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Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

From experience, there is a tendency to favour quantity over quality of work in Asia. This can be seen from how students in China are given stacks and stacks of mindnumbing multiple-choice questions for homework or how children are measured by time-spent practising music or sports rather than being encouraged to practice smart.

I suspect part of this comes from (relatively) uneducated parents (recall that 50~60 years ago China was in the middle of a cultural revolution and the Singapore of 1960/70 would be barely recognisable when compared to today's).

But I also wonder how much of this is baked into the culture through the language: character-based languages require a great deal more rote learning than others, and especially for children --who have no conceptual grasp of syntax / grammar-- memorisation is probably the most effective way of teaching it. It would then naturally follow to expand on that learning style on other disciplines...

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It has more to do with economic need than culture. As you see Asia has grown on a manufacturing based economy, whether it is Singapore or China. Despite being such a small country it is surprising to see what all we produce in singapore. In a manufacturing economy you used to need Human capital that is just hardworking, thus quantity over quality. However now that things are becoming expensive and automation has taken over reform is necessary. The job market is shifting toward private enterpreuneurship where people have to be creative to solve problems. One needs to start placing more emphasis on designing/researching/innovating than manufacturing. That is why the education reforms are necessary as in these fields it is quality over quantity.

Do take note though that in both Singapore's and India's case the system of examinations has been based on the British colonial system NOT something that was imbibed into asian culture.

Although the Chinese had civil service exams since ancient times, by the early 1900s there were more ways to make it as a rich businessman rather than study for the civil service examinations.

The official language of Singapore is English.

Some pupils of Chinese descent study Chinese, but that certainly doesn't apply to all Singaporeans.

Without Chinese, though, you're going to have trouble.

Singapore is 75% chinese, 15% malay and 10% Indian. Most malays and indians DO NOT speak chinese and are as successful as chinese. In fact many Chinese in singapore do not speak Chinese or speak better english than chinese. Furthermore the variety of dialect groups of Chinese in Singapore is so large that learning mandarin will not necessarily help you communicate with the older population. Its better to know a bit of every one of the languages than know only one very wellto get by. If you're thinking of singlish while words like "kena" come from chinese dialects (not mandarin), others such as "alamak" come from other languages such as malay.

As someone who has lived here for three years and travels around a lot in Singapore, not speaking mandarin can be problematic, particularly at some of the hawkers - but in precisely the same way not speaking Spanish was problematic in redwood city California (near Palo Alto).

Honestly, not being able to understand/speak singlish is probably a larger barrier to fitting in than not speaking mandarin.

> 70% of the population is Chinese - students may be taught in English but their parents and their teachers most likely are products of a Chinese-speaking culture.

> But I also wonder how much of this is baked into the culture through the language: character-based languages require a great deal more rote learning than others, and especially for children --who have no conceptual grasp of syntax / grammar-- memorisation is probably the most effective way of teaching it. It would then naturally follow to expand on that learning style on other disciplines...

No, the same thing happens in India.

To add some context, most major Indian language scripts are largely phonetic so they tend to be far easier to learn than something like English, which requires memorization of many (many) irregular spellings. I say this as a native English speaker, for what it's worth.

Therefore, I agree with the parent comment that language may not be the cause of the learning style here.

Wait so the article is about Singapore but your entire comment is about China, because? Asia is like this one tiny place where everything is the same? Singaporeans in the news tend to look Chinese? The education standards in China and Singapore are vastly different. Singapore's education and indeed government standards are closer to the West than they are to China and India.

>Singapore's education and indeed government standards are closer to the West than they are to China and India.

Don't deny that, and it's definitely closer on the spectrum to Western-style education, but the high volume and high stress environment (mentioned in the article) is more reminiscent of that in China. I have plenty of friends who resented the Singaporean system and were failed by the high intensity grades-focused education system. Credit to the Singaporean government for acknowledging and searching for a solution.

My original post was less of a judgement and more exploring the origins of the culture. Perhaps its as simple as a projection of the nations' socioeconomic aspirations...

It all stems from the Chinese tradition of competitive examinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination

> character-based languages

> children --who have no conceptual grasp of syntax / grammar--

Do you speak Chinese? I doubt you know what you are talking about, because IMHO complex semantics are hardly possible without syntax. If you imply that Chinese are in general incapable of ideas as complex as American's, only because of the language, that would be perceived as a slur. Can you substantiate your claim?

> memorisation is probably the most effective way of teaching it

as evident by the myriads of data structures developed to memorize data, memory is syntactic and by that I mean ordered.

I think he means that children in general don't learn a language by learning syntax and grammar.

With English and I guess other languages, you just learn your alphabet and you can guess words pretty well. This is not the same as in Chinese, so children would most likely need to use repition a lot more to learn the characters that they need to learn.

>Do you speak Chinese? I doubt you know what you are talking about, because IMHO complex semantics are hardly possible without syntax.

I speak Chinese and have studied Japanese and Korean. As another poster mentioned - I was more referring to the fact that it is uncommon to find children consciously learning explicit syntax and grammar on a technical level. How many 5-10 year olds do you know who consciously are aware of the concept of declination, conjugation or subjunctive forms beyond using them?

>If you imply that Chinese are in general incapable of ideas as complex as American's, only because of the language, that would be perceived as a slur. Can you substantiate your claim? This was not a slur on children from various nations. My observations are not judgemental --in case the language suggested so-- and my understanding of their underpinning causes are largely socioeconomic: it cannot be argued that most Western countries have had a great head start over Asia in the past 50-100 years and if anything, Asia should be lauded for the incredible catch-up they've achieved in such a short time-frame.

As an aside, I've been educated in 8 languages and have had at least 20 language teachers. In East-Asian languages rote-learning and pattern matching were encouraged for much longer than in other languages. For example, copying characters (pure rote learning) is encouraged until a far later stage in language proficiency than alphabet-based languages (where learning to spell has been acquired).

EDIT: As another example, I also recall Chinese-nationals preparing for SATs literally sitting down with a dictionary and learning 300 (or was it 3000 :S) words a day. This doesn't strike me as particularly efficient (I could be wrong, maybe they came up with useful games to memorise the words) and yet the practice was pretty commonplace.

Whether this is a cultural phenomenon or due to the nature of the language is what I can't ascertain; it feels a bit chicken-egg to me.

It could be that my personal experiences are completely unrepresentative, but I'm pretty confident that this is not the case.

> >Do you speak Chinese?

> I speak Chinese

oops, I notice now the question was insinuating and against the guide lines. I had fair chances, though :)

> For example, copying characters (pure rote learning) is encouraged until a far later stage in language proficiency than alphabet-based languages (where learning to spell has been acquired).

I read that before and I suppose the Korean switch to the Hangeul alphabet for example was an improvement.

I do have to look up words for English and even in my native language German to really not say one thing when I mean another. Even though this is common place, as idioms develop and meaning changes, we tend to understand meaning based on not only the grammar, but also the meta syntax, the composition of terms into text. And I was really curious whether lack of syntax, which I suppose is exagerated and placative, would thus still exist on the meta level.

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