Nobody at Home Speaks Mandarin: What Still Works

In more and more Singapore homes, English is the language of the dinner table, and Chinese is something that happens at school. Parents in these homes often assume they cannot help with Chinese at all, and either hand the whole subject to a tuition centre or feel guilty about it. Both responses miss what a parent actually contributes, which has very little to do with knowing Chinese.

What the exam needs that a parent can supply

Thirty-five per cent of PSLE Chinese is oral and listening — spoken language, produced and understood in real time. A child in an English-speaking home may go a whole week producing almost no extended spoken Chinese outside the classroom. No amount of written homework fixes that. What fixes it is minutes per day of hearing and speaking, and a parent who does not speak Chinese can still arrange for those minutes.

Four things that work without a word of Chinese

1. Supply the sound

Chinese audio in the home is the single biggest lever. Twenty minutes a day of a Mandarin cartoon with Chinese subtitles, a story read aloud by an app, or a children's news programme, at an age where the child still watches what is put in front of them, builds the listening ear that the exam tests directly. The parent's job is to choose it and turn it on. Children in Chinese-speaking homes get this for free; children in English-speaking homes get it only if someone decides they will.

2. Be the audience

The oral exam is several minutes of speaking Chinese to an adult. A parent who does not understand can still be the adult. Have the child read a passage aloud to you every evening, or describe a picture in Chinese, and listen. You will not catch the tones. You will catch the pauses, the speed, and whether the child sounds sure, and that is most of what the examiner hears. Record it on a phone; the child will catch what you cannot.

3. Run the routine, not the content

Testing beats re-reading and spaced practice beats cramming, and neither needs the parent to know the answer. Reading pinyin from a list, or pressing play on an app that reads the word, is enough to run a dictation test. Marking can be done against the list. The parent supplies the timetable — day 1, day 3, day 7 — and the child supplies the Chinese.

4. Make it worth the child's while

A child who sees Chinese as a school subject that nobody at home values will treat it that way. This is not about pretending to love it. It is about ordering in Mandarin at the hawker stall and letting the child do it, watching the cartoon with them rather than sending them to watch it, and asking — in English — what happened in the story. Children notice what the adults around them care about.

What to stop doing

• Translating. A child who is asked what a word means in English, every time, learns to route Chinese through English. Ask instead what it means in the sentence, or what would happen if the word were taken out.
• Outsourcing entirely. Two hours of tuition a week is two hours; the other 166 are where the language either gets used or does not. Tuition works better in a home that supplies the sound.
• Apologising. Children hear a parent say I was never good at Chinese either as permission. The more useful sentence is I am not good at it, so you are going to have to teach me — and then let them.

For a parent who reads no Chinese at all, one practical tool: anything with pinyin and audio. The MOE textbook word lists exist in pinyin; every dictation app reads the words aloud; every children's cartoon can be subtitled. You are never required to be the source of the language, only its organiser.