Motivation, Painkillers, 繁体字 and dogs

Hi guys, allow me to bring together two issues that I blog about a lot here: the learning of languages and the education system in Singapore. Now one thing that my regular readers would have heard me say a lot in my blog is that my Chinese kinda sucks - well it has been for much of my life but something interesting happened last year: I started selling bonds to Taiwanese clients who spoke no English, so in order to make the sale, I had to handle the entire process in Chinese: all communication was done in traditional Chinese (繁体字), the WeChat messages are also in traditional Chinese and I have had a crash course in banking/finance jargon in Chinese (I just Googled everything I needed to know). So now actually, my Chinese is much better than it has ever been at any stage in my life because there is a direct correlation between me having to use it almost daily and how quickly I can formulate sentences in my head, accessing complex and technical terms in Chinese and being able to read long WeChat messages written in 繁体字. But this was not always the case: as a student in Singapore, I sucked at Chinese. Mind you, I could actually speak Mandarin reasonably well because I came from a Mandarin-Hokkien speaking household, but I was just too lazy to memorize the thousands of characters that any good Chinese student was expected to memorize and I hated rote learning. So I learnt little in school when I was in Singapore - a lot of my Chinese knowledge is actually self-taught and fairly recent actually.

Furthermore, my father was a Chinese teacher and it was a great source of shame for him that his son struggled with the language - given that I had a very difficult relationship with my father, I used my inability to read/write Chinese as a way to irk him in a rather passive-aggressive manner. After I had completed my last Chinese exam in JC, I wanted to burn all my Chinese textbooks as I never ever wanted to read or write in Chinese ever again. That was how much I truly hated the subject - it was also around that time when I started learning French and within a year of studying French, it soon replaced Chinese as my second language. Given that I have since studied at a top French university, lived and worked in France, French is my second language whilst Chinese is still my third language. For much of my career, Chinese was of very little use to me - once in a blue moon, I would be roped into a project where I could use it but this is the first time where it has turned out to be truly lucrative. So here's one important lesson about learning a language: motivation. My motivation to improve my Chinese, to learn how to read/write in 繁体字 is purely financial - oh yeah, money is a great motivator but I had to be in the right place at the right time, with the right products for the right market before this moment came.  It is like waiting many years for an eclipse for the sun, moon and earth to be perfectly aligned just at the right angle. So the more I can sell to the Taiwanese investors, the more money I can make and they have been very good clients. The correlation between my ability to communicate in Chinese and the amount of commission I can earn is very strong - is learning 繁体字 difficult? Of course it is, but if you have the right motivation then it becomes surprisingly easier.

Here's the problem with the way we were taught Chinese in primary school: we were forced to memorize thousands of Chinese characters and there was little heed paid to 'motivating' the students to learn the subject. If you didn't memorize those thousands of characters and aced your exams, then you would be punished. The only 'motivation' available was to avoid harsh punishment and perhaps to some degree, get the approval of our parents and teachers for doing well. Given that my father was permanently disappointed at how I always performed poorly in those Chinese exams, I never got his approval so there was virtually no motivation for me to want to study Chinese at all back in those days. It does make me wonder how much better students would learn if they were actually motivated to learn, rather than simply going through the motions because they were merely following instructions. So this theory probably explained why I did so well in geography, I ended up getting a scholarship to do geography in one of the top universities in the UK. I saw geography as a form of escapism: I loved studying about different countries in the world, different cultures, about people who spoke different languages; I would immerse myself in the information about their world whilst forgetting about the problems I was faced. I grew up in the pre-internet era and it was a different world then. So that did explain why I excelled in geography: I was very motivated and passionate about the subject; shame it wasn't a particularly useful degree to have.

