Speak Dialects, you feel tribal ! Speak mandarin, it will break unity!

[SamuelStalin]

My ancestors and I are from the Fujian province in China and I am most proud of being a Hokkien, even more so after lancheowman's revelation on our closeness with old Chinese.

What LKY did right was to emphasize English at that time from the 60s when America and Europe particularly Great Britain, were strong, and China was communist. However it is noticeable that the teaching of Mandarin your local curriculum through the years have always been faithfully following China's lead in Simplified Chinese, which cuts down on the illiteracy rate and makes the language even easier for Chinese to grasp. The teaching of English has been simplified too for the same reasons, and so it is ultimately up to the student and his or her talent to express himself or herself proficiently in either or both languages.

Correspondingly as China has now entered several phases of liberalization and is now globally on the rise, it makes more sense than ever that your local Chinese could communicate with and understand the mainlanders with the Simplified Chinese they have learnt, unlike the Chinese of Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are still stuck in Traditional Chinese.

LKY is man of great foresight.

PS In Singapore you can converse in Mandarin and various Chinese dialects openly, but in Hong Kong you hardly hear anyone uttering Hokkien or Teochew, possibly for fear of brutal discrimination and being cast out from the mould. This is how blatantly racist you Cantonese people are. Thank God LKY is not Cantonese that would have probably interfered with his objectivity, flexibility and foresight.

Dialects are not just tribal, it is an identity. What LKY is trying to do is to rub away our identity, with this gone, our own culture will be gone, too.

I am a Cantonese and I am proud to be one. In fact, I have insisted my children to know Cantonese first. When the nursery noted that I spoke to my kids in Cantonese, they held me with high regards. They were complaining that many children had lost their mother tongue and only know Mandarin and English. I ever have worry that my daughter would have problem learning Mandarin. The teacher told me that there is no need to worry because once the kid join the nursery, they can pick up the language very quickly. True enough she is also speaking Mandarin at 4.

I find LKY's mindset too narrow and can't think out of the box ( probably of his age, which means that he needs to retire). The statistic shown by him and his minions aren't true and aim to misguide. I myself have no problem switching from Cantonese to Mandarin, English and even some Malay. I really find it hard to believe that one will be in deep trouble if he or she learn dialect first.

LKY's words on language cannot be trusted.

 

[SamuelStalin]

No thank you. Your local Chinese is quite precise compared to your street usage, but not artful and deep enough like the way we use it in China.

Let's all boycott local Chinese TV and radio stations, they're fit for just the PRCs!

 

[char_jig_kar]

What LKY did right was to emphasize English at that time from the 60s when America and Europe particularly Great Britain, were strong, and China was communist.

English as 2nd language is suffice. Its 97% Asian population here. To impose English as 1st language in a country 97% Asian population, if thats not tyranny and discrimination against Asian, I don't know what is.

However it is noticeable that the teaching of Mandarin your local curriculum through the years have always been faithfully following China's lead in Simplified Chinese, which cuts down on the illiteracy rate and makes the language even easier for Chinese to grasp. The teaching of English has been simplified too for the same reasons, and so it is ultimately up to the student and his or her talent to express himself or herself proficiently in either or both languages.

Correspondingly as China has now entered several phases of liberalization and is now globally on the rise, it makes more sense than ever that your local Chinese could communicate with and understand the mainlanders with the Simplified Chinese they have learnt, unlike the Chinese of Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are still stuck in Traditional Chinese.

LKY is man of great foresight.

He's not a man of foresight. If he is, he wouldn't have use English as 1st language. He should see that English as 2nd language is suffice. Right now, Singapore Chinese has got racial identity crisis because of his bias against Asian languages.

PS In Singapore you can converse in Mandarin and various Chinese dialects openly, but in Hong Kong you hardly hear anyone uttering Hokkien or Teochew, possibly for fear of brutal discrimination and being cast out from the mould. This is how blatantly racist you Cantonese people are. Thank God LKY is not Cantonese that would have probably interfered with his objectivity, flexibility and foresight.

Hong Kong is different from Spore. There are different dialect group here, as compare to Hong Kong, which is predominately cantonese.

 

[wanker10]

This is how blatantly racist you Cantonese people are. Thank God LKY is not Cantonese that would have probably interfered with his objectivity, flexibility and foresight.

Oldfart is Hakka which is worst. They are more racist. Btw, have u been to HK, it's still quite common to hear prople speaking Teochew & Hakka.

