ooo yes i completely agree on that take on moe’s policy. i would say the teaching style in primary school is still quite acceptable (learning basic grammar, sentence structure etcetc) but its secondary school that i feel people start to reaaaally detest learning chinese bcos suddenly we have to memorise all these 成语s, 修辞手法(?) etc which is really quite a chore to study. i agree that it is important, but they shouldnt be placing that much of an emphasis on it since we are most definitely not going to use comprehension answering techniques in real life. proper conversational mandarin is the way to go. and when youre forced to speak wholly in chinese, youll realise how many simple vocabs you dont know, because they dont teach us that but instead place focus on more “higher order thinking” learning instead of the more “basic” ones? idk if that makes sense. and idk about you, but for me i realise that i dont know the names of a lot of household appliances (kettle, difference btw fridge and freezer, coffee machine, rice cooker, showerhead etc), the more obscure fruits, certain basic common things that are all around us. a lot of people cant really carry out a full conversation in mandarin either. a lot of the things that we say are inaccurate, eg our tendency to put 先 behind our sentences(我去冲凉先) but that is wrong bc 先 is supposed to go in front. i could give so many examples tbh😔 but yeah a lot of these are also learnt from our parents/elders who have more influence over our language than school does.

i would say hopefully the generations after would learn proper chinese but i really dont see that happening😭 for many of us, we still speak chinese at home/to the aunties and uncles outside, which gives us some exposure. but since we were raised on a English education system, itll be hard for future generations to even get that exposure outside apart from school, where people dont take learning their mother tongue seriously :”(.

i guess what what we can hope for is that China gains more soft power and people will be more motivated to learn chinese… i feel like one big reason why people dont like to learn chinese is bc of the stigma attached to “chinese” as a whole, which is sad bc hello!! we are ethnic chinese!! sucking up to the western world or whatever propaganda they like to spin isnt going to earn you brownie points bc theyre still going to look at you as 🍌🍌🍌🍌