Loss of dialects hasn’t aided study of Mandarin
The writer of “Youth must learn dialects or risk losing part of their culture” (Sept 17) points out rightly that young Singaporeans are unable to speak dialects.
When I visited Johor Baru, I was bombarded with Hokkien, and in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, with Cantonese. In Bangkok, the older generation can speak Teochew.
When I was young, I listened to my father reading in Teochew, and my Sunday school teacher taught me to read the Chinese bible in Teochew. Hence, I was imbued with the association between the dialect and the Chinese script.
At primary school, I did not study Chinese, as it was not part of the curriculum in the 1950s. At secondary school, I studied Chinese for an hour a week. It was deemed to be a pariah language then.
Today, Chinese-language daily Lianhe Zaobao and BBC Online in Chinese are part of my staple diet of news. Parents of today, however, usually speak to their children in English, which causes the latter to be averse to learning Mandarin.
Chinese Malaysians can speak Mandarin and dialects, and their government left such learning to parents without interfering with their choice, whereas in jettisoning our dialects, we have not created an environment conducive to learning Mandarin.
