Premier Su Tseng-chang (
"We should make [mother-tongue language lessons] easier, more conversational and fun," Su said. "We do not need to teach children complicated vocabulary at the very beginning. It will put them off."
The premier made the remarks during the weekly Cabinet meeting yesterday morning after receiving a briefing from the education ministry on the progress of mother-tongue language lessons at elementary and secondary schools.
Citing an example to illustrate the challenges facing the education ministry, Su said that during a Taiwanese speech contest held recently by the Taipei City Government, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) approached an elementary school student and asked him: "What is your last name?"
However, the child did not understand what the mayor was asking.
Learning a language should be fun, Su said, adding that all dialects were of equal value and deserved to be respected.
"If we force children to learn specific dialects, we will not achieve our goals because we will not have made the process fun and children will not be happy to learn," he said.
The premier said that most of the speeches set for the Taipei City Government's contest were too difficult and the children did not really understand them. As a result, they learned vocabulary and sentences parrot-fashion and would not recall them after the speech contest, he said.
The premier also called on older native speakers to contribute their knowledge of their languages to school curricula.
"Our end goal is to make learning fun. Learning languages should not be a burden," Su said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching