Remove Class - Language switching !

I remember the day I changed my academic language from Chinese to English, it was really a very tough experience. After studying 6 years in Chinese primary school and then entered the remove class to start off everything afresh in English was a great challenge. To this day, I am still puzzled why this is called "remove class"? Perhaps it is a class specially designed and prepared to remove the old language habit that we had been learning and using in order that a brand new language could be substituted or "stuffed in", and use this to study and comprehend all the subjects and its terminologies to prepare ourselves for future higher learning experience?

Many of my school mates were having a lot of problem to adjust and cope with this change in medium of instruction! This is because English language is totally a very different language compared to Chinese. With my own experience in going through this abrupt change, I could understand and well imagine the frustration of our fellow Malaysians of other races face, on this switching of their mother tongue language either from Malay or Tamil to English. The casualties or fall-outs from schools at my time was high;the number of students eventually could not make it to the higher secondary schools was probably in the region of more than 50%. They had to drop from school after our form 3 or LCE examination, command of English language was definitely one of the obstacles though examination was also meant to be a necessary screening process to filter out the under peforming students. Some dropped out permanently and joined the workforce early while some more persistent ones went to study in independent Chinese schools and eventually managed to further their higher level studies in Taiwan. That was the scenario during the late 60's and early 70's of my time!

In the world of the Chinese and Malay stream students, there is no such thing as past tense or present tense, because when we talk about things of yesterday, it is automatically something already in the past and one does not need to change the forms of the verbs! We also do not differentiate the passive and active voices in such an elaborate manner. The past participle form of the verb in passive voice always confuses us though the action actually does not happen in the past and we could not understand why that it has to take on a past participle form!

It took almost half if not a full genius to change from one language that is so entrenched in our every day life and usage, and then take on another totally foreign, and be proficient in it. Once we had gone through that stage of overcoming this language change barrier, and we never look back because English language has become an integral part of our life that we have to use it day in and day out in the business world, worship service, writing emails and blogs, internet surfing, at home etc.

We never had " Bla Bla black sheep" kind of songs during our childhood school days and there is a clear distinction in the way we do things, the behavior and thoughts, between the 100% English educated students and those joining in half way from other medium of instruction. In fact, English educated students discriminate or even despise the other students from other schools mainly because of their poor command and handicap in English language!

Knowing learning language is a tricky thing, my wife and I used English as our home language to speak to our children since they were kids. Only their grandparents practised with them the usage of our own dialect, in our case, Cantonese! We sent them to Chinese primary schools for 6 years so that they could get a basic command of the Chinese language. Because of the environment we intentionally created for them to grow up in, they managed to pick up English at ease and they had not encountered any of the kind of problem or hardship that we had before, in mastering and acquiring the English language skill.