Why learn Chinese if other students speak it at home?

I liked learning Chinese at school. It was a challenge, one that I persevered with all the way through to the end of year 12. 

Maybe I kept at it because the promise was that if I carried on with Chinese to the end of year 12, I'd get to go on the China trip in year 11. However, I honestly believe I was so persistent because I was good at it. Or so I thought.

In years 7 to 10 I was encouraged to pursue the language, as I was constantly top of the class. Throughout year 12 I was also consistent. That is, consistently "satisfactory" or "good" in my SAC scores, and my teacher kept reassuring me that a mere "good" at my privileged school was probably "very good" at someone else's.

So you can imagine my dismay  when I  was told I'd scraped through with a raw score of 25. Not so good at it, hey?

It's all about that darned bell curve. Until the system figures out another way to rank students perhaps not even against but with each other, the number of students who are willing to compete against others who are miles ahead of them will continue to dwindle.

Australian students don't study Chinese in large numbers, but this is not due to laziness as Jane Orton suggested on these pages this week . Like anything in life, who wants to work hard at something if you already know the reward is less than satisfactory?

No matter how hard I practised those four tones, no matter how many pieces of paper I stuck on the shower recess to help memorise characters, no matter how many oral classes I had a week, there was no way I was going to do better than Xiao Ming who had been spoken to in Chinese since birth, but somehow the school system still considered Chinese to be her second language.

The problem is not with the teachers, the problem is not with the laziness of Australian students (a large generalisation), the problem lies, as Orton pointed out, in the lack of filtering between genuine second-language learners and those who have already had extended exposure to the language and culture.

I had to go to China and be engulfed by the food, sights and history to grasp the culture and understand Chinese people, whereas there were a dozen kids in our year level, even that of the year below, who we were ranked against, and who would go home and speak the language to their parents while they ate traditional jiaozi for dinner. That's not being racist, it's merely factual. My 20 hours of Chinese a week (four hours at school, 16 at home) couldn't compare to that.

In 2012, the year I completed year 12, a measly 4608 students completed a language in Victoria. Of that number, 244 completed Chinese as a second language. Now go and have a look at the high achievers' names in the paper and tell me how many of the names are not of Asian background.

There was a process my parents went through when I first put Chinese down as a subject at school – they ticked boxes on a piece of paper to say that I had not spent any time in a Chinese school, nor had I ever learnt Chinese. But the ticking-of-boxes-on-a-piece-of-paper system was not adequate to properly assess who may or may not have already been exposed to any elements of the subject. Until someone screens schools properly to decide who truly is learning Chinese as a second language, I don't think there is enough incentive for students to compete against those who have been exposed to it from an early age.

My Chinese teacher, Gary O'Meara (quite the genuine second-language-learner) is a rare example of a teacher whose Chinese studies are now his profession. He was one teacher who consistently motivated me to do well in a language that felt unconquerable. He showed me that it is do-able, he was persistent and he saw rewards, which now he reaps – lucky him!

Orton is right – we do need incentives and the resources for young Australians to take up Chinese. I also believe it is the language of the future. Kids need the confidence and the knowledge that their hard work and persistence will be rewarded.

I would have loved to have continued with Chinese throughout my time at uni, but I faced the reality that once again I would be in classes with people who were miles ahead of me. Thankfully the uni system is such that hard work is rewarded and poor work is rightly dissed, and we're not scaled against one another. But the intimidation was enough to turn me away from continuing my Chinese studies.

We need more Mr O'Mearas and more resources. But for now, let's give kids the confidence they need to be resilient and to stick with something that might not make sense at first, in the same way we hope they will when they're   studying any other subject.

Rachel Hibbert completed an arts degree at The University of Melbourne.