We are honoured to be featured on this week’s Talking Point – “Mother Tongue: How Can We Get It Right”, where we discussed how parents can motivate their kids to learn and revise the language. If you would like to watch it, there will be a replay on 21 Aug (Sunday), 11pm on CNA.

The simple reason why kids dislike Chinese is because it’s hard, and most humans prefer doing things they are good at, and avoid things they are bad at unless it’s important.

As Talking Point pointed out, there are far more kids speaking English at home now vs the past (in 2000, 30% of kids spoke mainly English at home vs 80% of kids currently). From experience, kids that get no organic exposure to Chinese at home tend to struggle at the language.

And let’s face it – the methods of teaching Chinese haven’t really changed compared to when we were young children. The same old rote learning, endless spelling and composition, and 习字. Except kids these days aren’t like us – kids these days are more independent, smarter and more digitally savvy.

In a nutshell, to the typical Singaporean child, Chinese is both hard and boring. So why would a primary school child want to practise Chinese over playing Minecraft or Roblox?

At this point, you might be thinking – “My Chinese isn’t great, but that hasn’t really affected me. So what if my child hates Chinese?”

Learning Chinese is like having an insurance policy for our children

For the majority of us, being bad at Chinese probably has little impact on our day-to-day lives. Chinese was merely an examination subject that didn’t matter after we graduated.

But this might not be the same for our kids. In a recent interview with Lianhe Zaobao, former Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo noted the impact of China’s rise, sharing that all of us face the same reality that China’s rise will impact all our lives, especially “our children’s”.

“We should anticipate that future in which English will find its proportionate importance, but Chinese will become much more important for our future“, Yeo added.

In that sense, being proficient in Chinese is akin to having a good insurance policy for our children – should the day come that being proficient in Chinese provides additional opportunities for our kids, wouldn’t we be thankful that we gave them the gift of being effectively bilingual?

But how?

The first step is recognising that disliking Chinese is a vicious cycle. The more a child hates Chinese, the more likely he or she avoids practising or using it, which naturally leads to further deterioration in the language.

To break the cycle, we need to find a way to motivate kids to be willing to practise and use Chinese.

That’s why we created VocabKing, an online learning platform where students can “Game their way to A”.

In this age of Minecraft and Roblox, you can’t just throw kids a stack of Chinese assessment books and expect them to do it without complaining. And even if they did it under duress, how much are they actually absorbing?

VocabKing contains many different revision tools, and the most popular one is the Pet Battle (which was featured on Talking Point). In Pet Battle, your child captures wild pets and battles his or her friends by answering Chinese questions.

So your child has fun while answering tons of Chinese questions – and of course, behind the scenes, our AI engine is analysing your child’s answers to create a unique learning journey that helps your child learn efficiently.

Vocab King is available for free if you are attending KidStartNow’s weekly enrichment classes. Alternatively, if you already have existing enrichment lessons and are interested in Vocab King as a supplement, we provide 7-day free trials. Simply sign up above or whatsapp +65-9820-7272 for more information.