke a little bit of Cantonese to me, but I refused to speak Cantonese although I knew a little bit. Then one day I made an effort to speak Cantonese and my cantonese has exponentially improved too.... Btw I'm from Malaysia and therefore I have a Cantonese or Mandarin speaking environment to some extent, which is a privilege most Singaporeans don't have
Like it or not Apple Daily taught me more Cantonese also
@@lzh4950 ohhhh wow that's great! Are you Singaporean?
@@yokelengleng Yes
@@lzh4950 it is quite rare for a Singaporean to be interested in watching Cantonese videos based on my impression. I thought Singaporeans are bananas that can only speak elementary Chinese. Do you speak Cantonese at home and how old are you (I'm asking because I think age plays a factor in whether you're interested in Chinese)?
I am an American. I live in Arizona USA. I was born in Chicago IL USA. I was raised by my immigrant parents from India. My parents grew up speaking a number of languages each. The only common one they spoke fluently in standard form was English. My father's mother tongue is Tamil. My mother's mother tongue is Kannada. They still spoken other languages, besides English or their mother tongues. Mom spoke Tamil and Hindi in addition to English and Kannada. Dad spoke Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, French, and Gujarati, in addition to Tamil and English. My parents used to 'argue' in Tamil or Hindi. Mother studied in Delhi and spoke Hindi (Kari Bholi), the leading dialect. She always was correcting my father on his Hindi usage (Dad spoke Bombay Hindi). Dad spoke Travancori Tamil, and was forever correcting Mom on her Tamil usage.
As a result I often got confusing messages whenever I spoke anything in a South Asian language at home. No one agreed on what I was saying was correct. As a result, I never became 'functional' in any mother tongue.. outside of English.
My younger sister did study Tamil as an elective in university in Chicago, but I never had that luxury. Where I studied, Tamil was not offered. My younger sister studied French also, and she speaks it like a Bretonese. Father's French skills are awful.
For me, what languages I learned beyond English were Castilian (Spanish)-I speak like an Argentinian, Russian-I speak it like a Moscovite, and Vietnamese-I speak it like a Saigonese.
I learned Castilian because it was available, and I needed a language elective in high school. Also went to Latin America many times (1 year in Cordoba Argentina). I continued using Spanish in my adult life, as is is spoken along with English in Arizona.
I learned Russian in university, Engineering School. Many of my professors were from Eastern Europe.
My Vietnamese is as an adult. I am married to a woman from Vietnam (18 years and counting). I learned it to communicate with my in-laws.
So there you have it...I speak nothing from South Asia as far as language.
My mother tongue is malay and omg the disadvantage in most childcares is lack of malay kids so some schools dont have a malay teacher
Kids learn chinese from infant to K2 then go to p1 not very equipped to have the basis for malay, simple things like table and numbers would make a diff
🇲🇽 👶💬 🇺🇸 My cousins are Mexican and American, raised in the US in Illinois. Their parents, my aunt & uncle, instituted a policy in the home of speaking English in some rooms and Spanish in others. They grew up speaking both languages fluently but my grandfather (who was not familiar with their bilingual tradition at home) had a difficult time while babysitting them as toddlers one day when my cousin was in the kitchen in his highchair, crying for "platanos" (bananas). In the days before cell phones, there was no way to simply call my aunt and learn that you just need to take him in the living room and he would speak English. Needless to say, my grandfather was very flustered. 😅
That's most interesting! A lesson for Singaporeans?
In my opinion, films/movies are a good way of learning a mother tongue language too. One of the movies that came out, Encanto which was a magical-surrealism musical had many versions of their songs published. When I first found out that there was a malay version of the songs from Encanto I was ecstatic cause the film really was such an incredible one as it presented a contemporary issue in today's world and to be able to listen to the songs in Malay was cool so I had a listen and surprisingly I found myself learning words that I never thought I would have till I heard the songs in Malay. Thus, I think good movies that portray contemporary issues and have versatility with a good plot and melodic songs are able to help kids to learn words from their mother tounge.
Multi-lingual signs too
The Encanto Malay lyrics are written by Mehmet Adem Barissever. He is a lyrical genius!
