I WOULD like to ask about other languages, especially Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

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Many (young) Chinese S'poreans don't have Mandarin as a mother tongue in reality! This is borne of current (2000) census statistics which indicate that 23.9% of Chinese aged 5 and up speak English most frequently at home, following 30.7% who speak "dialects". Mandarin is most commonly spoken at home by 45.1% of the Chinese population aged at least 5 y/o (source: http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/pape...-literacy.pdf).

Btw, what is the meaning of "misread or mispronounce" Chinese words? Many native speakers I know of in China/Taiwan and elsewhere do exactly the same thing, but no one questions their proficiency, much less have the audacity to make so bold a (prescriptive) claim that they "cannot speak their mother tongue properly", for whom Mandarin is indeed a mother tongue. Mind you, "properly" according to what/whose standards? If you're comparing "speaking Mandarin properly" with codeswitching in Mandarin/any language and another language (including Singlish), then you're just comparing apples (speaking in one language completely, usu as a result of being functionally monolingual) and bananas (codeswitching as a result of being bilingual, altho not nec functionally so).

And btw, don't obfuscate the issue by calling it "Chinese". What exactly is "Chinese"? Aren't Hokkien and Cantonese "Chinese"?

Asking the "authorities" to look into the matter is as good as going up to anybody who speaks "Chinese improperly" and correcting the person as such. Let's see what the success rate is. I'm not betting on it.

If the cow doesn't wanna drink.....

I sometimes feel that the mandarin I speak is more accurate than the Chinese, as they add their own regional slangs and inadvertantly change the 'original' way the words are supposed to be pronounced. Having said that, Singaporeans also tend not to pronounce words properly, whether it's English or Mandarin. Like 'petrol' and 'patrol' being pronouced exactly the same way although it's different. Or 'post' and 'pose' i.e. it will sound like 'Pose a letter'. Or 'Jump' pronounced as 'Jum'. I could go on. And there are lots of examples for Mandarin (and probably Hindi, Tamil, Malay, etc). Some may argue that it's a cultural trait hence there's no right or wrong.

I say don't be too uptight about the use of any language, whether it's Chinese or English or whatever. Learn the language as you grow, whether in school or at other occasions.

Depending on who you compare us with, our spoken mandarin is really not that bad. Have you heard how some Taiwanese speak in mandarin? If not, try listening to Ah Bian's Mandarin. The 'Ah Bian-type' of Taiwanese speak very Hokkien(or Min Nan Yu)-accented mandarin. And, one feature I notice is that they can't pronounce the 'f' sound in the phonetic system( ie. the hanyupinyin system). Their 'fei1 chang2'( ie. very) sounds like 'huei1 chang2.'

Considering the fact that mandarin is still Taiwan's national language (or guo yu) and that many Taiwanese could pronounce words inaccurately in mandarin, the mandarin of the Chinese-Singaporean is still not that bad.

Most Singaporeans do not speak or write any one language very well. For example, ethnically Chinese SIngaporeans are generally not as proficient in English as British, Australian or North American people, and not as proficient in Chinese as people from Hong Kong, Taiwan or the PRC. However, most Chinese SIngaporeans are at least partially bilingual, which is not the case for most citizens of the other countries I cite.

aiyah, can communicate ok liao lah! whenever i go to JB and use my half past six malay with certain storeowners, i get things done faster coz they understand exactly what i am saying. and then I probably mispronounce a hundred mandarin words - omitting the 'g's and adding extra 'h's but then people also understand.

What i would like to highlight the seriousness of speaking proper mother tongue?

If you would to go to China with your half-past Mandarin and abit of English, do you think your Chinese counterparts understand? Instead, they will think you are a foreigner

I mean well for our younger generation. Please note I am also as young as you guys there. I don't want other tourists to criticise our culture...remember this by heart, thank you

Singapore if continues to speak improper language, will soon become a rojak society...see our Zoukout party over last Saturday and u know how scary it is???

From some posts here, I know for sure that some of you have never been to China.

I have been to China several times, to Chongqing, Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Tianjin, Shanghai etc. I can easily move around that country so easily with my 'half-past six' Mandarin. In fact, I once spoke to a Han Chinese in a Shandong village. That Han Chinese couldn't speak Mandarin at all and was an illiterate, which means that any of you who have learned to write a couple of simple Chinese characters and speak some simple Mandarin would have been better than him in terms of Mandarin proficiency.

And, what was surprising to me is that when I talked to that Shandong native in Mandarin, he could understand me enough to answer my question in his own dialect, while I couldn't understand his dialect at all. Of course, when I was in the bigger Chinese cities like Beijing or Shanghai, communication wasn't a problem at all when i spoke to them in mandarin.