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| I speak English, Mandarin, German, Singlish and Gibberish. |
Our former PM and Great Leader Extraordinaire has embarked on his latest project to safeguard Singapore's economic future (among other unnamed policy goals). By the way, if you think the Propoganda Times' website sucks, you are right. Without commenting on or critiquing his latest book (until I've had a chance to read it), this post is my take on bilingualism the way Lee thinks of it, the way policy-makers are trying to make of it, and the way I am doing it.
Singapore's Bilingual Policy - In A Nutshell
Having had a brief stint after graduation as a research assistant for a local Singaporean related to Goh Keng Swee, I had the chance to do some research on Goh's bilingual policy which he had peddled as Education Minister. The take-home from this experiment was not that it was great for Singapore's economic development, its human resource and all that stuff you would expect to hear from foreigners keen to upkeep their good PR campaign here. The thing to note is how Mandarin was completely removed from the psyche and cultural identity of the local Chinese populations which were a patchwork of immigrants who hailed from disparate Southern Chinese regions. This is why the policy got such vociferous resistance from the masses as it entailed the wipe-out of all dialects -- Hokkien, Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Teochew etc -- from the mass media. Chinese-medium schools were also phased out, but this concerns other goals of the state.
Since then, we've come a long way, and just like the wildly unpopular population-control policies of the past, the bilingual policy has altered our education system dramatically and in an unintended consequence, our national culture. Lee's lament is that Chinese people no longer speak Chinese the way they "should" - perhaps like the natives? I would dispute this, because we were never a nation of indigenous Mandarin speakers, Pu Tong Hua was forcibly named the "Mother Tongue" of the Chinese although my maternal and paternal grandparents never spoke a word if it in their lives. Therefore, it is a misnomer to say that the mother tongue of the Singaporean Chinese people is Mandarin. In fact it's a gross misrepresentation of our true ethnic heritage. We never spoke Mandarin like the Chinese (in China) and we never will as a nation. At the very best, we will speak a Singaporean creole -- Singaporean Mandarin, if you will -- and we would never be at a level where our proficiency equals the Chinese in China. I'll tell you why next.
Bilingual Education: In and Out of School
I've written elsewhere in this blog why Singaporeans find it so difficult to be effectively bilingual here. Without going into a diatribe, I would just reiterate that our formal education system plus the social environment combine together to defeat every effort (if there is much of it) of the people to grow up bilingual. It's like living in the US only with fewer TV channels.
I use the phrase "grow up" and not "learn" because bilingualism isn't something you can consciously teach a child to be. They either are or they aren't and it all rests on NEED. Sociolinguists have mostly agreed that a child uses a language as much as he or she needs it to function in daily life, i.e. get what they want. And in the life of a young child or toddler just acquiring language, you provide a world in which he grows up surrounded by the very tools you want him to use. There is no point pumping him full of Chinese cartoons and videos and hours of Chinese playgroup or drama class from birth till 6 years old, and then at 7 when he goes to Primary School he realises that he only has 1 hour of Chinese class a day. Worse, all his friends speak English, all the teachers and the scary Principal too, and everything from Math to Music is in English. It's defeatist.
It's also dumb to "expose" a child to Chinese like you would plants to sunlight hoping they would soak it up and miraculously file away the language in their hard drives for future reference when all the time, his main caregivers converse with him in English. Policymakers should wake up to reality and make a call once and for all: treat Chinese like a foreign language and teach it like one (meaning abandon the whole bilingual pipe dream); or go the whole hog and overhaul the education system (too difficult and risky to other policy goals). How to do the second? Bring back Chinese-language schools (in the States they have immersion schools) or start teaching non-science and non-math subjects in Chinese (manpower crunch, no talent). You need to do all that instead of just imploring and haranguing parents to "speak Mandarin" to their kids. How am I supposed to have a conversation with my kid in Mandarin about the science experiment he did in school or the computer lab project he's doing? Ridiculous.
My Way or The Highway
I take a leaf out of my own upbringing as well as research I've done and stories from other parents (in other monolingual countries) raising their kids bilingual or multilingual.
1. Make your child need it
2. Make it normal
3. Make it fun
The first two I am already doing, but the third I don't know since Chinese language learning has never been very fun for me. At home, I speak exclusively in Mandarin to Ju and I've even armed myself with a big-ass dictionary for the words I don't have a translation for -- like dolphin and whale! In fact it has become so normal for me to speak to him in Mandarin that last weekend, at a party with several non-Chinese speakers present, I continued to speak to Ju in Mandarin. It felt weird to switch to English with him. Where there's a will, I daresay there is an effective way to get what you want. I can't say it was easy from the get-go, it took getting used to, but after 6 months, I can happy to say it comes almost naturally to speak in Mandarin to Ju.
Ju, in turn, loves hearing Chinese rhymes. In fact, when he gets cranky and gripey at any time, all I have to do is break out my Xiao Qing Wa ditty which never fails to get a grin and giggle from him. I even made up my own rhyme in Chinese last week to placate him on a long car ride:
妈妈疼，爸爸爱，宝宝长得大又快！
Daniel has less trouble speaking to Ju in German since it's really his mother tongue, unlike my Chinese which is some half-baked remnant of an unhappy 12-year syllabus. Daniel chatters on quite naturally in German to Ju and reads regularly from our German storybooks, unfortunately, Ju prefers songs, rhymes and ditties while being jostled on our laps. Oh well, it's a matter of time. Meanwhile, Ju will get an upsized dosage of German when his grandparents arrive from Germany in January.
So in the end assessment, is it a pipe dream? Will Ju achieve multilingual fluency and literacy?
As much as I like to criticise our policymakers and the social environment, I have to live within this milieu and bring my son up within these parameters. I am heartened that there is renewed interest and funding devoted to improving bilingual education. Yet I feel like I am wading into a strong current of resistance and obstacles that I alone am inadequate to surmount.
Some experts say, and I agree, that it is a myth to be fully and equally competent in both or all languages. Language is a living tool, and is shaped by (and shapes also) culture. If my son is to be a competent multilingual, it is my responsibility to give him the opportunities and environment to hone and sharpen his tools. This may entail uprooting and leaving Singapore at some point, hopefully, not until he is older.
