The Hong Kong Education System
Appendix R
A Note on the Chinese Language
education.
This note is included for the benefit of readers who are
unfamiliar with the Chinese language or its characteristics, in order
to give them an insight into the linguistic background to Hong Kong
The problems associated with the bilingual education system,
with the teaching of Chinese and English, and with the choice of language
as the medium of instruction in schools are discussed briefly in chapters
2 and 7.
General
2.
Chinese is one of the Sino-Tibetan languages, first developed
along the Yellow River. Its script is non-alphabetic, consisting of
30,000 ideographs (or 'characters'), of which a knowledge of about
3,000 is required to read a newspaper and about 6,000 to understand
literature. There are several major dialects: these differ to such a
degree that speakers of different dialects may be unable to understand
each other, though the characters are common to all of the dialects.
The principal dialect of the people of Hong Kong and of the adjacent
Guangdong Province is Cantonese and this is the dialect used in virtually
all Hong Kong schools. All the dialects are uninflected, monosyllabic
and tonal, the spoken tone of a monosyllable conveying its meaning.
Various forms of simplified written Chinese and romanised versions of
Chinese dialects have been devised but these are not normally used in
the Hong Kong education system.
Chinese characters
3.
Chinese characters have the following features:
(a) each character is pronounced as a monosyllable;