Discussion on Our Road Signs to English the Language

Fun
Daily Journal April 30, 2006
Discussion on Our Road Signs to English the Language
No disrespect to all English speakers I know of, I am simply judging the subject in this writing as logically and fairly as I possibly can in terms of the discussion of the many “white elephants” our government make that simply, in the end, makes fools of themselves.
Why are road signs in Taipei written in both traditional Chinese and English? Put aside English speakers and foreigners with English proficiency, most of the local people living in Taipei do not understand English. Then why are these road signs written in both languages? Our government officials and representatives from the Taipei City Government would probably say that this is for the convenience of English speakers and foreigners working in Taipei. But how many people in Taiwan, besides English speakers working or residing in Taipei, speak English? And how come in America, road signs are always written in English? I believe the government did it for the convenience of the foreigners working in Taipei. How about the amount of Chinese population working in the States? Should not the American government think about adding translation for their road signs to better encourage travelers to visit their country? Or, is it simply because English is a simpler language to learn and to understand than Chinese?
But then I must ask, Taiwan might be trying to develop into a bilingual country like Singapore, but it is not even close to being a country similar to Singapore, besides, our senators are still arguing the fact that by forcing kids to learn English since elementary school, our future generation is lacking the basic proficiency in Mandarin speaking and writing ability (not to mention some “extremists”-kind of senators that urge the importance of Hakka dialect for its significance in representing the identity and culture of real Taiwanese, and other more traditional families that only speak the Taiwanese dialect – and these families are making their kids automatically responsible for learning Taiwanese at home and speaking Mandarin at school, and now there is another obstacle to overcome – English). English is now a school subject and is causing many people difficulties in learning it.
The Taiwanese government tends to mend holes on the wall when it is too late (and it does not have spare hands to cover the gaping space). Our tax money has been taken to build new roads, and to make new road signs. But most of our kids whose parents’ tax money has gone to making bilingual road signs, do not speak English. Yes, of course, they are now forced to learn another language at school, while jeopardizing their proficiency in Mandarin, their original language.
It is a good thing to make transition of our people’s understanding in languages, but it is clear that Taiwanese kids will not be like Singaporean kids in the near future.