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[The Local Dialect]

Chinese students don't learn their own grammar though. Ask them if they know what Chinese sentence structure is or how to form adjectives in Chinese. It is fairly common for students to be weaker in the particulars of their own language's grammar than they are in the grammar of a foreign language.

Western education traditionally DID really emphasize grammar. My mom's generation had to diagram sentences, which is straight grammar. It has been de-emphasized along the way, but I actually think Western education teaches more about our grammar than Chinese education does about Chinese grammar. I can't comment on Arabic or Indonesian but my feeling is that European education still very much emphasizes grammar in the native language. I have some friends whose kids go to school in Austria and the German schooling is very grammar heavy.

[Canadapanda]

Chinese students don't learn their own grammar though.

I did a couple years of schooling in Hong Kong before I moved to Canada.  Until I attended Mandarin lessons a few years ago, I was under the assumption that Chinese (Cantonese, mainly) had no tenses or really any need for grammatical structure.  Mind you, Chinese grammar is much much much much much much more simple than that of European languages.

When I was learning the about the French tenses, I always thought that it was overly complicated and everyone should just learn Chinese instead.  Picking up Chinese again helped me realize why that was a stupid statement.