Ethnic Chinese here. Took Mandarin as my "mother tongue" subject in the 90s. Neither of my parents spoke a lick of Mandarin. Somewhere around Primary 3 my hatred for the subject began and persisted all the way until the A levels.

Back in those days mother tongue was taught with the assumption that most students had some sort of experience with the language back home, so we were made to memorise idioms and flowery terms without touching on basic grammar and vocabulary.

I could never understand a word in the cloze passage and comprehension segments of the exams, and would usually just guess the answers to multiple choice questions or copy chunks out of the passage in response to the comprehension questions.

No matter how closely I studied the new words taught in the syllabus, there was no way I could succeed at any sort of textual analysis because I lacked basic knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.

Believe it or not, I only discovered the Mandarin terms for "suitcase", "fork", "keyboard" and "sleepy" in my twenties.

On hindsight, only exposure to Mandarin media and recreational reading could have built up the requisite knowledge.

Eventually I just gave up on the language altogether, responding to my teachers in English whenever they spoke to me in Mandarin. When I graduated from JC, I could barely order a plate of noodles at a hawker centre in Chinese. I remember going on holiday to Taiwan and not being able to ask for directions to the subway station.

The irony is that after years of self-study as an adult I am now reasonably fluent and literate in the language and actually enjoy it a lot. To someone who has studied the language independently, the deficiencies of the previous MOE syllabus are all too apparent.