I am from Egypt and most people here speak arabic and english cuz we study both languages in school since elementary school , so we study both languages , arabic as first language and english as second , so in Singapore they can do that teach both offical and native language in schools
I find it so weird that now chinese sg people call mandarin they “mother tongue” but they ancestry never speak that language, (but other Chinese languages like hokkien teochew cantonese hakka hainanese…). The correct term for mandarin/huayu must be just “2nd language” as a lingua franca. LKY chose mandarin for being closer to China and the result now is just struggle to speak their true mother tongue and not fluent mandarin…
I'm very interested in where to watch the video of the 97.2 interview! The four of them are hilarious and with Steve I think the dynamics of the interview would have been amazing!
Great story. Steve has to be one of the best presenters for CNA.
thank you! 😄
11:27 That is also most Indonesian Chinese feel. Most Chindo that born between 1960s to 1998 cant speak Mandarin or Hokkien or any Chinese language. And learning it in our adulthood is not an easy feat
Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia that can speak Hokkien are mostly concentrated in Medan while Hakka in Kalimantan.
There's actually benefits in knowing more than one language 🤔
@Christine sung I can’t agree with you more !!! (Hi Five)
Yes. Excluding filthy Mandarin Chinese language 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
yes sure
but beware the communist CCP agenda to force feed mother tongue
jam it down the throat by order
and when being "bilingual" in job applications is code for must speak mandarin
@@albertpang102 pls gtfo of sg albert. disgrace to the nation
seems like students are learning just to score good grades rather than having fun or trying to be fluent in the language. that could be why youngsters hate 'mother tongue' so much, coz when they think of MT, they think of exams. I have an idea.. students can probably have regular online language exchange class with students from a country who can speak the language fluently. For example chinese session with a taiwanese student. It will be more engaging and meaningful for students to understand the power of language. A taiwanese student would love to learn english from a native speaker as well
I used to work for a Chinese enrichment school. Sadly, now a lot of parents want their children to learn Chinese because it will be beneficial to them in the future rather than because it’s their mother tongue.
Kudos to steven chia for putting himself out there.. haha! I laughed too much and can relate alot to this struggle with my son in mastering the mother tongue.. i supppse i shall just make it daily and fun.. journey rather than destination 😊
It is always good know the mother tounge and local laungage first and then master the other laungages. However, it is always best to know more than two laungages.
Where can i find the language aptitude test? Looks fun
If you don’t speak that language at home, how can you call it a mother tongue? As a Cantonese Chinese, I will never say Mandarin is my mother tongue, which is, though, not as foreign as English.
Each and every language is beautiful and if given the opportunity and time to appreciate the language, one should give his or her all to learn it with no regrets...the deeper you study, the more you would be in awe by its beauty
Apart from mother tongue, the general observation I have made is our younger generation no longer know much about dialects let alone speak them on a daily basis.
< Speak Dialct Campaign >
Bring back dialects
Dialects > IN
Mandarin > OUT
beware the CCP agenda
For me, it's the opposite, I grew up in a mandarin speaking household, so I think I am quite accustomed to the Chinese language. Also, I like watching Chinese content and listening to Chinese songs. These definitely helped me improve a lot.....but only for the speaking component. I can't write for nuts since we are so used to typing characters using our keyboards....
Yeah same, only thing for me is I’m slightly better at writing but not in using flowery language
I ❤️ CNA documentaries!
they're the only thing keeping me sane through my prelims lol. other than my books of course
DR ELMI!!! YOU ARE ROCKING IT! YOU ARE THE COOLEST MALAY TEACHER IN SINGAPORE! YOU ARE THE BEST!
As a Malaysian myself, I have to be glad that I can master different languages easily whether it's English, Mandarin, Malay etc.
A HKer do not have a strong proficiency in pinyin or Simplified Chinese. Isn’t it better to compare them with mainlanders or Malaysians?
Hongkonger are highly proficiency in Traditional Chinese
hong kongers are good at 書面語 they are worse at spoken mandarin than english.
also hong kong children will just read those characters using cantonese literary pronunciation.
@@jly5828 Singapore’s tests are in Simplified Chinese.
CNA insider is my favourite youtuber
Sama Sama
This is a Singaporean state funded media lah.... Not TH-camr
@@yokelengleng TH-cam has never said that a state-funded cannot be a TH-camr
many foreigners are very envoius of us malaysian chinese to be able to know more than one langauge/dialects, it shows that being multilingual is very benficial!
yes Malaysian chinese can speak 4 language at end of the day majority of them that come to wrk in Spore - despite they can speak 3 language but they still strong at BM & Mandarin only.
coz we Sporen use to speak English and my chinese-malaysian friend normally will respond - Bang ckp melayu la lagi senang i faham mah... inggeris susah sikit la..
