Mother-tongue teaching the best option

I refer to your editorial of July 9 headlined 'Mother-tongue merits'.

I fully agree with you that using mother tongue as the medium of instruction in schools has its advantages.

There is a common misunderstanding that teaching in Chinese has lowered students' proficiency in English.

I would like to illustrate my point by describing my education. I graduated from a mainland university in the 1960s. While being taught in the mother tongue, I still was able to master English through persistent studying. In my experience, after you have developed the ability to think logically, through your mother-tongue education, you find you are able to master a foreign language with greater ease.

You can see this with Chinese students studying abroad. After a couple of years at a foreign university, many of them speak fluent English, even though at home they were taught in the mother tongue.

We are Chinese, so we should be taught in the mother tongue. Moreover, we are Chinese, and the mainland is our biggest business partner.