You aren’t bad at Chinese, you just refuse to engage in it

90% of Chinese Singaporeans hate studying Chinese in school so much that they just memorise 好词好句 and try and get C6 in HCL (if they are in it) so they don’t have to take H1 Chinese in JC. Guess what happens? People start saying how their Chinese have deteriorated to the level of a primary school student as they only use it to order caifan (reduced to 这个那个) and to speak with their parents (in fact many speak english so they don’t even use it fully).

I too was once someone who wanted to get my Chinese over and done with, but during a student exchange program in China, I saw my fellow schoolmates struggle to even introduce certain of our traditions and culture in a presentation (they didn’t even know 椰浆饭). That was when I realised how bad some of our Chinese were and how even though I scored lower than half of them in HCL O level, I had a better command of the language than them.

This command of the language would prove useful in Taiwan just recently, where knowing Chinese well enough helped me strike conversations with many people from Christian missionaries (who were American and spoke English but we used Chinese this whole time) to finding out the dark side of Taiwanese society from an old lady in Kaohsiung who dove into a deep conversation about how many youths in Taiwan were essentially NEETs who leech off their parents’ income and savings which resulted in her unable to pay her own electricity bills and seek warmth in the lobby of the hotel I was staying in. Simply fluently speaking the language of the other party helps you understand a new perspective (in my case, because I don’t look Chinese, there were people who were shocked that I could speak at a near fluent level until I explained I was from SG and they prob thought Singaporeans could all speak Chinese)

We’re also seeing an influx of PRCs into the job market and from my student exchange in China, most PRCs are not able to converse well in English so you need to be able to speak Chinese just to communicate with them on anything. Furthermore, learning Chinese through actual immersion and not regurgitating textbook 词语 also teaches you how to actually learn a language, which will help if you learn even more languages.

So think about it, if I can maintain a decent command of the language and still trying to inprove it despite half of my family not being able to speak it, I’m sure most of you whose parents are capable of speaking Chinese and probably do at home should be able to attain a similar proficiency of the language as a native PRC or Taiwanese.