Mayday for the English Language in Hong Kong

It has not been news to anyone close to me that I hate English lessons. Yet others may simply treat me as a hypocrite, due to the fact that I am relatively good in English compared to schoolmates in my school. They don't get it, accompanied with a smile I explained to myself, that the real reason I oppose English lessons so much is of the same reason I'm good in English: I'm interested in English language, and dedicated to studying it. I can't bear, however, the fact that English teachers in Hong Kong are polluting such a beautiful and breathtaking language, and I can't in effect do anything about it.

Since 1898, after England had annexed Hong Kong to be one of its many colonies, the English language has already rooted its way to the so-called 'Pearl of the Orient'. English has become our second language, with Cantonese as our first language, and leaving the third place for our official language, Mandarin. It's not my intention, though, to say the England is to blame for the corruption of the English language in Hong Kong. In fact, it is such western-oriented atmosphere that England had left us aroused my interest in English in the first place. Also in my observation, during the ruling by England, the purity of the English language should not have been contaminated much - if any, despite George Orwell said the otherwise.

Now it is quite obvious that the English people has nothing to do with our failure in not only learning English badly, but also making it a bad language. After 1997, the Hong Kong Government, on the other hand, has started messing up the English language by stirring up the muddle water in our education system. The drama started by the Government first advocating how it is beneficial to use our mother tongue, Cantonese, to learn English, and then all in a sudden, 'fine-tuning' the medium of learning English to English language itself, which is apparently against the Government's original claim. About what 'fine-tuning' absurdly means here is another issue. What underneath the scheme shift, is the difficience in Cantonese and the incompetence of using it as a medium of learning, or at least the thought of it. The illogic, like a toddler trying to run, or a novice driver wanting for a Formula One race, is due to the Government's unbelievably naive and inconsiderate: How can any of the Hong Kong students be able to learn the English language when they cannot even master their mother language? It is the first language first, and then the second, not the other way around. What's more, the Hong Kong Government now suggests using Mandarin as the medium language of teaching Chinese lessons. How reassuring.

As all of us are so urged in learning English, the English language seems to be the only thing that matters in whatever circumstances, from applying to a university to looking for a job, from meeting people to having a date. But the truth is, the more we focus on English, the more we lose on Cantonese, the only effective medium for Hong Kong people to learn a second language, in this case, the English language. Hong Kong is an English-oriented city. It seems that even though people can't understand you, when you speak English, you are superior. It is more or less the same as speaking French over English, or German over Spanish. By inserting English vocabularies into a daily Cantonese conversation between friends or families, we make us proud of ourselves irrationally, and subconsciously think that the more confused the listeners are, the more superior we are. We don't appreciate the English language anymore. We abuse it.

With all the former generations living in such atmosphere, and inevitably corrupted in it, the latter generations that the former's teach must not have improvements in learning English. The whole situation can only get worse. As a student, I am very much concerned and annoyed as I can see the whole picture of what really is going on in our education system. English teachers start teaching us, the victims, how to get marks, instead of how to understand English, because higher marks in English exam papers guarantee a better job in the future, and most of the time we care only about marks. By the time I realized such teaching methods (e.g. what sentence written can count marks in a writing paper) cannot really teach me English, I started disliking English teachers, English lessons, the education system, and the dislike slowly deepened to hatred. Then I learn English in my own ways, never again a single way my English teacher had taught me.

In my opinion, it is not complex and hard to learn English. There is no need of 'fine-tuning' or something. Very old-fashioned but true, that one can only learn English better through more reading, listening, and speaking of it. If one is to become an English writer, or just to prove something to oneself (like what I'm doing now), then more writing of English can also be accomplished in order to learn English. The point is that there are thousands of Hong Kong students, who graduated from Form 7 vying to get in universities after studying English for over 12 years, but still cannot differentiate 'quite' and 'quiet', how can it not show us that there is something wrong in the education system? The way English teachers teach only helps us in the 'marks' part, not the 'life' part - and most students don't have a life; a normal person can tell this is not a coincidence.

A language corrupts not by one teacher, one writer or one journalist, but by the system and the people involved in it. Until we realize that, we will still be letting ourselves be part of the system which ruthlessly and incessantly destroys lovely languages, English or Cantonese.