Taiwan: jack of all languages, master of none
How intense is language study in Taiwan? Here's my 7-year-old's weekend class report card.
An American friend is asking me about an article he saw in Taiwan Review, one of the government's English-language publications created to show off achievements for an ignorant, bored or skeptical foreign audience. The piece calls the relentless pursuit of foreign languages a source of pride for the students here. I told my friend that Taiwan's language study is a polyglot of waste. I said:
"Taiwan gets started from first grade (my child is already studying Mandarin, English and the local dialect Hokkien). Language education in public schools comes at the expense of social studies, science, arts and other coursework that would make people more aware, more educated in the ways of the world around them. In the absence of education, old hearsay becomes modern truth. Languages are also taught poorly - emphasis on the written word over spoken, on grammatical formula over linguistic dynamism (abbreviations, artistry, idioms, jokes, omissions, slang, conversational shortcuts, actual meaning, etc.). Naturally Taiwanese imagine that success overseas involves just mastery of the written, grammatically proven language of other countries. Oops. This dyslexic attitude traces back to Japan, where imperial leaders worried about invasion cultivated language study to 'know the enemy before the enemy knows us.' This state of mind also explains why Japanese and Chinese fret endlessly over how resident foreigners have managed to speak their local languages."