mother tongues...

Well, late. But what the heck, everyone is still talking about it. Every other day in the forum, you see it, people talking about the new bilingual policy.

So here is my take.

I think the new direction that the policy is taking is great. Interest. Rote learning is so last century. Why didn't they think of this earlier? If they had attempted to teach creativity, I'm surprised that they didn't think they could teach interest. Although, this might be the next big problem; them trying to teach interest.

Another thing that surfaced over the weeks of forum was this one letter by this guy. This guy like many singaporeans have an innate, distinct, disdain toward the Mandarin taught in school. Hence, he never really mastered Mandarin but went on in life to speak 11 other languages. There was this other comment about how to learn a foreign language, that is to think in the language. It helps the speaker to immerse into the language. This could be another problem. In schools where the largest percentage of the population will find no meaning to learning Mandarin, they usually limit the language you can speak in school. Only English in the common corridors is something I remember form school. A limited exposure just reinforces the mentality that they don't need another language.

Language equality is important. That is something that we don't have. And that's something that is actually quite hard to achieve. Few people would see the need to have it. And due to individual social experiences, one language will always hold a higher status, more important, more intimate. That language will be dominant and used more often and expanded more extensively. How do you teach something like that? Brainwashing is not an option. No matter what you believe any government is capable of.