WHY SPEAKING MATTERS MORE THAN READING AND WRITING
In Singapore, when students (or their well-meaning parents) go to bookstores to check out assessment books, they typically find multiple titles packed with Chinese idioms for students to memorise and to impress their examiners in Chinese essays.
I spent so much time making notes on these idioms during my schooling days. It became a kind of obsession; I crammed so many of them into my compositions believing that this would show that I was good at Chinese.
I vividly remember the red stars my teacher would draw on these phrases while marking my work and this only encouraged me to add more of them to future essays.
Now, at 23, I can’t remember even a single one. And all I can speak is broken Mandarin interspersed with English phrases when I am unsure of the Chinese translation.
Upon entering the working world, I realised how valuable Mandarin-speaking skills are.
With more than 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers worldwide – the second-most spoken language after English – people working in almost any industry or field will likely have to communicate with Chinese clients in the course of their work.
As a journalist, it would help me to fluently interview a broader range of interviewees and newsmakers such as Chinese-speaking tourists or people from older generations.
It is a bonus for me to read and write Chinese better.
This isn’t unique to me as a Chinese. My Malay- and Tamil-speaking friends agree that mastering the spoken form of their mother tongue would be more practical for them.
With English as the main mode of communication in Singapore, they don’t often encounter written texts in their mother tongue.
They, too, want to interact better with older adults in their ethnic communities or foreigners who may not be as comfortable speaking in English.
