New Chinese learning may mean same old regurgitation ofcliché

By James Palmer (Global Times) 08:49, November 04, 2013

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(Illustration: GT/Liu Rui)

The recent trend toward cutting down English in the gaokao, or national college entranceexaminations, isn't all bad. Let's face it, it's a lot easier for rich kids to get good access toEnglish, whether through foreign travel or private tutors.

In a perfect world, the absurdly antiquated single-score exam wouldn't even exist, andcolleges, free from corruption and personal influence, would be able to make all-roundassessments of students' abilities and extracurricular achievements.

But in reality where resource distribution is quite unbalanced, the gaokao is still the bestchance for the poor-but-smart to get a shot.

I wouldn't have any problem with this move if I thought the renewed emphasis on Chineselanguage teaching was going to be done well. If the curriculum was opened up, new ideaswere embraced, linguistic creativity rewarded, and kids given the chance to be rewardedfor playing with their own language, that would be a wonderful thing. But all signs point toquite the opposite.

The problem here isn't so much less time for English, as it is more time for a vision ofChinese learning that ends up -leaving kids bored, frustrated, and uncreative.

A greater score for Chinese means more time wasted in schools on rote learning ofcharacters that can now be looked up with ease electronically, recitation of the same oldclassics, and greater weight given to essay-writing styles that rewards conformity overcreativity.

It means yet more classroom hours dedicated to a language that is already, in theestimation of renowned linguist John DeFrancis, about "five times as difficult to learn toread as French."

There have been the usual jeremiads about the supposedly declining state of Chineselearning. It's true that many young people struggle to handwrite their own language, moreused to the ease of computer-aided characters. It would be a tragedy if the style and graceof traditional calligraphy disappeared.

But at the same time, it points to the fundamental flaws with the character system.Intelligent adults in the West don't blank on how to spell words, whereas Chinesefrequently find their memory of even quite common characters failing.

Chinese, like all languages, is in a state of constant evolution, even in its written form.Despite nationalist-conservative fantasies about Chinese schoolchildren being "able to read2,000-year-old characters," ancient Chinese scripts are as broadly incomprehensible tomost people as Latin is to the English.

Due to the simplification of characters, most mainlanders struggle to read texts in theiroriginal form, while even those, like Hongkongers, educated in traditional characters, stillface the difficulties of grammatical and vocabulary shifts.

By the standards that actually matter, Chinese is thriving. Online, new words andexpressions are born every day, competing fiercely in the marketplace of language. Freedfrom the shackles of linguistic conservatism, Chinese are becoming more playful, inventive,and imaginative in their own tongue.

Part of this is the influence of English and other foreign languages. Healthy languages havealways thrived on borrowing from other tongues.

One of the reasons for the vitality of English is its cheerful stealing from every language it'sever come in contact with. The infusion of English words and expressions has reinvigoratedChinese, just as the experience of international literature produced the great Chineseliterary boom of the early 20th century.

But school education in Chinese has done little to recognize this. Where students should befollowing the four rules literary critic and journalist Hu Shi coined in 1918 - "Speak onlywhen you have something to say. Speak what you want to say and say it in the way youwant to say it. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else. Speak in the languageof the time in which you live." - they're instead being rewarded for the regurgitation ofother people's words and ideas.

A dose of English, with all its messy creativity and reinvention, is just what Chinese needs.

（Editor：DuMingming、Chen Lidan）