Learning languages

Recently, there has been quite a few newspaper articles on learning Chinese in Singapore schools, and how to improve the teaching methods to make Chinese lessons interesting.

I remember my Chinese lessons in the past. Boring. Because most of it was trying to get us to memorise words, phrases, and write compositions, fill in the blanks, etc. But I can say the same thing about English lessons. Same old boring stuff as well.

What got me interested in Chinese was my Chinese tuition teacher (my Chinese grades were so bad, my parents got worried and hired a tuition teacher for me). He didn't believe in going through the textbooks ("Your teacher will do that in school") or going through tons of assessment books ("There is already enough homework for practice"). What he did was find out what I was interested in, and how to get me interested in Chinese.

It started with using the language. Speaking Mandarin outside of class was not something that I often did (I usually spoke English at home), so the practice did help. Then he found out that I was playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2 and used that to introduce me to the story itself. I remember discussing the characters with him (I had read the English translation of the story) and he gave me a copy of a Mandarin recitation of the story. I got so interested in the story that I got myself the book in Chinese, and we eventually went on to discuss the poems inside.

Chinese poems. That was another means used to get me interested in Chinese. He would introduce poems to me, and I would learn what they meant. Discussing the poems would bring about discussions of the historical settings, and from there, I learnt Chinese history. As I learnt more and more about Chinese history, I delved deeper into the Chinese culture and traditions, and since then, my passion for Chinese has never died.

My grades got better. In fact, they became good. Class was a breeze, and eventually I even wrote my own simple poems in Chinese (you can find some of them here with the rest of my works).

I think the most important thing about learning a language is interest. Next is necessity. Interest allowed me to pick up Chinese even though I was getting by well on English. Necessity made me pick up Japanese.

Studying in Japan in an environment fully immersed in the Japanese culture (where no one is even going to bother speaking English to you) forced me to pick up Japanese. Classes were conducted in Japanese, and no one knows enough English to be able to explain anything to you in English, so either I pick up Japanese to understand what the lecturers were saying, or I flunk my classes. That sure did help to motivate me to pick up the language. Having to use it every waking hour (greeting people, asking classmates about homework, asking people for directions, etc.) really did help a lot too. Writing reports, listening to the news, watching TV, all these helped. At the end of the day, this total immersion in the Japanese culture allowed me to pick up the language even though I had only 2 months of formal Japanese lessons.

I guess if we are really serious about getting our kids to learn more than one language, then we need to work on their interest, since they will eventually pick up whatever is necessary when they are immersed in the situation. With our tech savvy kids, if you allow them to play War of Warcraft during class, but only using Chinese, I am sure they will improve in Chinese. Rather than find ways to make lessons (Chinese or English) interesting, I think it is more important to find out what the kids are interested in, and weave in these languages, and once they are hooked, get them to start seeing the beauty in the language (that's when poetry and literature usually comes in).