Chinese: It Starts with Wanting to Speak It

Shin Min Daily News, 华文，从想说开始

By Professor Yow Wei Quin, Head of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

(Translation)

In Singapore, many children learn Chinese from a young age, yet they may not necessarily want to use it in their everyday lives. The issue may not lie only with the language itself, but with whether they have a reason to want to use Chinese to talk to someone. Often, it is not that children do not want to learn, but that they lack a compelling reason to speak it.

Language learning is social first, and technical second. Children do not master a language simply by memorising vocabulary and grammar. Rather, it is through interacting with others — through eye contact, tone of voice, facial expressions and responses — that they gradually come to understand what language means.

A classic 2003 study illustrates this well. Patricia Kuhl’s team at the University of Washington exposed nine-month-old American infants to Mandarin Chinese. After 12 sessions, infants who interacted with native speakers were able to distinguish between Mandarin speech sounds, while another group that learnt through video or audio recordings showed almost no improvement. Kuhl called this phenomenon “social gating” — suggesting that interaction with real people may be the key that opens the door to language learning.

My own research has also found that bilingual children pay closer attention to a speaker’s gaze, gestures and tone of voice, combining these cues to understand what the speaker means. In other words, learning two languages is not simply about mastering two sets of vocabulary and grammar; it also involves learning to understand others, infer their intentions and respond appropriately.

This also reminds me of the real-life experiences of some young people. One Singaporean student had studied Higher Chinese in secondary school, yet always said that she “didn’t like Chinese”. Later, during an internship at a robotics start-up in Beijing, she made Chinese friends and went with them for hotpot, shopping and chats. At first, she frequently relied on WeChat translation. Gradually, she began typing directly in pinyin, and her sentences became increasingly complete. Her improvement did not come from taking a few more Chinese lessons, but because Chinese had become a language through which she communicated with her friends and expressed herself.

Something similar happened during a two-week exchange programme between the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Tsinghua University’s Xinya College. Students from the two universities formed teams to tackle design projects together, while also eating, chatting and making friends. At the end of the programme, SUTD students shared their reflections in Chinese, while the Tsinghua students did so in English. They did not necessarily speak perfectly and occasionally mixed in the other language, but they were all willing to try expressing themselves in one another’s language.

These experiences show that we do not first master a language and only then begin using it; rather, we gradually become proficient through repeated, authentic interactions. Therefore, instead of asking only, “How can Chinese be taught better?”, we should also ask: “How can we create an environment that makes young people want to use Chinese?” Family, peers, community, cultural identity and authentic interaction all matter.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can certainly assist learning, including by correcting pronunciation, explaining vocabulary and providing low-pressure opportunities for practice. But AI cannot easily replace the sense of belonging, humour, cultural meaning and genuine relationships that arise through human interaction. A more worthwhile question, therefore, is not “Can AI teach Chinese?”, but “Can AI help children become more willing to use Chinese to communicate with other people?”

The future of Chinese does not depend only on whether children can answer exam questions correctly. More importantly, it depends on whether there are people they want to communicate with in Chinese, and whether they have thoughts and experiences they want to share in Chinese.