A Business Graduate's Reviewing History Blog

Right now, I feel like revisiting Chinese with a new understanding. Back then, we only memorized without understanding. Teachers, no matter how good he or she was, were forced to conform to a system that only taught how to memorize long sentences but not how to understand them. I felt the approach of reading in both Mandarin and Amoy can be distracting to one thing--learning Mandarin. Talk about not allowing vernacular to be spoken in Tagalog class. However, Amoy is spoken in class (and I got into trouble many times for breaking that rule) to learn Mandarin. I took basic Mandarin at the University of San Carlos (since a foreign language elective is required ), learned pinyin, and later one of my Chinese language teachers spoke to me in Amoy, "Now, you see how important Mandarin is. Good." She used the word 华语 (huá yǔ). Just because I had bad grades back then doesn't mean I'm unable to learn new things, right? We have seven ways to say Chinese? Many times, it's ver...

I think one of the biggest problems of Filipino-Chinese schools and their Chinese education is the method. I remembered how we were taught zhuyin and pinyin wasn't really taught. We had to memorize long sentences. More often, Chinese language teachers tend to act like we were in China than the Philippines. It wasn't until later that I developed an interest in learning Mandarin. I developed a sudden taste for Chinese media. It was there I learned about the existence of another dialect known as Cantonese. Pinyin was barely taught. Instead, we were taught zhuyin which was still widely used in Taiwan. Zhuyin was the standard Chinese alphabet. Then there was pinyin which is the proper Romanization.  We need to take a look at the history of pinyin with the late Zhou Yougang. He was born on January 13, 1906, and died on January 14, 2017 . As I was using the Tao Li, I got curious and Googled the inventor of Pinyin. I'd dare say that the inventor himself is a plain genius. I do have...