@@fazhanshariff9853 Come to KL and you will learn Cantonese from Malaysian Chinese.
🤮🤧🤮🤧🤮🤧🤮🤧🤧🤧🤮🤧🤮🤧🤮🤧🤮🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧
Many older S'poreans speak at least 2 languages and 2 to 3 dialects too. it is a pity that the younger generation are not fluent in Mandarin and dialects.
@@leealex24 many S'poreans speak cantonese too. I am one of them.
Good to know the basic of Bahasa and mandarin but best to focus on mastering English or you will face limitation in career and business opportunity
Unfortunately, many of them don't speak good english either.
There’s a group of seniors raised in English speaking households and at that time the 2nd language policy wasn’t even in the syllabus until I got to secondary sch. , and I was from a mission sch. I passed Mandarin . Today I can only get by in ordering food in Mandarin. I will not be able to hold a sentence long conversation in Mandarin.
Mandarin was force fed, dictated, shoved down throats
beware the Communists/ CCP agenda
Mother tongue is for the home / "mother" to decide
< Speak Dialect Campaign >
Dialects IN > Mandarin OUT
The team at Elemantra are all so proud of you, Dr Elmi! You really are a gem in the Malay Language community. #arifbudiman #elmizulkarnain #elemantracademy
Why would you ask a native Hong Konger to take a mandarin language exam in simplified chinese? This is so cringefully wrong
In Singapore, English is a working language. Our native language depends whether you are Chinese,Indian or Malay. Yet some Singaporean Chinese can’t speak proper mandarin. Is there something wrong with our education, society or Singaporean perspective about his/her ethnicity? Is Singaporean still having the post colonial mindset/syndrome? Can someone please explains.
PRCs come to SG, stay here for 30 years
Tak boleh cakap bahassa ingrris
Singapore Chinese here
I am a bit below average in Mandrin and Malay but being exempted and learning these languages late in life after 20 has it's benefits 😂
Using games to learn is a great idea. I learnt my maths from Microsoft games CD when I was a kid. Thus, I grew up loving Maths and had always scored well on that subject at school.
While saying that Mandarin is not a "mother tongue" does have some merit, I wonder how many Singaporeans are actually even aware of the modern history of Chinese language and how Mandarin was the outcome of the May 4th movement, an important historical period when Chinese intelligensia led a vigorous movement to modernise Chinese culture. Since then, each Chinese community (Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore) has continued evolving from this movement in order to bring forward and reinterpret Chinese culture in the modern era. However, before this fully came to maturity in Singapore, the Chinese intelligensia consciousness was abruptly stamped out when Chinese schools and Nantah were forced to close and convert to English schools in the 70s and 80s in Singapore; this is why Singaporean Chinese are so detached from their cultural roots. They were denied the chance to continue the movement to re-interpret Chinese culture in modern society. That said, rejecting Mandarin entirely only goes further to drive a wedge between modern culture and traditional Chinese culture, in the process hollowing out the ethnic identity, losing its means to connect tradition and modern society.
If most kids are now speaking English at home, how do you explain the general standard of English amongst Singaporeans?
I suspect many of those families actually natively speak Singlish at home; but either the census the data is from doesn't have Singlish as a separate option, or CNA is not allowed to recognize it as a separate language on SG television because of the govt's attitude towards it.
@@dingus42 That makes sense. Perhaps CNA's next topic should be 'Singapore's struggle with English' ?
@@dingus42 Singlish is technically a pidgin language, it’s somewhat like slang, and the government is trying to reduce such usage of Singlish cause it affects English grammar (Singlish and English have the same words but the grammar in Singlish looks downright like a failing English student to a native English speaker, aka the grammar in Singlish is basically worse than standard English)
@@kohwenxu
Singlish is NOT English - period.
so far there has been no serious speak english campaign
like the nutcase , incessant speak mandarin agenda & campaign of the past
that was top gov priority to remove dialects and push mandarin
social engineering
the slogan was Mandarin IN, Dialects OUT
it made the communists happy
@@kohwenxu That is not correct; 1. Singlish is NOT a pidgin but a creole, which is a big difference; and 2. It has just as complex a grammar, with its own rules, that are just different from English since they are based on Hokkien and Malay grammatical structures.
