Letters | Learning Chinese is hard enough without speaking one and writing another

Readers sympathise with Cantonese-speaking students having to write in Mandarin, criticise MTR’s 16-year delay in making the East Rail Line safe, suggest district rangers to curb littering and illegal parking, and thank a cabby for returning a lost phone

Reading Time:4 minutes

Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin poses against a display of her calligraphy (“On the Love of the Lotus” by Zhou Dunyi of the Northern Song Dynasty) at the Education Bureau on July 13. The bureau has been trying to encourage a more efficient Chinese learning environment at school by introducing Mandarin as the teaching language. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 11:30am, 18 Sep 2022

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I still remember the day I was invited to a briefing session for parents on how to choose a secondary school for their children. Four or five secondary schoolmasters were the main speakers at the meeting. One of them encouraged parents to choose his school because students at the school did not have to learn Chinese if they had difficulty with it.

Why is learning Chinese still difficult for Hong Kong students? It is true that Chinese is a difficult language: language experts estimate that it takes between 350 and 1,000 hours to gain fluency in English, but it can take 2,200 class hours to learn Chinese.

But it’s not just that Hong Kong children have to spend more time on the language. With more schools teaching the Chinese language in Mandarin rather than Cantonese, Chinese can be an even harder nut to crack because what the children have to write is often not what they speak.

Written Cantonese and written Mandarin are so different that they have their own written characters and variations on four-character idioms.

Written Cantonese is popular in WhatsApp texting and other communications among Hongkongers. But written Cantonese is not permitted in classrooms at school, not to mention in Diploma of Secondary Education examinations.