There's something else that irks me about the attitude of Chinese teachers: I remember how my father would wax lyrical about how rich China was becoming and how being able to speak Mandarin would allow us to "去中国,做生意,赚大钱" (go to China, do business there, make a lot of money). And I remember thinking, well your Chinese is obviously excellent since you are a Chinese teacher, so why are you still working at the local primary school earning a modest salary as a teacher, why haven't you "去中国,做生意,赚大钱"? The irony is that I have two older sisters who were your perfect Asian students, yes they were super diligent and hardworking, unlike me, I was so freaking lazy. So they got their straight As in all their Chinese exams but ironically, even though they live in Singapore, they don't use Chinese at all in their work given that they have some Indian and Malay colleagues, so it would be downright impolite to exclude them if you were to have a conversation at work in Mandarin - so by default, all communication in the office has got to be in English. Both my sisters are highly respected professionals in their respective fields today, they just happen to be in an environment where everything is done in English. So it begs the question: all that time, energy, effort, blood, sweat and tears that my sisters spent as students studying so freaking hard to get those excellent results in all their Chinese exams, was it all for nothing since they don't need Chinese in their jobs today? Well, hold on to that thought as I introduce another case study: Tracy.

I have a former classmate called Tracy from my JC days - she hated Chinese, couldn't speak it, struggled with it a lot more than me at school. At least for me, the problem was just reading and writing, but she could barely string together a sentence in Mandarin even when ordering food in the canteen - this led to some hilarious situations where the old aunties in the canteen couldn't understand what the heck she was trying to say. Fast forward a few years, Tracy ended up working with one of my sisters before getting sent to Beijing, China - oh the irony, that was the one place we didn't expect her to end up given her relationship with the Chinese language but as fate would have it, that's where her company decided to send her and she accepted that posting because it was a very good move for her career. Guess what happened next? She became totally fluent in Mandarin in China because she needed it to deal with locals, both for work and even for everyday things like visiting a pharmacy or a supermarket. By the time she returned to Singapore, her Mandarin was so good she was often mistaken for a Chinese national as she had a northern Beijing accent. The fact is Tracy wasn't motivated to learn Chinese as a student, the teachers and I suppose her family did a very poor job in motivating her to learn Chinese, she didn't think she needed it until she found herself in Beijing. Then with the right motivation and the right environment - Tracy then became totally fluent in a language that she failed to learn as a child.

The moral of the story is that it is never too late to learn if and when the need arises: so if you're given the chance to learn something like Chinese in school, it's not the last chance saloon. It's not like if you do badly in that one final Chinese exam, you're condemned to be estranged from Chinese forever. Hell no, that would be imagining that your teacher at school had some kind of unique super power to teach the Chinese language that no one else possessed when the truth is, any teacher could teach you Chinese or as in the case of Tracy and myself - you could simply find yourself in the situation where you're suddenly motivated to learn the language and then just figure it out for yourself. Whilst Tracy and I weren't learning Chinese from scratch (that would be a different story, like when I learnt Welsh from scratch), but we had gone from being unable to use our Chinese at work to being quite confident in thriving in a Mandarin-speaking work environment and that's a huge step that most Singaporeans (including my two sisters) have never taken. So, please allow me to say something quite obvious: the learning never stops, long after you leave school and cease being a student. Just because you no longer have a teacher doesn't mean you have to stop learning - once you get to university, there's a lot less teaching and the relationship with your tutors turn into more like guidance where they simply point you in the right direction rather than tell you what the 'correct answer' is. Thus by that very same token, people like Tracy and I relearned Chinese as adults, after we had been through that kind of learning environment at university. As intelligent and resourceful adults, we had the tools to (re)learn a language without the help of a teacher. Young children on the other hand simply don't have those same tools and that is why they may need the help of a teacher to learn a new language.