I completed my primary six and secondary 2, in Vietnam 48 years ago. I can read novels and write simple chinese . Chinese characters required learning from young, writing is the hardest part, every writing stroke has its own sequence of writing.
I heard Vietnam banned Mandarin schools due to the 1979 China Vietnam border war?
The speak Mandarin campaign is a victim of its own success. Singapore Chinese Mother Tongue should be the dialect. With the banning of the dialect. Instead of speaking Mandarin… People choose to speak English instead.
I agree. But call it a yield of majority community. Singapore suffered racial conflicts so much. Lee Kuan Yew admitted supporting certain side makes quarrel. And he admitted Chinese should be treated as part of the land but acknowledge that they are immigrants. To unify society language was the matter. Not talking about Tamils and Malays. Even the people among Chinese. They are actually Hokkiens, Cantonese, Hakkas and Baba Nyonyas. They distinct one another. You may have heard the conflicts and violence among the chinese community was so big. Especially Hokkiens and Cantonese. Their languages are so different it's totally unintelligible for one another. And ROC and PRC set Mandarin as their official language so choosing Mandarin as official not only unites Chinese people but also make more chances to communicate and benefits from Mainlanders.
Singapore had no choice. They wanted to use the benefit of Chinese through the mainland. But there was barely no Mandarin speakers. But they couldn't beat the traders from Hong Kong because their English fluency was much better.
got A for a level h1 mother tounge but i’m not even fluent in speaking it compared to many many others
Just play maybe 15min of Yanxi Palace in Chinese class. The kids will get hooked and they'll be motivated to watch more and passively improve their Mandarin. My friend had sh*tty Mandarin, and in the beginning he understood only like 20-30% of the content, but by the end he understood like 80%. Same probably goes for Malay and Tamil - get the kids hooked with cool dramas and stuff.
Testing mandarin in simplified Chinese and you found a kid from Hong Kong 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah I felt bad for the comparison person.
Tried speaking to my kids who are half-chinese back when they were young and given my own rather poor Mandarin vocabulary, that monologue ended pretty fast. Besides my son told me since he was only half-Chinese, he only needed to know half as many words. Could not argue with the logic of a 5 year old.
There's some problems with the way they tested language proficiency. Firstly, it's very insufficient to use three Singaporean kids as representative of a country of 5.5 million. To collect more accurate results, you need to test Singapore's entire population. Also, there was apparently no speaking or listening comprehension on the exam since it was paper only. Proficiency in a language reflects reading, writing listening, and speaking. As far as we saw, the exam only had reading comprehension.
As long as you are highly self motivated and self disciplined, you can master anything you want. Age is really just a number.
Super interesting! Singapore's power to speak to powers like China and USA makes it amazing!
I have heard that apart from the two main langages, Mandarin and Cantonese, there are so many different dialects that people from one part of China cant understand people from another. With English, that is not the case. I can understand people from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, USA, Canada, Australia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, NZ, Jamaica and a few other places, we all speak the same type of English. I used to be able to speak and write Malay moderately well 50 years ago, but as I haven't used it for nearly 50 years it is a bit rusty now and I can no longer read Jawi script.
Go emigrate to Chinese China 🇨🇳 then.
English does have dialects. If a person from Jamaica was speaking patois or a person from Scotland was speaking scots you wouldn’t understand them both considered by many as dialects of english. It’s just that these groups also speak standard english in addition to their home dialect.
That is because they are NOT dialects as the govt calls them, but actually different languages
Yes Chinese "dialects" are very different, but if you know Malay you'll know that the differences between Malay "dialects" are even greater.
@@jackmilk6944 One of the reasons for that is that the Indonesian archipelago covers a vast distance and includes what used to be many different tribes and countries before the Dutch colonised them. Bahasa kebangsa'an is the language of Sumatra and Malay penisular, so other parts of Indonesia have to learn it as a second language.Even in Sumatra and Malaya there are tribes which have their own language, but in my experience they all speak Malay as well. As their own languages have some similarity to Malay, they might sometimes get them mixed up.
to master a language, not just write / read / listen to a language, really need to communicate in that language everyday if possible.
I would say most are byelingual, considering that to be fluent, we need to be able to speak, listen, and write them (3 parts). Formal education and exposure is important, but also should be over a long period of time. Formal education might be the initial exposure and teach us about the rules of the language, and also how to read and write them. But long term exposure in those 3 parts, I would say, is the one that determines at which level of fluency we are at, or how multilingual we are.
Written below are my experiences with languages so you can skip those if uninterested.
