I used to hear that Chinese Malaysian businessmen will have no problem doing business with the world as they speak fluent Mandarin, English, Malay and a plethora of Chinese dialects.
But is this the case?
Indeed Chinese Malaysians command a few more languages than people in other countries, but such multilingual advantage may have to come with a price.
The level of English competency among university graduates has plummeted in recent years, and the government has mapped out strategies to arrest further decline.
While boosting the standard of English, the government also wants to lift the competency level of the national language. There are educators hitting out at the poor command of Bahasa Malaysia among Chinese and Tamil primary school students.
Indeed, Mandarin Chinese is our mother tongue and by right we should not have any problem with this language, you might conclude.
Not really, the standard of Chinese language is also fast declining in this country.
While there are Chinese Malaysians well versed in all three major languages, they are nevertheless in the minority, because many are still unable to skillfully and effectively employ BM and English in day-to-day lives, and not all of them could claim good command of the Chinese language either.
The problem with us is that we have picked up so many languages but are masters of none. And this problem is more serious than declining UPSR exam results for Chinese, or the fact that fewer candidates are willing to take Chinese papers in government exams nowadays.
We must not think that the sole function of a language is for communication. As a matter of fact, a language is more than just a communication tool, it is also a principal tool for thinking.
We use the language to think, and if we are unable to master a language, it will be difficult for us to exercise intricate and precise thinking. We can at best think in a superficial and crude manner.
The world we are living in is a highly complicated place while our life is not altogether a straightforward one-way process. We need to make use of the language as a medium to initiate the thinking process, making learned analysis and judgment of various convoluted phenomena.
In other words, deficiency in language competency may limit a person's thinking power, scope of vision and potentials.
It takes plenty of time and effort to master a language and given the trilingual environment many of us are in, few will actually master any of them.
This is unfortunately the curse behind our multilingual aura, a price we need to pay being tagged "multilingual geniuses".
We not only need to salvage our increasingly poor command of languages, but also our crippled thinking faculty. – Sin Chew Daily, November 24, 2015.