 

[Frankiestine]

the truth must be told. mandarin is just another dialect.

yes old man should be reported to the UN human rights for ethnic cleansing of the chinese population in singapore..

listen up people..."The people should not be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people"...

 

[denzuko1]

...What LKY did right was to emphasize English at that time from the 60s when America and Europe particularly Great Britain, were strong, and China was communist. However it is noticeable that the teaching of Mandarin your local curriculum through the years have always been faithfully following China's lead in Simplified Chinese, which cuts .... now entered several phases of liberalization and is now globally on the rise, it makes more sense than ever that your local Chinese could communicate with and understand the mainlanders with the Simplified Chinese they have learnt, unlike the Chinese of Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are still stuck in Traditional Chinese.

LKY is man of great foresight.

Base on the way you protray, LKY does not have great foresight. He is only an opportunist who got lucky.

PS In Singapore you can converse in Mandarin and various Chinese dialects openly, but in Hong Kong you hardly hear anyone uttering Hokkien or Teochew, possibly for fear of brutal discrimination and being cast out from the mould. This is how blatantly racist you Cantonese people are. Thank God LKY is not Cantonese that would have probably interfered with his objectivity, flexibility and foresight.

You don't know that Hong Kong originate from Guang Dong province and many are a Cantonese in origin? Teow Chews and Hokkiens are immigrants from Fujian and Chao Zhou and you expect the majority there to learn the dialects just to communicate with the minorities? Why not you ask people from Chao Zhou and Fujian to learn Cantonese just to communicate with the minority Cantonese there? Similar, why not you go to Shanghai and get around speaking only Hokkien, see if anyone there can understand you at all.

 

[po2wq]

Speaking dialects in Singapore will bond local people together, in addition, you feel tribal among the local tribe.

Keep your dialects, teach your children and learn mandarin only when necessary. ...

no worries la ...

in ze n, mandarin in sg wil oni b @ bestest like england in sg ... singdarin ...

 

[char_jig_kar]

no worries la ...

in ze n, mandarin in sg wil oni b @ bestest like england in sg ... singdarin ...

those PRC leaders such as deng, mao etc, they speak dialect accented mandarin. thats no different like the sporean speaking singlish or singdarin. so whats the big deal??

the problem my friend, is this. although people from many parts of the world, they speak english or mandarin with dialect accent, end of the day, they could speak their mother tongue in fluent.

can we say the same on Sporeans, especially the new generation? thats, the grave mistake of Lee Kuan Yew and PAP: they took away Sporeans' mother tongue.

 

[nickers9]

Switzerland had German, French, Italian and English multi-media. No trouble, no racial riot and no civil war for centuries. However, Singapore isn't Switzerland. Switzerland's multi-racial proportion is rougly balanced, no German-, French- or Italian-Swiss felt slighted. Whereas, Singapore has 75% Chinese, and like you've always said, why couldn't the language of a 75%-majority be the national language? That'd cause understandable problems with the minorities. Democracy and civility shouldn't be tyranny of the majority over the minorities, especially when it's a overwhelming majority. Witness southern Thailand.

I think now the 2 most influential country in this world is India and China. USA and Japan will be a history soon.

Might as well suggest to LKY to learn Indian and Chinese languages as in this way you can do business with the 2 countries.

 

[char_jig_kar]

Thats the logic LKY base on, to impose English as 1st language in Singapore. The Western countries are great, so lets use English as 1st language. Never mind 97% of the population here is Asian.

 

[yansen84]

The next thing about switzerland. Yes they can speak a few languages. In the US ppl learn spanish along with english yet the point is these languages belong to the same family. English and german are in the same germanic branch, french and spanish are romance languages and all are classified under indo-european. Now take chinese and english for eg. Both are as different as night and day.

Mastering both languages to use both proficiently definitely takes much more effort to learn compared to mastering say english and spanish. Chinese words alone can kill even chinese ppl.

Learning those ang moh languages is somthing like teochew ppl learning hokkien. I grew up in a teochew speaking environment but i could understand hokkien when i served ns. Hence i actually learned a new dialect just like that.

you are basing this on theoratical explanation, which is not wrong I must say but far from the truth when it comes to explaining Sinkies learning dialect. If you look at my parents' generation (I was born in the 80s), most of them can switch between hokkien, teochew, canto, and can also speak reasonably well in english and mandarin. from my own personal experience, I say the school education takes care of the 'mainstream' languages of English and Chinese (Mandarin) sufficiently; what you do in your own time in terms of dialect learning has no effect on your proficiency in the mainstream languages. In fact I've always outperformed my peers in English and Chinese (I did Higher Chinese and Chinese Literature) while in school, and if that is not evidence enough of our ability to learn more than 2 languages I don't know what is. I'm not flauting my lingustic skills here, I'm merely saying if an average Joe like me can do it, the old fart must be seriously wrong about the whole thing.