For example, I scored B3 for English O Levels and C for General Paper A Levels. I scored A1 for Chinese O Levels and D7 for Higher Chinese O Levels. Well, it seems that I am average in both for examinations. (By the way, I had an English teacher in Secondary School who was extremely shocked that most of us don't know how to read this - ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ (I have no idea what they are called but they are used for pronunciation) - and it was never taught in my younger years or with my parents, and I felt that I wasn't able to speak proper English when my teacher said that.)
But I do feel more confident in speaking English than Chinese, especially for technical terms like names of animals, scientific terms etc. If I change my phone language settings from English to Chinese, I will be lost if I look through the settings menu. I find myself unable to speak only Chinese to a person who only speaks Chinese, forgetting how to write Chinese characters since I don't need it for university and I use hanyu pinyin for writing in Chinese online.
I also consume more English content such as news articles, watching TH-cam, dramas, reading mangas etc. I would choose English subtitles for Japanese anime or Korean drama. However, I can mostly watch Chinese drama with Chinese subtitles and read Chinese novels (小说) normally as well. There are times when I wanted to borrow a book from NLB and only Chinese translated versions were available for loan and I still am able to read it, though English translated names are slightly difficult.
So other than English and Chinese, I learnt Malay as third language in Primary School (compulsory) and in Secondary School in Malay Special Programme (voluntary). My father's side is Teochew while my mother's side is Cantonese. Listening-wise, I understand Cantonese > Malay > Teochew. Writing-wise, Malay > Cantonese = Teochew (basically non-existent for both). Conversational speaking-wise, Cantonese > Malay > Teochew. So I am definitely not fluent in any but enough to get by at times but not enough to understand content like Cantonese dramas or live in a place that only speaks those languages.
Furthermore, I self-learned Korean and Japanese. So I can listen, speak, and write them to a certain extent. And I took a Korean, Italian, and German class in university. Again, not fluent in any but also enough to get by. Now, I am more fluent in Korean and Japanese despite learning Italian and German in classroom settings as I expose myself more to those two languages via drama, music etc but I am still unable to read novels or fully understand lyrics etc.
The actual mother tongue of most Singaporean Chinese was actually Hokkien for those whose ancestors from Fujian. Mandarin is the mother tongue of Beijing Chinese.
Anyone knows where I can find Steven's interview with Love 97.2 FM???
"Mother tongue" sure ain't Mandarin for most.
i mean the host is chinese, of course hes gonna try more with his mother tongue, that something the host knows
@@hiddenblush I believe SK was referring to the fact that Mandarin is a northern Chinese language whereas most ethnic Chinese in Singapore would have Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc, as their mother tongue instead.
For me it is ✌️
@@MelvinSimKH
YUP SO TRUE
Mandarin was shoved down pples throats / force fed
there was no choice
it was social engineering
it made the CCP communists happy
as they had first done the same force feeding earlier at their end over there
so it would then pave the way for them to migrate here later and "feel at home"
when increasing the population need to hit the right ratios
and so Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese lose out
mother tongue is a personal matter, should not be official gov business
its for the "home & mother" to decide
not to be dictated
Ha ha ... Dr Sun He is so good at speaking Mandarin because she was born & grew up in an environment that is mandarin speaking . From her accent, I guess she is from China or Taiwan (?) , which explains why she speaks good Mandarin.
Mother Tongue is a misnomer, at home my Mother and Father spoke CANTONESE, and not mandarin. So what is my Mother's Tongue ??. I know of a Neighbour, they are both Eurasians, both spoke English at home, the poor children left with no choice and struggled to learn Mandarin in school.
Many Singaporeans speak half mandarin and half English, if they can't speak a full sentence in one language, I won't call them bilingual at all.
what is that app i cant seem to find the app
I didn't do that well for higher chinese (C grade) and express chinese (B grade) but because of my home environment (Parents don't speak much english and mother is a chinese teacher), I end up being more fluent in mandarin in adulthood compared to my peers who got As for their chinese exams.
My mom is always baffled why I can speak mandarin so fluently but not be able to score well XD
Also chinese translated manga and light novels are cheaper.
CNA, did you really just test 3 children from overseas who have never studied under the MOE curriculum and compared them to 3 who have done so, and then was shocked that the 3 who had done so was able to do the exam under MOE better? Bro..