Okay, perhaps it is because my parents are teachers and they were quite awful teachers as well, that's why I have this pathological distrust of teachers. But moving beyond the specific topic of learning a language, there are plenty of instances as a working adult where I simply have to teach myself something new and that's completely normal as a working adult. You may have to learn a how to use a new piece of software or app, you may have to deal with a new product or you may get new clients who have different requirements and you need to learn how to adapt to their needs very quickly. If you're unable to teach yourself new stuff all the time, then you wouldn't be put in a position of trust and you'll end up doing a job at the very bottom of the food chain. I remember being at a supermarket when the cashier had made a small error - she had scanned an item twice by mistake and when I asked her to rectify the situation, she went into blind panic. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Let me get my manager, please wait a moment." If you're unable to think on your feet to deal with a simple problem like that, then you're always going to be stuck in a position where you can default to someone more senior to do the thinking for you but obviously, the more senior manager is going to get paid a lot more to be put in a position of trust to handle such situations. So if you're the kind of person who is unable to teach yourself anything new, you're more than likely to be stuck in a dead end job where you don't have to use your brain to think - where the solution to any problem is to run to your manager instead of using your brain to come up with a solution. That's why students should be encouraged to learn independently outside the classroom environment from a very young age.

It is possible that I am being overly pessimistic about the situation - let's look at social media today, most young people participate in social media and certainly, they mostly just figure it all out for themselves. There are so many different platforms that can use (and new ones appear so often as well) and these young people merely just figure it all out for themselves how to use these social media platforms. When in doubt, they know how to Google the solutions the need or perhaps ask a friend for help - they most certainly do not get taught how to use social media in school because most teenagers know far more about this kind of technology than their teachers, given that they have grown up with the technology. So if teenagers are resourceful and independent enough to figure out how to use social media with little or no formal instruction, then all we need to do is to get them to apply this same mindset to other aspects of their education. However, what we are up against is a culture of giving teachers a lot of respect to the point where they are put on a pedestal by some parents - I'm not saying that teachers don't have a role to play: they certainly do when it comes to younger children, but my point is that adults have to get used to teaching themselves and learning new things on their own all the time in order to function in the working world. Thus the role of the teacher shouldn't be to cram students with as much facts as possible, but rather to simply guide them on this journey of discovering and learning, where the students are soaking up useful skills and knowledge rather than being force fed an insane amount of information just to pass an exam. The current system is broken - children deserve a better system to prepare them for the working world.

So should children in Singapore even bother learning Chinese then? My knee jerk reaction is to say it should be abolished immediately but that's an emotional response on my part as my father was a Chinese teacher and thus I grew up hating the Chinese language (as he was a really terrible teacher). I do believe that children should be given the choice to learn Chinese if they are interested, but it should be optional and it has to be their choice - they should never be forced to learn anything that they have no interest in. But I do believe that there are great benefits in learning any language - be it Chinese, French, Greek, Hindi, Korean or Swahili. Being a true geek when it comes to learning languages, I find different systems of grammar truly fascinating and so when I learn a new language, my brain is constantly having to unscramble words in a sentence to make sense to my English-speaking brain. If you're a geek who loves solving puzzles, then you will probably enjoy learning a foreign languages and the kind of mental gymnastics you subject your brain to in the process is great training for learning any other kind of subject. So to illustrate a point, allow me to translate a simple sentence "I don't have a dog" into a few languages to show you how the word order and grammar is quite different in these different languages and thus this will illustrate what your brain has to do when using another language.

English: I don't have a dog.
French: Je n'ai pas de chien. (I (prefix for negative) have not of dog.)
Dutch: Ik heb geen hond. (I have none dog.) 
Spanish: No tengo perro. (No I have dog). 
Southern Welsh: Does ddim gi gyda fi. (Prefix for negative none dog with me.)
Russian: У меня нет собаки. (At myself not dog.)
Romanian: Nu am un caine. (No have one dog.)
Hungarian: Nincs kutyám (Haven't my dog.)
Georgian: ძაღლი არ მყავს (The dog no I have.)

