Well the key lies with the foundation. Does the student possess the required level of reading,writing and listening skills?Well, the student who did higher Chinese in primary school will be better equipped to handle the rigors of Secondary School Chinese. Students who are not apt in reading, writing and listening will have to lean on memorising (背). If a simple sentence is not able to be penned down by the student, he will face immense challenges where the bulk of the syllabus is on writing. Is is Sec school Chinese difficult?
1) Secondary school Chinese composition no longer consists of picture composition unlike that of primary school and the minimum word requirement is above 200 to 300 words.
2) Situational writing will be the additional component for paper 1 where students are required to write letters or email under a given scenario. Students with weak written vocabulary will find this challenging.
3)The written essay component will be either a newspaper article review or narrative. Most teachers will prepare students for it by going through a student's newspaper called comma or （逗号）every week. After getting the insight to current affairs happening in Singapore, students will then need to pen down their thoughts, comments, suggestions and whether they agree or disagree according to a required format. Many students are marred by the inability to recognise difficult words of a report. Reading the the article or question statement will be a challenge, much less writing the essay.
4)Besides being filled with long passages, paper 2 consists of many difficult words. The cloze passage for example has options that are very similar to each other. Many students can get away by using the "tikam" or guessing method during their primary school days but that is no longer the case for secondary school.
5)Next, 3 comprehension (MCQ) and 2 Comprehension (open-ended) occupy the rest of the sections. The most challenging of the questions are the last two which requires you to give an opinion, a philosophy or real-life example that the story can apply.The weaker students do not understand the question or are unable to construct their own sentences based on their knowledge. The medium standard students who feel for the passage will find it hard to find accurate words to express them. This could be attributed by the fact that every comprehension question allow lifting of texts and this question could be the only one that students had to phrase their own sentences. Normally these questions are worth a heavy 5 marks. Some schools even set them as 6 to 8 mark questions. With an average of 2 questions from comprehension open-ended A and B, the marks at stake will be 24 to 32. Imagine students who are not prepared for this type of questions who may only manage to secure 1 to 4 marks and lose 20 marks from the comprehension. Time constraint is another evil that could cause the above scenario to happen when students doggedly do the paper by sequence neglecting the time allocation for each section. Even Higher Chinese student may fall into this trap.
6)For the oral component, the primary school and secondary school both have picture descriptions. However the subtle but significant difference is that the primary school deals with illustrated picture whereas the secondary school deals with photo. Many being used to picture have difficulty describing orally a photo. Students who come from an English-speaking background and do not speak mandarin frequently might startle their way through, unable to achieve fluency.
All in all, the interest toawrds writing, speaking, listening and reading have to be picked up in order to ace sec school chinese.
