Why Chinese Mothers are Superior...??

[camsurrey27]

Shocking is all one can say to this. Perhaps chinese mothers should ask for an A.I child (robot = artificial intelligence). Raising an unemotional misfit of society is the outcome! Hardly surprising that western men choose asian girls to play with, they only know one answer 'yes sir'!

 

[Gataloca]

Carang, English pronountiation is tricky also, specially when you learn it as second language. There is not fixed rule, and some words, like "read" can be pronounce in different ways. I prefer languages like Spanish, with clear rules about how to pronount each word.

And about learning thousands of characters, well, that always happen when you have to learn a new language, right? And Chinese characters do have a structure. ... No fixed rule, but some characters can be grouped... Like characters related to wood or items made of wood, may have a wood character in it. Same for characters related to water, fire, etc
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[thanka2]

i think that part of the chinese "need" to drill and learn by rote can actually be blamed on their written language. there is no way to learn to read/write chinese UNLESS you memorise the characters. you can't "sound it out" like you can using phonics when learning english. english is a language (and i would argue so are other european languaes) that can be broken down and learned a little at a time. there are various methods to teach it and different ways one can learn it..... chinese is just not the same. to become literate in chinese, one must learn THOUSANDS of characters.

the problems arise when they use the same mentality and method to teach other things...

There has been a lot written on this subject, actually. And actually, Chinese characters are composed of parts that are called radicals so there is some way to decipher them and they are not just always memorized as a whole, except for rare or extremely complicated characters.

Characters basically have a left side and a right side. One side gives hints or clues about the meaning of the character (the radical) and the other side gives the sound (pronunciation) of the character. For example, the word "hot" in Chinese has a radical for "fire" so many things related to "fire" in some abstract sense would also have this radical. This is not true of all Chinese characters but of some. This helps in the memorization process. But, yes, in order to be literate in Chinese one must write, write, write and read, read, read.

Also, there has been some study and writing about the role of Confucianism has in the influence of academic culture in Asia. In Confucianism, the best a student can hope for is not to be innovative or different or even better than his/her teacher but to be an exact replica of the teacher. So, it's a product vs. process dilemma between Asian education and western education. Asian education stresses perfection in product so the student is told to copy the master's work over and over and over again (rote learning) until the work is exactly like the master's. Western education stresses the process of learning and of self-discovery (individual-driven society, unlike Asian group-driven society) so the student is encouraged to learn while making mistakes and eventually to arrive at a product that is different and possibly superior to the master's.

So, the quote from Amy Chua that "nothing is fun until you're good" is a very Asian education concept. The product must be perfect, otherwise all is wasted.

 

[carang]

thank you, i do realise how the chinese language is constructed. but i stand by my statement.

in english, you learn 26 letters and those 26 letters make up virtually every word in the english language (exceptions being those words that are imported into the language).

however, to read a chinese newspaper, you need to read, on average 5000 characters. THAT is completely different to learning to read english.

not only that, but you might know the individual characters, but not know that when they are combined it changes the meaning (kind of like compound words in english).... eg: siu sum.... little heart... = be careful....

anyway, i'm too tired and too sick to try to explain myself clearly... i hope that makes some sense.

 

[thanka2]

thank you, i do realise how the chinese language is constructed. but i stand by my statement.

in english, you learn 26 letters and those 26 letters make up virtually every word in the english language (exceptions being those words that are imported into the language).

however, to read a chinese newspaper, you need to read, on average 5000 characters. THAT is completely different to learning to read english.

not only that, but you might know the individual characters, but not know that when they are combined it changes the meaning (kind of like compound words in english).... eg: siu sum.... little heart... = be careful....

anyway, i'm too tired and too sick to try to explain myself clearly... i hope that makes some sense.

All I know is that I have friends from all walks of life and different countries who started studying Chinese in their teens or twenties (not exactly the ideal age for picking up new languages--that would be a lot younger, right?) and are now fluent in Chinese and literate (can both read and write well enough to score well on the HSK which is the equivalent of the TOEFL test for Chinese)--and they were out doing the "college thing" and partying and having fun and not at home memorizing characters by rote. They also didn't come from Asian countries that employ a Confucianist education system--most were western educated. So, I do believe that it's a bit of an oversimplification to make Chinese out to be harder than it is. I think it's hard for sure but I think it's not so much harder than English--just difficult in different ways. English grammar, for example, is awful for people learning the language as a second language. But, yes, I do see your point about the rote memorization coming in some part from the language. There are other ways to learn Chinese, however, apart from rote memorization and my friends are just proof of that.

