Loss of Face and Job

不会写

This would be pretty humiliating, I think.

It does also highlight something else which irks me.

That trend amongst really wealthy American families to compete in the language stakes of the child. Like 'guru'* Jim Rogers bragging about his daughter:

He is so confident that China will be the world’s next great nation that he employed a Chinese nanny for his daughter shortly after she was born. “She is 3 years old and already fluent in Mandarin,” he says.

I don't think I was fluent in English at the age of 3. Anyway, I'm probably totally mistaken here, but I don't think the painless 'teach them when they're young' method will work as well as these billionaires think. Ethnic-Chinese still struggle to pass Chinese language tests. The difficulty, I'd say, is not the spoken aspect, but the written. Plenty of savvy people are making lots of cash getting people to speak Mandarin, and they'll claim that speaking is what's important.

Ms Bai, a student in bilingual education at the Teachers College of Columbia University, explained that teachers of Chinese "still focus on grammar, on reading, and don't speak much. Chinese students focus mostly on getting good grades, so writing is more important for them. But in a job interview, you need to speak the language. In the United States, the focus is more on speaking."

Right. I'm unaware of this alleged crowd of people who are literate in Chinese yet struggle to speak. Their silence is deafening. But who needs that pesky grammar and reading?

Quick Mandarin's Zhang said: "It's hard to find good Chinese teachers, because teachers coming from China are very strict in their methods of teaching. Americans have a different way of learning - they like to actively learn through searching answers. But in China, it's different. The teacher will talk and then just give a lot of homework."

To which, I reply with a quote from the Straits Times article at the top:

Mr Richard Ong, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia, did not write Chinese well enough to take a mandatory test for senior managers, say bankers.

And so he didn't get to be a Goldman-Sachs CEO- probably the very job that Rogers has targeted for his kid. I wonder which test it was. But in any case, regardless of what the second hand language salesmen try to tell you, reading and writing is important, and there's no painless way to learn those 3500 characters required to be considered literate. In fact there is a Chinese professor I know who says writing is the most important aspect of learning Chinese.

*Guru. I hate the word, particularly since nowadays it is almost always applied to investment authors.