Shaun T. Dy's Business & Economics Perspective Blog

I remember writing about how to make Mandarin Chinese more accessible in the Philippines . I remembered the day when I ended up not liking school not because I didn't want to learn. I was eager to learn. Science and history are interesting subjects. However, mathematics is taught in such a way that it's almost irrelevant. "You just need to study it, it's required by the DepEd and you can't graduate without it!" was the only reason. You're not allowed to think, just be a robot, and then parents get mad about why their children have almost no initiative and need to be programmed like robots. It's because the school system kills initiative and nobody does a robot's job better than a robot .  Bahay Tsinoy, museum of Chinese life in the Philippines I just found this photo shared on Facebook. It was the picture of childhood trauma that I'd like to talk about. The standard Chinese textbook. At first, I was excited to learn Chinese but that excitement

I wanted to write more about Chinese education. I did write about the constraints that hit Chinese education . I had problems with how too much memorization became the focus. With Chinese, there's also the world of reversible words which change in meaning . In English, we can compare that to the anagram where switching letters change the meaning . For example, evil and vile may be synonymous but live and evil aren't. In Chinese, we can have two characters getting swapped which may either change the meaning entirely or change to a related meaning. Remember that they may be related but they don't have the same meaning. I could remember how the Hokkien calls visitors lang ke and while we called the customer ke lang. Both are people but both have a different purpose. I got into the LTL Mandarin School website and found reversible Chinese words. I won't tackle it all here because 164 words would mean I'll have to write an entire lecture. I think one of the biggest probl

There's no doubt about it that the Chinese language, often referred to as 华语 (huá yǔ) ,  is very important. I remembered meeting some of my old Chinese language teachers who even said, "Now you see Mandarin is very important, right?" It was sometime in college when Chinese entertainment took the Philippines by storm. I could remember hearing English covers of some Chinese songs. I remembered a text that talked about how Mandarin is becoming more widely spoken. Langoly even verifies that by 2022 last year--we've already hit a total of 1.118 billion speakers . Even before 2022, I started to see Mandarin Chinese as a very important subject. Yet, the only thing I regretted, back then, was taking the Chinese language subject for granted.  I think it's necessary to look at the flaws of the education system. One of the many things that I wrote about was the problem of focusing too much on grades and too little on learning . Grades can be a good motivator but the problem

I wrote about how I believe pinyin will bridge the gap in Mandarin learning  and how pinyin helped secure business permits . I think a new challenge that some may face is learning pinyin through the 23 consonants and 24 vowels method. Back in college, I took Mandarin as my required foreign language (FOLA) elective. It was my attempt to find out what went wrong with Chinese language classes in Chinese schools. Zhuyin was used for too long (read here )   and isn't the ideal bridge between Mandarin and non-Mandarin speakers. Meanwhile, romanizing on your own without learning the pinyin gives the wrong reading. It's like how nobody should Sh in the place of X. I could talk about learning using the 23 vowels and 24 consonants method. The early stages of teaching pinyin followed the bopomofo method. The Chinese language teacher in college didn't use the 23 consonants-24 vowels method. Instead, we had the pinyin arranged using the bopomofo method. It was simply to translate all th

I just read from the Inquirer that House Minority Leader Marcelino Libanan wants to encourage the learning of Mandarin . Sadly, the article also says the following regarding Libanan's aim of wanting to learn Mandarin: “ If we are going to continue to rely on the export of labor to help drive our economic growth, we might as well equip our future workers with Mandarin and other foreign language skills to further build up their competitiveness, ” Libanan said on Sunday. Libanan, the representative of Pagtibayin at Palaguin ang Pangkabuhayang Pilipino (4Ps) party list, noted: “In foreign labor markets, we already have the edge because our workers can speak English. We should now aspire to double that advantage by encouraging more Filipinos to learn Mandarin at an early age.” This reminds me what we can't keep relying on what I call the labor export policy. I even wrote an article addressing the destructive obsession with OFW remittances . Sadly, the lawmaker may still be focused o

There's no denying that we're in the Asian century. We have the rise of Mandarin as one of the major languages of the world. In fact, it's the second most spoken language. However, I feel Chinese schools in the Philippines weren't exactly prepared to teach Chinese--only how to memorize without understanding. That's exactly why I didn't like the Chinese language subject. If there was one thing I hated about the Chinese language subject--it was the use of zhuyin. The use of Romanizing wasn't allowed. I could agree to learn to read the characters. However, Zhuyin may not be the best course of action in regard to the international community . I even feel that Zhuyin (a subject I hated) may be as obsolete as the Filipino ancient alphabet.  It wasn't until college that I got into pinyin. People had been checking out Taiwanese entertainment. I remembered Googling and found Romanized lyrics. Those who were college students in the 2000s (under the K+10) may remem