In today’s South China Morning Post, for the perhaps ten billionth time since I’ve been in the lovely city of Hong Kong, there’s a … language debate! As usual the topic is “why is Hong Kong people’s English so crap.”
Writers of letters to the editor come up with various reasons and solutions, all good. Everyone can agree that it comes down to lack of practise. One even blames people’s “Cantonese pronunciation.” So how come more and more mainlanders, Cantonese speakers included, speak increasingly excellent English, seeing they mostly have less access to native English speakers and less access to English learning material than Hongkongers?
I think it’s because Hong Kong teachers largely approach the teaching of English like French teachers in Britain approach the teaching of French: “This is something you’ll have to muddle through because we say so but don’t think you’ll come out of it actually speaking the language. But let’s all suffer together shall we? Pass the exam; then you’re free to go.”
Of course the English textbooks in HK don’t help. Once in my grey youth I was actually a private English teacher to Hong Kong kids. The parents had obviously told the kids that being in the same room as a “native speaker” for a few hours a month was enough; they weren’t expected to do or say anything and as long as they sat there passively through the ordeal, and as long as the parents could tell their friends that they had hired a tutor, everything would be fine.
Oh, how young and naive I was. One seven year-old girl stupidly showed me her homework. There was a drawing of a letter complete with stamp, whose caption was “A little.” I insanely crossed out the caption, replacing with “A letter.”
Two days later I saw the girl again. She was in tears, because her teacher had angrily wiped out my caption with many red strokes of her pen, re-writing “A little.”
The girl failed her test and I was fired. The same week two 11 year-old twins were reading Tom Sawyer, as in “the Chinese version of.” I ruminated long and hard over the sentence “Quick and nighting, Indian Joe jumped out the window.” In the end I decided it meant “quick as lightning …” and told the boys that this was the correct interpretation. Result: Tears at dawn and being fired again. It said “quick and nighting” in the book, therefore that’s what it would remain.
I’m not sure, but it must have been shortly after this I took up teaching Cantonese to foreigners …
So basically, there’s no way HK people can learn good English when the primary level textbooks are written by jumped-up morons who think their face is dead in the water if they run what they have self-importantly written, by a person who can actually read and write English.
It’s not Hong kong people’s pronunciation there’s anything wrong with, nor their willingness to acquire a second language.The problem is all the little idiots sitting around the publishing houses thinking that because they know “a is for apple, b is for bastard” they can actually write a textbook. That, and HK people’s ingrained fear of challenging what they perceive as “authority.”
“In my school, this is “a little” because it’s always been “a little” and I will personally execute anybody who dares to contradict me!
Faced with being fired or execution, who wouldn’t go along with it?
But, you know, “when there is a fire, don’t use the lift.”
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