I could go on, but as you can see, even when expressing a simple concept like "I don't have a dog", the grammar for this statement in various languages can be completely different. This hard enough when you're trying to construct a grammatically correct sentence in another language, but imagine speaking to someone in that language. You hear a sentence like ძაღლი არ მყავს in Georgian which is word for word "the dog no I have" and you would have to unscramble it for it to make sense as "I don't have a dog." Of course, you can't break those rules - or at least you shouldn't. So imagine if an English speaker creates a sentence like "ik niet heb een hond" (literally: I not have a dog") - grammatically that's a lot closer to English but that's the kind of sentence that an English learner of Dutch would come up with. A Dutch person would probably say, "yeah I can understand what you're trying to say but the grammar is incorrect." Simply the mental challenge of learning another language's grammar system is great training for the mind of the student - you learn the rules of the grammar, you apply the rules as you use the language and whilst that may sound incredible straightforward, you'll be amazed how important this kind of training can be for young people. Hence when a young person starts a new job, they would be encountered by all the rules and regulations concerning the company, the products they make, the services they provide and thus there's a lot of rules that they need to familiarize themselves with very quickly, so as to be able to perform that job well. That's pretty similar to the way the student learns the grammatical rules of a new language and has to follow those rules, even if they are rather different from the learner's mother tongue.

By that token, learning Chinese can be great mental training for the mind, given how complex the writing system is. But then the question is whether or not it would be the right language for the student to learn - Singaporean Chinese students are never given the choice at all, we are by default expected to learn the Chinese language at school as our 'mother tongue' whilst there is no option to replace it with something like Malay, German or French. I believe that if students are given the chance to pick a language that they are truly interested in, then they would gain far more out of the process of learning that new language and get a lot further in it. It is absolutely ludicrous that somehow we have a system in Singapore whereby the languages we have to study in school are selected for us on the basis of our skin and our parents' ethnicity, without paying any heed whatsoever to our interests, skills and preferences. After all, without sufficient motivation, a student is unlikely to get very far in the language and having a keen interest in the language is not something you can force upon anyone. Whilst I believe that learning any language is obviously useful training for a young mind, I would never ever force a child to learn a language like Chinese unless the child voluntarily says, "I am interested in the Chinese language, I would like to learn Chinese." And if we do get past that stage, then of course learning a language like Chinese can be hugely beneficial for the child's mind even if the child never ever uses it at work in the future. But bear in mind the fact that the same benefits can be reaped if the child chooses say to study Welsh, Polish, Thai, German or Arabic: Chinese is just another language at the end of the day and you will still reap the same rewards.

I remember the way people used to react when a Chinese Singaporean student would declare, "I fucking hate Chinese, I don't want to study Chinese, I really suck at it, I don't need it, why am I being forced to do it at school?" The typical counterargument for this would be along the lines of "as a Chinese person, it is vital for you to speak your language as it is a part of your cultural heritage and identity." Then there would be all this bullshit about trying to be white when your skin colour isn't even white, that somehow all that guilt tripping about being a 'yellow banana' (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) worked for people like Tracy and myself, we still remain unmotivated, uninterested and unable to learn Chinese. In hindsight, I believe that people who came up with all those arguments were not at all interested in trying to motivate me, but they were simply trying to put me down in order to make themselves feel better - which is, when you think about it, a really shitty thing to do! Perhaps the best way to deal with such a situation of a child not being interested in studying a subject like Chinese is to try to get them to see the benefits of how learning a foreign language can help train our brains to grasp complex concepts, thus making the climbing of other learning cures a lot easier in the future. That certainly would be far more practical than wittering on about one's culture or heritage - the key of course is to motivate the child to see benefit in the academic exercise, rather than convince them that Chinese is somehow a useful language to know. After all, it certainly wasn't useful for me until quite recently, when I started dealing with the Taiwanese.

