.....I thought i know LKY well,oh well.
Since the communist proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, modern China has wrestled with the problems of mass illiteracy, hampered by a language that has more than 400 dialects in continental China alone.
A dictionary published in 1959 contained 49,965 characters, while in 1986 a Chinese dictionary listed a staggering 56,000 characters. How can anybody in China learn to recognise 56,000 characters? The simple answer is nobody can. According to Prof. Lu Bisong, President of Beijing New Asia University, one can read non-technical Chinese publications, such as the daily newspaper, if he has a command of about 3,000 characters or around 8,000 words, a word being a construct of several characters. A graduate with a primary degree may know about 8,000 characters, but will be unable to read ancient manuscripts. That kind of specialist knowledge is left to scholars of ancient history and language, who devote a lifetime to the pursuit.
To achieve its goal of mass literacy the communist government during the 1950s set up a commission of linguists to simplify written Chinese. Hong Kong and Taiwan kept to the old script, which was taught to the baby boomers of Singapore.
In 1958 the revolutionary government introduced Pinyin, the new Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, to replace the old Wade-Giles system of Roman alphabet transliteration designed to help foreigners to learn Chinese. Pinyin removed the inaccuracies of sound reproduction by Westerners, often considered pidgin by native speakers. With the arrival of the new system in 1958 Soochow became Suzhou and Peking became Beijing. Singaporean names with the Hokkien “Hock” and the Cantonese “Fook” became a generic “Fu”, foreshadowing initiatives that will mandate the demise of dialects, and render grandparents unable to communicate with their grandchildren.
The teaching of Mandarin in the Ministry of Education (MOE) was also a work in progress. The first born of a friend had to deal with textbooks containing only simplified Chinese characters, rendering the parent practically illiterate since he was of the traditional school. One year later, second daughter had books with Pinyin printed below the Chinese script. Dad felt a bit less impotent. The third child, also one year part, read in Pinyin first, below sighting the first Chinese character. Suffer the little children, while the “experts” dabbled in waters way above their heads.
From all appearances MOE still hasn’t figured out how to teach the language. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew blamed it on the MOE officials, “They were basically two groups of people, one English-speaking, the other Chinese-teaching.” He claims that it was wrong to insist on ting xie (dictation) and mo xie (writing down compete passages committed to memory). Never mind what time-honoured educators have to say of its value: “[Dictation] ensures attentive listening; it trains pupils to distinguish sounds; it helps fix concepts of punctuation; it enables pupils to learn to transfer oral sounds to written symbols; it helps to develop aural comprehension; and it assists in self-evaluation.” Lee now wants to emphasize listening and speaking, and dismiss writing. Webster defines literacy as “the ability to read and write”. The writing is on the wall, the future of Singapore will be 50% literacy.
Source: http://todayinsingapore.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/on-learning-chinese/