 

[yansen84]

My ancestors and I are from the Fujian province in China and I am most proud of being a Hokkien, even more so after lancheowman's revelation on our closeness with old Chinese.

What LKY did right was to emphasize English at that time from the 60s when America and Europe particularly Great Britain, were strong, and China was communist. However it is noticeable that the teaching of Mandarin your local curriculum through the years have always been faithfully following China's lead in Simplified Chinese, which cuts down on the illiteracy rate and makes the language even easier for Chinese to grasp. The teaching of English has been simplified too for the same reasons, and so it is ultimately up to the student and his or her talent to express himself or herself proficiently in either or both languages.

Correspondingly as China has now entered several phases of liberalization and is now globally on the rise, it makes more sense than ever that your local Chinese could communicate with and understand the mainlanders with the Simplified Chinese they have learnt, unlike the Chinese of Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are still stuck in Traditional Chinese.

LKY is man of great foresight.

Utter rubbish. You are merely basing your argument on the fact that we should adopt whichever language is used by the prevailing or up-and-coming economic power(s). In other words, we would soon have to learn, besides Mandarin, Indian languages, Russian, Portuguese (Brazil) to impress the BRICs?

In that case, your first paragraph is just plain bollocks. You are not the least bit proud of your Hokkien heritage; if you were, you would agree with the many of us here that preservation of one's mother tongue (be it Hokkien, Teochew, Canto, Hakka) is as important, if not more so, than learning to speak a language for economic benefit. Learning the tongue of the economic superpowers per se is indeed wise, but to do so at the expense of your own mother tongue would be an irreversible folly.

 

[rainnix]

For years now for my Chinese entertainment feed I've just been watching the Taiwanese and HK channels instead of 8 and U from Mediacock, and listening to Malaysian Chinese radio stations. Let's all boycott local Chinese TV and radio stations, they're fit for just the PRCs!

Correction. The PRC dun even watch local dramas nor they listened to our radio stations. They have internet and they tuned to their dialect dramas and radio stations back in China.

 

[Sideswipe]

Thats the logic LKY base on, to impose English as 1st language in Singapore. The Western countries are great, so lets use English as 1st language. Never mind 97% of the population here is Asian.

exactly, peoples failed to see that we are Asians and should use our mother tongues as the country speaking and administrative languages.

LKY made LHL learnt Russian during his young days. LKY thought that learning Russian could be useful back then. Who know, Soviet Union might take over the world. I have no doubts if Soviet Union became the world sole superpower, replacing USA in those days, we could have switched from a English speaking country to the one and only Russian speaking country in South East Asia.

We are what we are, forget the crap about racial harmony and English is a must. The minorities must always adopt to the majorities. You learn Japanese when you stay in Japan, Korean in Korea. French when you migrate to France.

The reason why we did not became a Chinese administrative country is not because of racial harmony, English global importance but only because of LKY complete bias and hatred of Chinese cultures and languages.

 

[lancheowman]

I read in encyclopedias about how chinese characters evolved like they used to be simple stick figures then slowly became traditional words then simplified etc.

Anyway i assume that by the tang dynasty the words were already more or less like today's words am i right????

ANyway most sinkees learnt simplified so that's also gonna be a problem reading those poems since they would be in traditional.

Btw can u read tang poems in say hokkien and the meaning be even more meaningful??

I wish you could elaborate more on teochew, hokkien were they what the ancients spoke?

So among all the dialects the southern ones are the most chinese?

Deh, tiko russian monk,

i said already;the written characters did not change since the time of confucius. Qin shi Huang only dictate that the small seal script should be used universally over other scripts. so by the tang dynasty, the same characters would have been in use for at least two thousand years. only the sounds have changed (and many times over)

and anyone who can read the modern simplified PRC script will be able to read to traditional script. the problem is when you are asked to write in the traditional script. so pls try.

the ancients during confucius time spoke old chinese. Mandarin came about only in the 1600s during the manchu qing dynasty which was about three thousand years later. the theory is that the hokkien and possibly teochew dialect preserves and retains most of the sounds of old chinese but this is still WIP. however, we can safely assume that any dialect today will be more closely relate to old (and middle) chinese than mandarin.