Finally, there is one major factor that many people usually overlook and that is the opposite of motivation: when you are discouraged from doing something. Now I recently went skiing with my sister in Spain and that was a classic example of someone who got discouraged, dejected, pessimistic and gave up. In a nutshell, my sister tried to learn skiing for two days and got nowhere - she was consumed by the fear of falling so each time she stood up, she knew she was going to fall imminently and anticipated the fall instead of focusing on actually skiing. Thus she then realized that if she didn't try to ski, she wouldn't fall - likewise, many Singaporean students in Singapore felt the same way about Chinese: if they didn't try to speak the language and just stuck to English, if they wouldn't make any mistakes. If they didn't have to take a Chinese exam, then they wouldn't fail. The way to get over that mindset is actually quite obvious: stop being afraid of failure or mistakes. Now in the context of Singapore, many parents and teachers would threaten their students with harsh punishments should they perform badly in the exams: good fucking grief, that's such a fucking retarded way to try to get students to do better. The students should be studying because they are motivated to gain knowledge, not because they are afraid of being punished - in the case of Singapore, many students don't even know why they are spending so much time and effort studying so hard, they only know that if they don't do so to deliver good results, they will be severely punished. That is all so wrong on so many levels - no wonder the standard of Chinese in Singapore is so low compared to Hong Kong or Taiwan as teachers and parents have no freaking clue how to motivate the students to study Chinese.

Some of you may get cynical and say, "Alex, I know you didn't have a good time studying Chinese when you were a student, but without having gone through that experience, do you think you would be able to make money from the Taiwanese today? Should you be grateful for having been taught Chinese or at least having been given the foundations of the language that enabled you to learn it as an adult?" Well, I actually disagree - Chinese should not have been compulsory beyond primary school, since I was already taught he basic foundations of the language at primary school. Beyond that, I should have been given the freedom and choice to access it if and when the need arose: I certainly had no intention of working in China or dealing with Chinese clients as a teenager, so back then, I resented being forced to learn a language I had absolutely no intention to ever use in the working world. Such is the problem when you make a subject compulsory - imagine if you had to pass an exam all about dogs and the teachers said, "this course will give you the skills to work as a vet or in a pet store in the future!" And you reply, "But I have no interest in dogs, I have no intention to work as a vet or with pets ever. So why is this course on dogs compulsory for me?" It sounds so ridiculous, right? You would never force a student to take a course all about dogs - so why should the rules be any different when it comes to Chinese? Instead, I should have been given the confidence and skills to pick up any language I want later on in my life if and when I decide I have the motivation to do so. I want to learn Chinese now, I really didn't want to back when I was a student. Nothing can change the fact that being forced to do something I didn't want to do made me miserable back then. The big difference is that I am now motivated to learn Chinese, back then I really had zero motivation and thus I hated it.

Allow me to conclude with this analogy: I have a drawer in my kitchen were I keep a lot of my medicines, including painkillers like Ibuprofen, Aspirin and Paracetamol. These are painkillers I would take if I developed a bad headache and I needed something to deal with the pain. Otherwise, that drawer would remain shut and I wouldn't take those medicines if I didn't need them. I view the knowledge of the Chinese language in much the same light: if I needed Chinese language skills to deal with my Mandarin-speaking clients from Taiwan, then I would spend some time to teach myself what I need to know in order to do my job properly. Likewise, say if I gained an Italian client, then I would do the same thing: I would spend some time and effort improving my Italian language skills in order to serve that client better. It may be a few weeks of hard work but I know that I can react to whatever the situation demands me to learn quickly, with the right motivation that I can make money once I improve the relevant language skills. Forcing every student to learn Chinese just because there is the possibility that they may use the Chinese language at work one day in the distant future is like taking a strong painkiller like Ibuprofen everyday for no better reason than, "you never know, you might develop a headache sometime later today, so let's deal with that possibility and take that painkiller first thing in the morning despite the fact that you have no pain now." That's completely illogical and plain stupid - we take painkillers only when we have pain, the same way Tracy and I finally got round to learning Chinese when we had a genuine need for it and became motivated to learn.

What do you think about this issue? Did you have problems with motivation when you were learning Chinese at school? Why did you think this is a problem particularly with Singaporean Chinese students? Is the root of the problem with the way Chinese language is badly taught by the teachers in Singapore? Or is it the education system that is way too rigid in the first place? How do you find motivation to learn something that you need for work? Is motivation something that cannot be forced upon a student - you simply have to wait for the stars to align the way I discovered I could make good money from my Taiwanese clients? Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts - many thanks for reading!