Afrikaans is NOT such a nightmare

Dear Redi,

I was listening to your show about having Afrikaans forced as a subject at schools.

There is more than one issue here.

Firstly, even if another official SA language is offered at the school already, a lot of kids realize that it is not a better option, and secondly, students have an attitude problem.

I matriculated in 2004, and my home language is Mandarin Chinese, so as far as i was concerned Afrikaans would be the fourth language that i'd learn. English was giving me hell as it is, so any more languages on my shoulders were NOT welcome. I guess, in hindsight was lucky that my primary school taught Zulu as well as Afrikaans until grade 7, and my public high school did offer Zulu as a second language, so in high school i could make a choice. 

Understand that Afrikaans was(and sounds like it still is) a HATED subject at schools. When i started school in SA, i adopted the attitude of the kids around me and HATED Afrikaans in Primary School. BUT we ALSO hated Zulu. In fact, we just simply hated every subject which didn't have a "fun"/"nice" teacher - and the way we classified these teachers into the "nice" categories were not scientific! :p

Anyway, the attitude of hating the languages and various other subjects carried on to High school. The attitude against Afrikaans was worse in my high school than for Zulu, and several non-Zulu speaking students opted to take Zulu instead, and i thought seriously about it too. But the second language is taught at the "second language level", which means that we go into much less depth than for a first language (so we didn't need to interpret "how the author felt when he wrote that paragraph, and how did he communicate this"), but it is required to learn the STRUCTURE of the language, construct sentences and learn to change tenses etc. Most of the non-Zulu speaking students who chose Zulu ended up reverting to take Afrikaans because Zulu is just SO much more difficult at a second language level than Afrikaans is.

The structure of Afrikaans is simpler, and at the second language level, there are fewer rules that needs to be learnt. it is also much more similar to English than Zulu or the other venaculars, so your mind needs to do a lot Less bending. I eventually realized that Afrikaans was in fact the EASIEST subject at school because (Even if i was really good at maths) there were MORE rules in the "Factorization" section in maths than is the WHOLE of Afrikaans. It eventually became clear that my attitude of Hating Afrikaans was unfounded. I was following the feelings of everyone around me, which meant that i was being a sheep - the most disgusting form of mentality in my book. Once my attitude toward Afrikaans changed, it became even easier, and I went on to share the Top in Afrikaans trophy in matric.

The HATE of Afrikaans is an attitude that students adopted from the early years in primary school. I don't know where the other students got it from, but i got it from them. I also thought that it was unfair and stupid that we were FORCED to learn it. but ANY other second language is the same. the Canadians HATE learning French as their second language, the Taiwanese HATE learning English as their second language. Somewhere in their minds they have it that if it's the one subject they do really badly at, it must mean that it's really really hard and that's another excuse to keep hating it. That's a VERY detrimental mindset and it's up to parents to get it out of their heads. 

For parents to entertain this negative attitude to the point of whining about it on radio instead of setting the kids straight only shows that these parents have the SAME attitude, and that THEY are infact those who instilled it in their kids.

These are KIDS, they HATE WORK, they want to PLAY. in High School they want to have girlfriends, and cool clothes, and nonchalant attitudes like the stars on TV. They will find ANY excuse to hate ANY subject. These are Very easily influenced pre-Individuals and we need to take care what kind of guidance we give them. We can't just sympathize and entertain their every complaint. They've got to jack themselves up and learn to become real people - who have do a LOT of things that we don't Want to do. Afrikaans is the least of their problems!

-- 

Jennifer Hsieh
MSc Neurophysiology
Dpt Human Biology
University of Cape Town
+27 21 650 6599

Chairperson
Golden Future Project
University of Cape Town
Cell: +27 82 906 8108