The Taipei City Government has released the results of a Mandarin proficiency exam administered to 31,145 sixth-grade students. <\/p>\n
According to the results, more than 40 percent of those tested are unable to use so-called radicals (bùshǒu<\/span>, 部首) to find Chinese characters in dictionaries. This, of course, comes as no great surprise to me. Ah, for the wisdom of the alphabetical arrangement of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary<\/a>!<\/p>\n Furthermore, the Taipei Times<\/em> reports that the person in charge of the testing, Datong Elementary School Principal Chen Qin-yin, said that although most students received good grades, the essay test revealed weaknesses in writing ability, including a limited use of adjectives.<\/p>\n Reading that sort of thing sets off all sorts of alarms in my head. First, adjectives are the junk food of writing. Even worse, though, I suspect that Chen is talking not about any ol’ adjectives but rather stock phrases either in or reminiscent of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese). Larding a text with clichés is the sort of thing that passes for good writing here. And if, for example, students don’t throw in a zhi<\/em> in the place of a de<\/em> often enough their grades will suffer. <\/p>\n The language reforms springing from the May 4 movement have been tremendously important. But more than eighty years later the job still isn’t finished!<\/p>\n sources: <\/p>\n The Taipei City Government has released the results of a Mandarin proficiency exam administered to 31,145 sixth-grade students. According to the results, more than 40 percent of those tested are unable to use so-called radicals (bùshǒu, 部首) to find Chinese … Continue reading \n