Saturday, October 16, 2010

Speakee Chinese

Hands up all those boys who recall the horrid extracurricular lessons we had called POL classes!

Or Pupils' Own Language as they called it. Ostensibly a noble yet misguided attempt by the government - urged on by the strident minority communities - to teach the young their own mother tongues. Mandarin / Tamil lessons two hours a week for only a year. Lofty national aspirations doomed to failure due to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the disinterested students.

And the uninspired, lacklustre teachers. A fatal combination.

My ten-year-old classmates weren't exactly budding Einsteins but they didn't walk with their paws dragging on the ground either. I'm sure a Mark Thackeray would have been able to inspire us all to pick up our tedious Chinese textbooks. Rather than follow the conventional teaching methods of making us drone on, reciting dull passages in endless mantras.

Hardly motivating for a bunch of rowdy schoolboys.

No wonder we only received 5 out of 100 fr our weekly exams - a consolation prize for being able to scribble our names in complicated Chinese. Meant as a pitiful sop for the unlettered, especially since the rest of the paper ended up with unforgiving red slashes that essentially signified a big fat zero.

Hero
Write like this, grasshopper!

So that forgotten chapter in Mandarin remained closed till I started work. Invariably there would be that one stubborn patient who remained stoically uncommunicative until a doctor of Chinese origin happened to stumble by. Then unbidden an impulsive string of Mandarin would come pouring out from the previously taciturn fellow describing terrifying symptoms vaguely forming a multitude of incurable diseases.

Short of claiming Tibetan / Korean ancestry - or making a quick, ignoble escape abandoning the dying man, I really had no choice but to attempt a deplorable display of my incompetence in the language.

After several inarticulate misadventures with purely Chinese-speaking patients, inevitably I picked up a couple of useful phrases, 'Are you dying?' amongst them. The painful fact that half of them haven't managed to learn a word of any other language in ten years of formal schooling galls me but I usually keep my mouth shut on that point.

Though it did goad me into finally learning Mandarin.

5 comments:

Aiden said...

I'm fascinated by my classmates who can write in Chinese real fast while I struggle with the little strokes here and there. I guess its high time I started to learn the language. At least to be able to speak fluently.

Janvier said...

"Are you dying?"!!! Oh our goodness hahahahaha we can so imagine you saying it!!!

nicky05 said...

OMG. Saying "are you dying" in chinese especially in cantonese...hahahaha . totally gonna lose ur profession

Legolas said...

What's with the grasshopper?

Kenny Mah said...

"...inevitably I picked up a couple of useful phrases, 'Are you dying?' amongst them."

ROFL. Aiya, what a way to kickstart learning a new language! :P

P.S. Invention is the mother of necessity and all that. I learned Mandarin from fellow students from China when I was in Munich. It was fun having an extra language that the locals and other students did not know. (And no, Malay did not count cos there weren't many Malaysians but PLENTY of Chinese in Germany.)