Singapore must spare no effort to preserve its mother tongues and will set up a centre to improve the teaching of Chinese, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said last night.

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Don't stop at two if you can have three lor.

Not all kids from the summit have this ability. Some are duds too.

Some kids from the base are not bums.

This fallacy must be addressed and reversed if we want more babies from the base.

with all due respect, i'd suggest the PM seek informed views, which can be found in the literature, on learning a second language, and mandarin as a second language, before he makes further statements to diminish his standing.

"Half of all Chinese Singaporean kids now speak English at home, which means Chinese teachers 'have a more difficult job trying to stimulate their interest' in the subject."

the fact that half of all chinese s'porean kids now speak english at home cannot therefore mean that chinese teachers have a more difficult job trying to stimulate their interest in the subject. it does mean that a greater proportion of them may be learning mandarin as a second language (defined in linguistic circles and in the literature, and not merely ordinally), and therefore the language needs to be taught differently.

basic pedagogy, whether of teaching english or mandarin or any other language as a second language, is not substantially different. however, what can affect pedagogy include factors such as the age of the learners, the community language(s), the resources available, the learners' first language(s) and how long they are to learn the language.

and besides, there has been much work done on the teaching and learning of mandarin as a second language in the past decade or so. the PM, his advisors, and the local press are simply living in an ivory tower of their own.

in my opinion, the PM as well as the press make a fundamental mistake in failing to understand the primary differences between learning a language as a first, and second, language. the appointment of key personnel to their respective positions clearly tells me this. there are not many s'poreans i know of who specialize in teaching second languages, partly because few s'poreans go on to learn at least one second language (as defined in linguistics circles, not merely another first language for instance) well enough to function in it in multiple domains.

and lastly, it is ridiculous to maintain that mandarin is our "mother tongue" when it is taught as a "second language" in school. it doesn't take a college grad to know there is a problem with the names, and is it any wonder that s'poreans are generally functionally bilingual, but not to a very large or specialized degree?

given all this, the first thing i recommend is to put professionally trained second language educators in a couple of the key positions. until then, we're just going on a merry-go-round.

2nd language or even 3rd

Is it targetted at the hoi polloi?

More than half of Chinese Singaporean children speak English/Singlish at home. How then can Chinese be their 'mother tongue'?

Here's a radical suggestion: de-link one's 2nd language from one's 'race'. Have a basket of languages for students/parents to choose from. Having chosen their 2nd language based on interest (and perhaps 'market forces') rather than coercion, there will be more enthusiasm and less tears.

Before you accuse me of being a 'potato-eater', I'm bilingual and bicultural in English and Chinese (really, not just 'say-say'). You can check out my bilingual blog: www.singaporeaninhongkong.blogspot.com

We should aspire to be bi=cultural or multi cultural. Our traditional views of ourselves is that we understand the west very well and the west treat us as 'insiders' - all becuase we think we speak "good English" and that we are "western educated". That is an assumption that needs to be rexamined.
Many years back Singapore TV started showing Cantonese TV series in Cantonese, then dubbing them in Mandarin. We then wanted to promote local film industry and started producing local Mandarin TV series. Alas, we now have low=IQ Taiwanese talk show and some Korean series (which is pretty good). The quality of China made TV series have improved by leaps and bounds over the years, in depth, colour and content. We should start bringing showing some of these to let Singaporeans appreciate the "new cultural trend" in China.
In the past Mainland Chinese would ask the Taiwan and Hong Kong counterparts about HK and Taiwanese singers etc, now it's different. China has their own quality talk show, low IQ entertainment style TV and once in a while extremely high quality TV series.

definitely DO NOT forget the chinese language & culture it is and will always be an inportant part of Singapore. BUT you should NOT forget your MALAY singaporean culture either as this is also part of this beautiful vibrant country which i love so much.. nasron

Sg is a multi-racial society. Please do not neglect the others. Chinese is not everything and that important. Most locals are able to speak a 2-3 languages.

There will always be a gap between what is and what ought to be. Ideally, all Singaporeans should be bi-cultural and bi-literate, but the reality is most of us can't be. Rather than latching on to an unrealistic goal, we may as well be pragmatic and cultivate more *genuine* bi-lingual people (English and one other language - not necessarily one's 'mother tongue') rather than nurturing whole generations of 'ban tong shui' ('half-bucketful of water') language-users.

Besides, how 'Chinese' Chinese-Singaporeans really are? Most won't even know when the Mid-Autumn Festival is unless they are reminded by the moon cake shops.

Most locals can't speak 2-3 languages. Most of us speak Pidgin/Creole that's incomprehensible to people outside Singapore, JB and maybe Batam.