I used to think it is mostly only Singaporean Chinese that are forgetting their roots and not speaking their mother tongue at home. Well this video proved me wrong
I am lost. What is mother’s tongue to Singaporean Chinese? Unless you’re from Peking or Beijing. Mandarin is their mother’s tongue dialect. Because the Chinese court was in Peking and to unify the court, the local “dialect “ was adopted as the official language. I noticed that the Chinese teacher is from China, and the second Interview who spoken English is also from China. There accents give them away. Sorry, Singaporean mother’s tongue is not Mandarin, unless your root is from Peking or modern day Beijing.
Yep my heritage is canton. My Malaysian Chinese friend first language is Bahasa Melayu and English which is way more fluent than his real mother tongue, Cantonese. The word mother tongue should be abolish. Honestly we should be studying English and Bahasa Melayu as our base language. Mandarin and other languages can be optional and added as a third language for Singaporean children. It is a bloody joke that Singaporean Chinese don’t even know that We are in nusantara !
Because MANdarin is influenced by MANchu
@@user-oh6wb5rj2q yes, because the Manchu used Mandarin that is the local dialect of Peking or modern day Beijing as the “ court language.” Manchu adopted Mandarin as the official language in court to unified the ruling. Mandarin in Beijing is known as the Common language.
Agreed. I'm Cantonese and I'm so pissed whenever told Mandarin is my mother tongue. No it's not. It originated literally thousands miles away from my ancestral region and was imposed on me through political gaslighting.
@@jamesw4459haha…. I’m a America born Chinese - Cantonese myself. You take it so serious - I can feel the rage and anger from your post. 😀
I’m with you brother. My Professor keeps getting on me for that word”菜” vs “ 在”! 🤪 Great topic, I love it!
My mother’s tongue would be Italian, even though my mom is Asian, since her maternal grandmother, her mom’s mom is Sardinian. Yet I can only speak Spanish, French and Mandarin
I'm surprised for the Malay. I found a lot of Malay children spoke mostly in English when I was there (Malaysian here)
Kids should aim for trilingual now to be relevant with the leading global economy. Chinese, Hindi and English.
Haha i only picked up chinese at 18 because the university i studied in is full of chinese speaking folks. So i learned and practice with them till i mastered it when i hop in my 2nd job company later. So my total of practice and polishing is 10 years. I dont intend 2 learn reading and writing as long as i able 2 order food in hawker can already. Haha.
Did the parents attending the toddler class get a discount?
ha ha! Let's just say they were highly entertained by the session!
this should not be a controversial fact:
all of the chinese in southeast asia never had mandarin as their mother tongue. mandarin is the language of bureaucrats, today's SEA chinese came as laborers from southern china.
in taiwan there is a saying 狗去豬來. the japanese left the languages of taiwan alone and even supported their development. the KMT lost to the communists and imposed northern barbarian culture on the populace, and played a vital role in the forced assimilation of the taiwanese aborigines.
the dog eats and protects, the pig just eats.
as for malaysia, mandarin was self-imposed. the chinese recognized a threat from the malays and the indigenous peoples and needed a monolithic identity. the same thing happened in singapore.
Who cares. If Chinese now prefer Mandarin dialect then what's the issue? My main dialect is Mandarin,so are my friends. If Singaporean Chinese love Southern Dialects so much then why not start a campaign like Penang's Hokkien Campaign. Singapore is more advanced than Malaysia right but you all can't do it?
@@jackmilk6944 balik tongsan lah kalau tidak puas duduk di negara orang
Might be good to consider, teaching the weaker language subject as a second language not as a first language. There is a difference in teaching approach.
I got my mt exam paper back and I got 16/200 the rest of my grades were good
From friends and my own experience, if our parents do not use our mother tongue at home, we lack exposure to our mother tongue environment after we graduate from secondary school. So what I did is go on vrchat for me to expose to languages 😂
And no exposure to business or industry related mother tongue words. That’s why they now have to come and learn business Chinese + the skill of translation after they graduate. It’s not an easy process due to the large linguistic difference between English and Chinese.
When watching this, memories of LKY came flooding back...read he kept up his mandarin lessons even till old age.
The lyrics of the first song sounds like "chicken nugget chicken nugget.."
If you learn Chinese Mandarin there is also different types of Chinese Mandarin for each region around expressing and speaking example; Good Morning my name is.
China Mainland 早上好我的名字叫 ， Taiwan : 早安好我的名字？ Also Movies and City names are slightly different example: San Francisco 三藩市 舊金山 etc. Is like American English and British English .
