Toronto Chinese Students Love Pinyin and Simplified Chinese

Should children learn pinyin or national phonetic alphabet, simplified or traditional Chinese? This debate has been existed in Toronto Chinese teaching field for many years, but it seems simple among the children: It is easy to learn pinyin and simplified characters. 中华民俗节庆网

According to Star Island Daily, Song Naiwang is a teacher from the mainland China, teaching Chinese on Saturday mornings in Toronto area. When she teaches Chinese characters, she always writes a traditional character with its simplified one behind it. Children may learn any of them and they will not lose marks when writing any of them down in the test.

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This is a typical way of teaching Chinese, because children's parents require differently. The parents from Taiwan want their children to learn traditional Chinese and national phonetic alphabet, while those from the mainland hope their children master the simplified Chinese and pinyin. Parents from Hong Kong stepped into a dilemma: they want their children to learn simplified Chinese and pinyin but are unwilling to give up the traditional characters.

Ms. Song said, the Ministry of Education in Canada established Chinese courses ten years ago. The first group of teachers was mostly Taiwanese, they taught Chinese by national phonetic alphabet. Later some emigrants from the mainland China joined the teachers' team, and pinyin was introduced to the students. A Taiwan teacher got very worried and she claimed to the leader of the Ministry of Education that only national phonetic alphabet is standard and pinyin should be abandoned. But the Ministry took no actions, so there have been lying silently two "camps" on Chinese teaching.

Many years later, Ms. Song Naiwang found that worried teacher also began to teach in pinyin! The reason is simple: Children think it easy to master. In fact, the parents keeping their children in learning Chinese is difficult enough and it will be more difficult if the students are required to learn national phonetic alphabet and traditional Chinese characters.

However, teachers from the mainland found another problem: Though Toronto often holds Chinese competition for children, the level of putonghua is still low and there even lacks of an objective standard for putonghua. www.1155815.com

For this reason, an association called "Canada Chinese Putonghua Teaching Association" is under construction and expected to be set up at the end of this year or the beginning of the next year. Gao Ximing, one of the sponsors, pointed out that its purpose is to improve Chinese putonghua teaching and to promote the standardization of the use of putonghua. wish.1155815.com