Bulletin Summer 1979

language. Someone who can write pai hua wen but only pronounce it in Cantonese pronunciation cannot be said to have completely mastered the language. But the usefulness of pu tong hua goes beyond this. The learning of a language is mainly a matter of exposure, and this is one of the stumbling blocks in the learning of pai hua. Hong Kong is almost exclusively Cantonese speaking. The pupil who is learning pu tong hua lacks the opportunity of coming into contact with it. How can we overcome this lack of exposure? For this let us take a backward glance into Chinese history. For nearly two thousand years, ever since the written language became separated from the spoken language, all Chinese had to resort to translation whenever they wrote, as they had to write in classical Chinese. Classical Chinese, by definition, was a dead language and exposure was out of the question. How, then, did the Chinese acquire the ability to write classical Chinese? The answer is simple. They did it through rote learning. Rote learning, to a certain extent, compensated for the lack of exposure. It was through rote learning that they acquired a feeling for sentence pattern, sentence rhythm as well as an adequate vocabulary. We can take a leaf out of their book. The situation with regard to pai hua in a Cantonese speaking environment is more complicated than that of classical Chinese in the past. If w e look upon pu tong hua as the spoken side of pai hua wen and pai hua wen as the written side of pu tong hua we can see that exposure is uneven. The opportunity of hearing and speaking pu tong hua was never very great but seems to be diminishing. For instance, ten years ago the cinema was dominated by films with pu tong hua dialogue, so that the regular film goer, at least, had considerable opportunity of being exposed. But today a film with pu tong hua dialogue has to be dubbed in Cantonese before it can be a viable proposition. Even this last opportunity of exposure to pu tong hua is thus taken away. As for written pai hua, of course, there is still ample opportunity of reading it, but this is where the speaking of pu tong hua comes in. The Cantonese pupil almost invariably reads his pai hua in Cantonese pronunciation. This makes it sound unnatural. One of the reasons for this is that pu tong hua has a lot of unstressed syllables, particularly in the case of grammatical words, while there is no such syllables in Cantonese. Thus in reading pai hua in the Cantonese pronunciation, all the unstressed syllables are converted into stressed syllables. This contributes to the lack of euphony. With the lack of euphony, the Cantonese pupil is liable not to develop an adequate feeling for pai hua, a feeling which can only come through the total experience of reading the text in the correct pronunciation with the right rhythm and sentence intonation. It is for this reason that I advocate the teaching of pu tong hua in primary schools. All that is necessary is to teach the children the correct pu tung hua pronunciation together with the rudiments of sentence patterns and a basic vocabulary which is likely to be different from the Cantonese. The aim is to enable them, once they reach secondary schools, to read their pai hua texts aloud in the correct pronunciation. A certain amount of rote learning or, at least, repeated reading aloud of the text will be of enormous importance to the writing o f correct pai hua. In cases where the same expressions have different meanings or where the construction differs a little in the two dialects, taking an expression as a whole including the pronunciation will help to prevent confusion. For instance, the same expression 葡萄 means different fruits in Cantonese and pu tong hua, but if the pupil learns to say p ú t á o in pu tong hua when he means grapes and, p'ou 4 t'ou 4 in Cantonese when he means a different fruit, then the right expression will come to him naturally whichever dialect he may be speaking. Finally, there is the question of feeling for the language which can only be acquired through treating the speech activity as an integrated whole and not as a hybrid of Cantonese pronunciation and written pai hua. A word to avoid possible misunderstanding. In classifying pu tung hua/pai hua as a second language I imply no playing down of its importance. M y classificatio starts purely from pedagogical premises. If there is any truth in my view, then the use of inappropri methods constitutes a great obstacle to language and cannot but retard the progress of the pupil. IV Ten years ago there was a similar symposium on the teaching of Chinese. Professor Chou Fa-kao, the then director of the "Chinese Linguistics Research Centre" of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a paper presented to the symposium, put forth a number of valuable ideas, including contrastive study of grammar and Cantonese-pu tong hua vocabularies. Ten years later the work he proposed remains as urgent as it was then. The Chinese Universtiy is very concerned, indeed, with the lowering of language standards in schools and has, therefore, revived the Centre under the new name of 'Chinese Language Research Centre'. It is hoped that in the years ahead some of these tasks will be accomplished. In order to succeed, not only those of us who are at the Centre will have to make a great effort but, more important, we shall need the encouragement and support of the public at large. 13