I scored an A1 for O-Level Chinese but struggle to speak a coherent sentence

Pointing at food items in the hawker centre because I don’t know how to say their names in Chinese. Stuttering when Chinese tourists ask for directions at the MRT station. Mixing in English words while speaking in Mandarin with elders. 
Like many young Singaporeans, I am appallingly bad when I have to use Mandarin. I find it difficult to speak in my own mother tongue despite 12 years of language classes. When surrounded by Mandarin speakers, my anxiety levels spike and I whip out my dictionary app. 
I often wonder why this is so. After all, I did score an A1 for Chinese (Express level) at my O-Level examinations. Thousands of dollars were spent on tuition classes in order for me to achieve this result. 
But then, I’d spent most of those 11 to 12 years completing written examination papers as homework and memorising Chinese phrases to use in essays. I practised my speaking skills just a few weeks before the oral examinations. 
With an English-speaking environment at home and less emphasis on speech for my Chinese education compared to the written skills, it’s really no wonder I always sound like I just began picking up the Chinese language rather than an intermediate learner who started at the age of five. 
It’s embarrassing when I talk to some fellow second-language learners who began classes three years ago but are already more fluent in Mandarin than I am. 
A similar phenomenon is happening in South Korea, where students’ English proficiency is not improving because of the “test-score oriented approach”, the Korea Times reported. 
Despite heavy investment in English education, South Korean students study it to excel in exams rather than to communicate better in the language. 
In Singapore, when students (or their well-meaning parents) go to bookstores to check out assessment books, they typically find multiple titles packed with Chinese idioms for students to memorise and to impress their examiners in Chinese essays. 
I spent so much time making notes on these idioms during my schooling days. It became a kind of obsession; I crammed so many of them into my compositions believing that this would show that I was good at Chinese.
I vividly remember the red stars my teacher would draw on these phrases while marking my work and this only encouraged me to add more of them to future essays. 
Now, at 23, I can’t remember even a single one. And all I can speak is broken Mandarin interspersed with English phrases when I am unsure of the Chinese translation. 
Upon entering the working world, I realised how valuable Mandarin-speaking skills are.
With more than 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers worldwide – the second-most spoken language after English – people working in almost any industry or field will likely have to communicate with Chinese clients in the course of their work. 
As a journalist, it would help me to fluently interview a broader range of interviewees and newsmakers such as Chinese-speaking tourists or people from older generations. 
It is a bonus for me to read and write Chinese better. 
This isn’t unique to me as a Chinese. My Malay- and Tamil-speaking friends agree that mastering the spoken form of their mother tongue would be more practical for them.
With English as the main mode of communication in Singapore, they don’t often encounter written texts in their mother tongue.
They, too, want to interact better with older adults in their ethnic communities or foreigners who may not be as comfortable speaking in English. 
Oral skills are important in helping us build strong interpersonal relationships. Speaking skills are also the first impression anyone gets of your language competency. 
And in this day and age, you can ask ChatGPT to write a report in Chinese for you, but it is difficult to develop a good rapport with others by speaking through Google Translate. 
Being able to have dinner with a Chinese speaker, discuss business plans or exchange fun facts about each other’s lives just requires speaking simple – yet grammatically fluent – sentences. 
At no point does this require using flowery or complicated vocabulary or literary expressions to convey a point across.
No shade to the idiomatic phrase “风和日丽” (feng he ri li, literally “moderate winds and bright sun” to describe good weather), but who starts a real conversation by waxing lyrical about the sun and breeze?
I acknowledge that schools make the effort to incorporate oral skills into the syllabus. 
In my conversation with a teaching fellow in Chinese language teaching and research at the National Institute of Education, the oral examinations for the Higher Chinese syllabus at the O-Levels constitute 20 per cent of a student’s overall marks.
And at the Express level, it is 25 per cent. But beyond these tests, students need to be conditioned to speak effortlessly in their mother tongue in a variety of settings outside of school. 
The culture of practising for the oral examination just a month or two or a few weeks before the test has to change. 
Instead of reading and writing, schools should place more emphasis on oral skills in mother tongue education. Perhaps it would be good to carve out class time to discuss socio-political issues or the latest events in every lesson, rather than just doing one examination paper after the other. 
It would be like having dinnertime conversations with family members, but in our mother tongue.
It might be too much to expect everyone’s family to speak primarily in their mother tongue at home, but having more opportunities to do so at school would help make up for this lack.
Written ability is still important, but for myself and many of my peers, being able to first feel comfortable conversing in our mother tongue would naturally motivate us to put in more effort to learn the intricacies of the language in its written form. 
To truly cultivate bilingualism and reverse the declining standard of mother tongue proficiency among Singapore’s youth, it takes more than just offering the Higher Mother tongue subject to more deserving students, as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong spoke about in this year’s National Day Rally. 
Hopefully, future cohorts of Chinese students in Singapore would be able to order their meals at coffee shops and food courts by speaking to hawkers in Mandarin, rather than resort to sheepish finger-pointing. 
Eunice Sng, 23, is a journalist at TODAY.