There is such a difference in terms used and all in the different types, that fun fact: Wikipedia Chinese provides you the option to change between 6 different kinds of Chinese depending on where you are from. (Still wiki leaves out the Chinese dialects)
If u can't speak Chinese, Malay, or Tamil, maybe ur mother tongue is Singlish.. don't worry, u have mother tongue.. heuheu 🤣
Lol (Although there’s the Non-Tamil Indian Languages)
Always speak to children in your own language, particularly if you’re explaining something. I speak a bit of French, if I had to explain the solar system or even how to make toast in French it wouldn’t be great. However I can quite easily do it in English. I used to teach English as an additional language and parents we’re always shocked by that. Assuming they should only speak English at home!
Children have an amazing ability to transfer knowledge from one language into another.
If I teach you to count to 5 in several languages do you have to learn how to count & the order of numbers again? No, you transfer that knowledge over. Encourage bi linguistic and multi linguistic skills
thats sweet
second language / mother tongue is for the home , parent to decide, and later the individual
not to be jammed down the throat and force fed to citizens
the CCP communist way / agenda
Malaysians be like: I can't relate to this.
Nah, my Malaysian Chinese friend grow up with Bahasa Melayu and English. He is very broken in Cantonese and totally can’t speak mandarin. I have to fill in the sentence for him when we speak with Chinese stakeholders. I am also trying to play catch up with Bahasa Melayu
@@arturosiew9630Am I Malaysian born Chinese that my parents brought to Singapore. Can somewhat relate to this given that I get relatively not that great grades for Chinese
We seem to forget the fact that Mandarin was NOT the mother tongue of a great majority of Singaporeans of Chinese descent.
People were ENCOURAGED to discard their real mother tongue and preferring English to Mandarin is simply a step further in the process.
I am Indonesian, I spoke to my little sister, which has 17 years difference, English since birth.
Control the consumption to English Baby TV.
Now, she speaks English better than me.
The downside? Her Bahasa is not that good.
Looks like you cannot win everything.
She knows English was my small win since she can learn a lot of thing via the Internet.
I learn how to speak proper mandarin when I start working
Don't give excuses. Malaysian Chinese and Singaporean Chinese shared the same nanyang background, same history, same ancestry, same culture, same cuisine and same religion. Malaysian Chinese can speak a variety of dialects and Mandarin , on top of English and Malay. I don't see why Singaporeans are struggling. Many malaysian celebrities , whether famous globally or in chinese world such as Michelle Yeoh, Jimmy Choo, Fish Leong, etc are conpetitive simply because of their multi-lingual and multi dialectic proficiency. In the recent michelle yeoh hollywood movie, only Yeoh can speak all the languages. All are limited. Btw, name me a SG international celeb.
Some are ashamed of speaking dialects, when dialect proficiency gives you an edge whether to hire you or a malaysian who can communicate easily with ppl in HK, Taipei, Beijing and rich indon uncles in medan and jakarta who prefer to speak hokkien .
LKY was terribly wrong on this field. English is important only back in his pre war and baby boomer days. His way of thinking is stagnant. The world is changing now. China is the second going to be the top global economy. Soon, India will be the top. Time for indians to embrace hindi!
As a tamil,, definitely won't embrace hindi.
Not all Indians would embrace Hindi. Like sure, there may be some, but there are definitely going to be people who speak other Indian languages/dialects.
It’s the same with Chinese. Just like India, China also has different dialects of Chinese.
Hi Steven, First time hearing u speaking Mandarin. Quite fluent. By the way, your growing up years did your grandparents or parents speak to u in your own dialect other than Mandarin and/or English. Also do your converse in dialect with your kids? Languages are best learn by speaking and being exposed to it.
Thank you, the 10 years of learning it in school did build some foundation. But for me, it was english all the way. Even my grandparents spoke english. I also can't speak any of the dialects fluently...only enough to order bak chor mee!
Chinese Singaporeans speak both mandarin and English poorly :(((( can barely understand their accents
Can’t say for others, but I and the people around me have a very high command of English, to the point of being fluent. Don’t generalise a whole bunch of people. What’s more, accents do not mean a lack of fluency in a language. There is no correlation between these two.
I mean, if you can't understand a native English accent you might be the one having problems with English...
wonder can let #benjaminkheng #stevenchia sing #jjlin or #stephaniesun song in their #mothertongue?