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ROLE MODELS: Shooter Vanessa Yong and basketballer Michael Wong are two of five 'activists' in this year's Speak Mandarin campaign. With the Olympic Games less than a year away, the campaign hopes to ride on the interest in sports to reach out to Singaporeans, especially the younger ones. -- ST PHOTO: SHAHRIYA YAHAYA
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WITH the Beijing Olympics round the corner, organisers of this year's Speak Mandarin campaign are hoping to ride on the increased interest in sports to boost the language's popularity here.
To do this, they are roping in national athletes as role models and to get the younger set involved.
At indoor football facility The Cage yesterday, five national athletes - basketballer Michael Wong, shooter Vanessa Yong, footballer Shi Jia Yi, sailor Roy Tay and bowler Jazreel Tan - were unveiled as 'activists' at the launch of this year's campaign.
Completing the line-up was Straits Times sports correspondent Marc Lim, who will pen a weekly column on his efforts to learn Mandarin in time for the Beijing Olympics, which he is slated to cover.
Mr Lim, who was brought up in a family where Mandarin is spoken as a third language after English and Malay, will also record a series of Stomp! video clips in which he gets athletes to introduce terms, such as 'offside' or 'free kick', in Mandarin.
Minister in the Prime Minister's Office Lim Swee Say, who was guest of honour at the event, called the venture into sports 'timely'.
With the upcoming Olympics, many Singaporeans, especially younger ones, will take part in or watch sports. Athletes also serve as good role models, he added.
'So I hope when we ask this question, 'Huayu (Mandarin) Cool, are you game?', I hope many of them will say, 'Yes, I'm game,'' said Mr Lim, referring to the campaign's tagline this year.
Started in 1979, the annual Speak Mandarin drive aims to promote the language among Chinese Singaporeans, especially those born after 1965.
Post-65er and national basketballer Michael Wong, 28, uses Mandarin at home and on the court, and hopes to get more people to do so.
'If I come into contact with non-Mandarin speaking youth, I will ask them to try communicating in Mandarin,' he said.
Likewise, shooter Vanessa Yong, 19, said she is very much at home in Mandarin.
'Whoever speaks to me, I will speak to them in Mandarin, so they'd have no choice,' she said with a laugh.
Earlier, in his address to the 200 or so guests at the event, Minister Lim recounted how hard it was for him to learn English as a student at Catholic High, a Chinese medium school.
Despite his shaky foundation in the language, he did not give up as his father had convinced him he would lose out if he did not learn English.
Similarly, young Singaporeans will lose out if they do not learn their Mother Tongue language, he said.
'I have come to the conclusion that many young Singaporeans can be effectively bilingual tomorrow... because their foundation in Mandarin is better than my foundation in English in the 1960s,' he said.
The crux was not whether they are able to, but whether they are willing to, as his experience has shown.
Said Mr Lim: 'Because I'm prepared to speak my lousy English, as a result, my lousy English over the last 30 years has got better, betterer and hopefully, one day, become betterest,' he said to laughter from the audience.
hoaili@sph.com.sg
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