Singapore Speak: January 2009

This website was originally named

"The Art of Dumbspeak" and was conceived in 2004 to poke fun of politicians and what I called the "dumbspeak" they would use to defend their policies. Press and interviews usually contained "dumbspeak" which assumed that their audience was a nation of mostly dumb sheep. My main criticisms had been in the areas of social and education policy, as you can observe from my most popular posts below.

Since 2011, my priorities shifted to a project of greater personal import, one which gave me the chance to experiment with a policy of my own. Like education policy, where outcomes are unpredictable and will not become obvious for a good decade or more, our family used One Parent One Language (OPOL) to bring up our son in 3 languages: the heritage languages of Chinese (from me), German (from his father) and English. I have been documenting the results regularly since Ju's birth in 2011. They have been nothing short of astonishing for our family and our expectations vastly surpassed.

My goal with our Multilingual Experiment and this blog is to show that language acquisition in children is a muscle that can be exercised, strengthened and honed to achieve striking results in bilingual and multilingual ability. It is my intention to show up the failings of Singapore's bilingual education as well as its achievements. It is also my hope that our family's ongoing project would be an inspiration to those who share our goal of giving their kids the best that they and their community have to offer to help them achieve effective bilingual proficiency.

Singapore Speak

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

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