well
What I mean
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You can speak Welsh? 
Of course not.
Good job you never had to speak it, then.
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Exactly, that’s my point. Trying to revive Welsh was a pointless exercise, just like trying to make Taiwan bilingual is pointless.
I think the Dutch model would probably work better for Taiwan.
Strong English as a second language in a Mandarin speaking country.
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It helps that learning English from Dutch isn’t a big stretch
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if Singaporeans can’t speak mando well, their english is not that good if that is their main language. That is a real problem.
when i was a kid i was on my bike around the tunhwa area around the stadium. And a cadillac came around with the windows down and there in the back seat was Chiang Ching Kwo. Was pretty cool. A scene i remember
He doesn’t speak Hakka. He grew up speaking only English. He learned Mandarin at 30 and Hokkien at 38.
I’ve read two of his books.
He wanted to make Singapore bilingual because he observed that the English-Speaking Chinese had better jobs but were yes ma’am to the British. No matter how well you speak it, you’re not an Englishman.
Chinese-speaking Chinese, OTOH, were much more confident in themselves.
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It probably doesn’t help that Singapore has a very high percentage of foreigners living there. Approximately 30% of the population.
Compare that to Taiwan’s 3%. Further, the vast majority of Taiwan’s foreigners are migrant workers and not considered immigrants.
The demand for being able to speak English in Taiwan is very low.
As I’ve said though, that’s not to say you shouldn’t learn a second language. You should. However, the idea that Taiwan will become bilingual is a fantasy.
In my opinion, it’s political, not practical. The DPP just wants to distinguish itself from China by claiming that Taiwan speaks a different language.
Pointless in my opinion, because everyone in power knows Taiwan is separate from China, even if they don’t officially acknowledge it.
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But that’s exactly the motivation for Lee’s bilingual policy in Singapore. No one spoke Mandarin in Singapore when it gained its independence. English was the language in government due to its colonial history, but that wasn’t the language people spoke at home either. To make English and Mandarin Singapore’s main languages was a political move to make Singapore distinct from neighboring countries and to build a sense of national identity.
You could say the same thing about the KMT’s oppressive Mandarin only language policy to extinguish self identity of the Taiwanese peoples.
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That doesn’t make it right. Taiwanese people are happy speaking Chinese.
People just don’t like change unless they are forced to change.
Ok, but why change it? Most people have no need to speak English in their daily lives.
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That I agree with you. For me, bilingualism in both Singapore and Taiwan should include native languages like Taigi/Hokkien, Hakka, Indigenous languages and so on, not Mandarin and English.
I can also understand that in the current political climate, it is much easier to push for English to be the second lingua franca rather than restoring all native languages.
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Agreed, except that many taiwanese are already bilingual, even as young children. Tri and quad even… but certainly bi
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Edited for posting in the wrong thread
I was just in LA county meeting with my family and some of their friends.
They lamented the decline of Daigi in Taiwan, and pointed out that a lot of Taiwanese-American kids are taught Daigi and don’t learn Mandarin at all.
Just Daigi and English.
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Most of early Taiwanese immigrants to the US left Taiwan because they had to seek political asylum and escape from the KMT’s White Terror. Many of them taught their kids only Taigi either because they didn’t want to teach them Mandarin (for those who left after the 80s), or I’d imagine for some, they didn’t really speak Mandarin to begin with (for those who left before the 80s).
When I went to college around that area, I had a classmate who only spoke Taigi. She even had a Japanese sounding first name.
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