English to blame for poor written Chinese?
According to this article on ShanghaiDaily.com, the vice chairman of China’s top legislature has said that English study in China is to blame for many of the mistakes found in Chinese publications in the last decade. Studying English, the argument runs, means that Chinese studies suffer.
The author of the article disagrees wholeheartedly, and blames the problem instead on an exam-oriented education system. English, the author suggests, is merely a scapegoat…
Do you live in China? Is the education system too exam-oriented, or is English to blame? Post a commment below…
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February 1st, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I’ve lived in China for 8 years. It’s true that the education system does focus quite heavily on exams, but I don’t know if we can blame this for poor quality Chinese publications. To be honest, I haven’t ever heard anyone talking about the poor quality of written Chinese in publications, and my own Chinese isn’t good enough to be able to notice!
I guess it’s possible that English is to blame - I remember after teaching in Spain for 2 years, I ended up speaking with really dodgy “Spanglish” grammar. But that was speaking - I don’t remember having any problems with writing…
February 7th, 2007 at 8:23 am
I lived in China for 8 years, and from my experience, neither of the two factors mentioned in the article were really to blame.
The problem lies in the fact that few people actually have a need to WRITE Chinese with a paper and a pen anymore. Instead, people use computers to communicate. Because Chinese is a language that must be memorized and practiced over and over again in order to be remembered, the use of computers is what’s at fault.