why chinese doesnt get taught
Tuesday, April 28
arent chinese lessons silly?
ok i'm not talking about our current .9 and .11 lessons that we're screwing up during normal chinese classes XD but in general, even a normal perfect class, the lesson is silly...
the approach we're taking toward teaching chinese couldnt be more stupid. so the moe provides us with a textbook with something like 35 chapters? fine, discounting the ones that are cut out there's about 30 left. so 30 chapters to teach across the 4 academic terms we have in school, in which there are 40 weeks. factoring in all the weeks gone due to exams, holidays, and the cut short term 4 due to o levels, we're left with about 30 weeks of school too. wow what an attractive rate of 1 chapter per week!
and how exactly are lessons spent teaching us? we read the passage and then a very strange thing happens for a language class. the teacher just expounds about what the passage talks about! WOW! i'm sure i want to learn about FLOWERS, or POEMS, or MORALS, or FOLK STORIES, or CULTURE during a language lesson which isnt even my dominant language! when did chinese language equate to life appreciation, with some pastoral care thrown into the picture? and they expect us to learn... hello, if i wanted to learn about life skills i would be in another lesson, and i definitely wouldnt be learning it in chinese! plus, their folk stories are western ones translated into chinese most of the time! like what on earth is that! come on, get something authentic chinese... i dont see english textbooks translating stories from Journey to the West and putting it in their syllabus...
and after all that focus on the content of the text, we're given things like ting xie and workbook exercises to do... how do they expect us to know the words when they were merely brisked through? and its not like the students have any motivation to mug the shou ce just to learn those words. even if they do, it ends up in our short term memory, which is quickly discarded. what a great way to improve our chinese, study such that the words are in our minds for 1 day, then completely forgotten for the rest of our lives. plus, there are an average of 10 new words to learn for each chapter, its not very easy to learn and remember them all you know...
even english classes dont do that. they dont demand that you cram 10 new words of the english language into your mind repeatedly every single week. nope, languages never get learnt properly in that way.
just think back, from all the bountiful chinese lessons you've had for the past 4 years in secondary school, do you remember these 1200 chinese words that you've supposedly added to your chinese vocabulary? i definitely think not! for me, at most i can remember 40. and thats just a random stab in the dark, i'm sure the actual number's much lower than that.
so have chinese lessons done anything to edify my knowledge of the chinese language? definitely not. have i learnt nice moral values? nope, nothing i didnt already know. have i developed a greater appreciation for other cultures including mine? no, i didnt understand anything when it was in chinese.
so thanks a lot, oh wonderful moe, for making my time in chinese lessons so well spent!
AMEN;
9:43 pm