but, there is evidence even among the ancients from the time of the zhou dynasty, there were different spoken dialects and that old chinese was a lingua franca then but it was only one of many spoken languages of some of the peoples of the central plains. therefore, you also have the wu dialect spoken by the people of zhejiang and shanghai and other regional dialects in far flung places like gan su

by the tang dynasty, old chinese was extinct. the spoken tongue then was middle chinese and this approximates to our modern day cantonese. so you should try reading tang poetry in cantonese or go download some of these from hong kong sites.

tang poetry still sounds ok in mandarin (but better in cantonese) because of the promximity in time but when you try reading confucius' 3000 year-old shijing in mandarin, it is totally off.

all southern dialects are chinese because china's history after the han dynasty is often riddled with episodes of exodus from the north by chinese people running away from wars. these people brought the soounds of now extinct chinese languages to the south and the descendants continue to use this today as dialects. northern dialects and languages like mandarin tends to closer to the languages of altaic peoples who conquered and settled in northern china at different times. these include the manchus, the mongols, the xianbei, the huns and also the Di. you can also count the Turks.

 

[zhihau]

I have no doubts if Soviet Union became the world sole superpower, replacing USA in those days, we could have switched from a English speaking country to the one and only Russian speaking country in South East Asia.

would we all have Big Russian Souls then? Davai! Davai!

 

[lancheowman]

so u buay song about what? that the mandarin as official spoken language in china?

i buay song with wat is your problem issit? so now i buay song with you ..how

 

[Ramseth]

by the tang dynasty, old chinese was extinct. the spoken tongue then was middle chinese and this approximates to our modern day cantonese. so you should try reading tang poetry in cantonese or go download some of these from hong kong sites.

tang poetry still sounds ok in mandarin (but better in cantonese) because of the promximity in time but when you try reading confucius' 3000 year-old shijing in mandarin, it is totally off.

One example of famous classic poetry by Late Tang Emperor Li Yu 李昱:
问君能有几多愁
恰似一江春水向东流

Recite in Mandarin:
wen jun neng you ji duo chou
qia si yi jiang chun shui xiang tong liu

Recite in Cantonese:
man guan nang yau ge do chau
che qi yat gong chuon shuoi hiong tong lau

Notice that the verses rhyme in Cantonese, but not in Mandarin.

 

[lancheowman]

My ancestors and I are from the Fujian province in China and I am most proud of being a Hokkien, even more so after lancheowman's revelation on our closeness with old Chinese.

What LKY did right was to emphasize English at that time from the 60s when America and Europe particularly Great Britain, were strong, and China was communist. However it is noticeable that the teaching of Mandarin your local curriculum through the years have always been faithfully following China's lead in Simplified Chinese, which cuts down on the illiteracy rate and makes the language even easier for Chinese to grasp. The teaching of English has been simplified too for the same reasons, and so it is ultimately up to the student and his or her talent to express himself or herself proficiently in either or both languages.

Correspondingly as China has now entered several phases of liberalization and is now globally on the rise, it makes more sense than ever that your local Chinese could communicate with and understand the mainlanders with the Simplified Chinese they have learnt, unlike the Chinese of Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are still stuck in Traditional Chinese.

LKY is man of great foresight.

PS In Singapore you can converse in Mandarin and various Chinese dialects openly, but in Hong Kong you hardly hear anyone uttering Hokkien or Teochew, possibly for fear of brutal discrimination and being cast out from the mould. This is how blatantly racist you Cantonese people are. Thank God LKY is not Cantonese that would have probably interfered with his objectivity, flexibility and foresight.

i think you are utterly confused and perversing my original message. when i say OLD CHINESE, i am talking about the spoken chinese language of and from the time of the ancients. This would be from the time of the Zhou dynasty or earlier until the time of the three kingdoms and the jin dynasty in 200s to 300s AD.

i am not talking about the written chinese language which has hardly changed since the time of the even earlier shang dynasty (oracble bone script). so pls dun talk abt the traditional vs the modern PRC simplified chinese script here. OLD CHINESE is not about written scripts.

 

[lancheowman]

One example of famous classic poetry by Late Tang Emperor Li Yu 李昱:
问君能有几多愁
恰似一江春水向东流

Recite in Mandarin:
wen jun neng you ji duo chou
qia si yi jiang chun shui xiang tong liu

Recite in Cantonese:
man guan nang yau ge do chau
che qi yat gong chuon shuoi hiong tong lau

Notice that the verses rhyme in Cantonese, but not in Mandarin.

beautiful in cantonese but awkard in mandarin even tho there is stll some rhythm