 

[yonge]

I, for one, thought the article was hilarious and will be getting the book. As a Chinese-American, I thought she was over-the-top, but that may be for literary effect. Will only know after reading the book, won't we? Also, as someone wisely pointed out, this is a memoir, not a how-to book. In the meantime, I'd like to point out that the tone of many of these comments are quite judgmental and the assumptions made about 'Chinese' and 'Western' are already ugly, betraying the authors' own prejudices. Normally, I would flag offensive comments, but there are so many in this string, what are we going to do - flag the whole thread? To tell you the truth, this thread has been much more painful to read than the WSJ article, because of the vitriol directed at one person whom none of us know personally.

We're all interested in parenting - as we're on this forum. Are we incapable of tolerating differences in adults? Many people do things differently from the way each of you do. In fact, each of you will do things differently from each other. Let's just take a deep breath, pause, and hug our children (if that's all right with you). I, for one, aspire to love both adults and children consistently.

 

[rani]

Did anyone read today's article in the SCMP? They found HK's "Tiger Mum".

Her 10-year-olds (twins) are swimming champions, judo brown belts, sailing veterans and chess maestros. Their own "tiger mother", gets them up at 5.30am every day but Sunday for swimming practice.

 

[suvi]

I agree with carang about the inherit problem Chinese language introduces to the learning process. Children in Hong Kong start learning Chinese characters when they are three years old and apart from a few exceptions there is no other way than memorization to do it.

Unfortunately the same technique is then applied to everything else. It gets you through the A-levels but not beyond. I've heard that the dropout rate from HKU after first year is high as the students cannot adjust to the different learning methods required. Having gone to a local school here myself as a teenager I completely understand that. I could ask any of my classmates what does it say on the page 72 of a particular text book and they could quote it word by word. If I'd ask something that required combining information from different sources, most of them would be lost. I hope the changes in recent years introduced to the secondary schools mitigate the problem. Yet I would not like to plant the seed of memorization as a sole technique into my own children at that young age and fortunately I have the luxury to avoid it.

I remember reading from my geography book when I was 12 that Chinese children of the same age do not know enough characters to read the newspaper, which to me was incomprehensible as I had been literate for 5 years already. My benefit is my otherwise useless native language Finnish that happens to be a phonetic language. While the grammar isn't as straight forward as Chinese grammar (I suspect with my little knowledge of Cantonese), the fact that literacy among young native speakers can be reached in matter of months sometimes just weeks makes an impact.

Finnish as a second language is apparently one of the most difficult languages to learn. I wouldn't therefore compare how difficult or easy it is to learn Chinese or English as a second language but how difficult or easy it is for a native speaker to learn how to read and write and what implications it has. Personally I'm grateful I could walk into a library at age 7 and pick up any book I liked and even more so that my parents allowed me to pick anything I liked.

As for the article, a great piece to stir up a conversation but cannot support even in the name of tolerance child abuse disguised as a piano lesson.

 

[Gataloca]

Now I remember that when I was in the University, back in the US, heard that many people from Mainland China applying for the MS degree in Computer Science had very high score on the English test part of the GRE, not because they were good at English, but because they take a dictionary and memorize each word and meaning..... It is just crazy!
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[tomogotchi]

Shocking is all one can say to this. Perhaps chinese mothers should ask for an A.I child (robot = artificial intelligence). Raising an unemotional misfit of society is the outcome! Hardly surprising that western men choose asian girls to play with, they only know one answer 'yes sir'!

It ?s one thing to debate on different parenting philosophies/styles on this forum, another to make your own presumptions and racist comments on this forum. It?s really sad that you had to make such a comment here.

For me who is from Japan where the parenting style lies somewhere between Chinese and Western cultures, it was indeed shocking to read Amy Chua?s article. I don?t understand the article had to be so provocative, because elsewhere she mentioned that she realized her tiger mum parenting technique had flaws and backfired on her second daughter. Her own father also seems to have said that the strict parenting might have worked for the first daughter but was maybe not suitable for the second one. At the end of the day, each child is unique, and each family is unique. You just have to figure out what works best for your child and your family.