Cantonese may be holding HK back: Kevin Yeung

[East_coast]

Cantonese may be holding HK back: Kevin Yeung - RTHK

[Tea addict]

Just use English instead, not Putonghua. More people in the world learn and understand English. And I'm saying this as a person whose native tongue is Russian.

[SpeakCantonese]

Cantonese may be holding HK back: Kevin Yeung - RTHK

I agree with him... speak Canto. at home.

We often discuss this at my school, despite a few shouty people defending Canto the reality is that a majority of parents would prefer all Chinese at local school is Putonghua. IMO, it is absolutely amazing how much time and energy is devoted to learning, by rote, traditional characters.

[Mefisto]

HKFP in May 2018: Cantonese a dialect, not a mother tongue, says Hong Kong Education Bureau supporting material on Mandarin.

An article, contained within a set of Mandarin teaching supporting materials sent out by the Education Bureau, has stated that Cantonese is a dialect, and not a mother tongue.

Song wrote that, in 1951, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) described the mother tongue as the “ethnic group language” of a person, citing a 2003 article by Li Yuming, former party secretary of the Beijing Language and Culture University.

Song said: “The mother tongue does not only belong to a person, but also to an ethnic group.”

“Cantonese belongs to Chinese, but we usually would not use Cantonese – a Chinese dialect – to represent the language of the Han ethnic group. To make it accurate, a dialect in a language cannot be seen as a ‘mother tongue’,” he wrote.

“Calling ‘Cantonese’ a ‘mother tongue’ does not fit with the strict definition of ‘mother tongue’,” he wrote, adding that mother tongue refers to a language but not a dialect, which is “the local variety of a language.”

UNESCO definition

However, in a 1951 UNESCO paper on the use of vernacular languages in education, a mother or native tongue was described as “[t]he language which a person acquires in early years and which normally becomes his natural instrument of thought and communication.”

In another UNESCO paper in 2008 on the mother tongue, it was referred to as “a child’s first language, the language learned in the home from older family members.”

Last year, an international study found that students who learned Chinese in Cantonese performed almost the same as those who learned the language in Mandarin.

In response, Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung said the papers were given to teachers or people in education to consider different views on the mother tongue from different scholars. Yeung said most of the primary schools chose to teach in Cantonese: “The government’s stance on teaching language is clear.”

In Guangdong children have been punished for simply speaking cantonese in the school grounds. What reason does the Party have for treating the Hong Kong corner of Guangdong more benevolently? One Reich, One Language is quite obviously the ultimate solution to whatever problem local languages pose to the Party.

[imparanoic]

Original Post Deleted

Let's rename him " Ku fen Yang" using his ideology