Semi-official language, English, in Taiwan.

Some legislators would like to pass a bill that makes English become official or semi-official language in Taiwan. If the bill is balloted, it would bring a number of impacts no matter on education or on culture. This change would be a reverse for the whole country. In education, for instance, for a very long time, our educational policies in English have focused on grammar and reading. If we plan to make English blend into our daily lives, especially in our everyday speech, the teaching guidelines shouldn’t follow the old way as they used to be done. However, we cannot neglect the development of our native language, Chinese. If we over-emphasize the English courses, we might gradually lose our radical knowledge concerning our native language and fail to completely develop another language as an official language due to the fact that a successful official language is related to its culture. Take Singapore as an example, it is a country that dwells different races that originated from different countries speaking different languages; nevertheless, they uses their official language, English, to communicate and to trade with other races and in school, they use English to teach different races. On the contrary, in Taiwan, the majority of our forefathers originated from China. Our background is not like Singapore, a mixture of different races. Although English is an international language, we don’t need to be so hurried to carry out that policy. Such being the case, we might violate our primitive advantage because the standing of Chinese becomes more and more crucial than ever before in this global village. People from all over the world soak in the trend of learning Chinese. However, there is no denying that English is still the most popular language in the world. If we learn it better, we will have more opportunities to keep the pace of the world. Thus, our government can advocate the benefit of learning English, but it is very essential for every Taiwanese to learn our native language well.