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It was so contagious that you found Chinese of all professions and ages using any means possible to grasp the language. It could be through language tapes, clubs or even "Crazy English" boot camps where they yelled out English at the top of their lungs.

Singaporean filmmaker Lian Pek decided to capture this frenzy and the people who were part of this, prior to this year’s Beijing Olympics.

Her documentary, Mad About English, was released earlier this year as a feature-length film (80 minutes) in Singapore cinemas and became the most-watched documentary there for six consecutive weeks.

Mad About English has since been trimmed down to one hour for its premiere on Discovery Channel this Sunday at 10pm, with Pek assuring that the essence of her documentary has remained intact.

Pek was a broadcast journalist before turning filmmaker. She made her documentary film debut in 2004 with Sayonara Changi, about prisoners of war during the Japanese occupation in Singapore’s Changi prison.

Her next documentary, Born Again Buddhists (2006), dealt with the rising number of child ‘incarnates’ vying for acceptance in Buddhist monasteries.

Born Again Buddhists won three awards, including best director, at the 12th Asian Television Awards in 2007. It also took the best international documentary prize at the Rome International Film Festival (2007), best of Discovery Asia (2006) and a finalist prize at the New York Festival (2007).

During a press conference to announce the premiere of Mad About English on Discovery Channel recently, Pek relates how she went about filming the documentary in the past year and a half in China.

"We found more and more people speaking the language apart from people in the service sector and people in the expatriate sector of the cities. That was what got me looking for characters for my film.

"The first person I found was 75-year-old Jason Yang who was trying to practise his English with anyone who was passing by."

Yang has been studying English for the past six years. He set up the Golden Years English Salon, an English club with weekly classes for seniors like himself at Beijing’s Chao Yang library.

He wanted to master English because he wanted to serve as a volunteer during the Beijing Games.

Pek eventually went on to meet others that were featured in her documentary such as Li Yang, the "crazy English teacher", who has an outlandish but somewhat effective method of teaching English; an English-learning taxi driver; a student at an English boot camp; and even Dr David Tool, the celebrity grammar cop.

"What was interesting to me was that 30 to 40 years ago, English was a forbidden tongue," says Pek.

"It was considered too westernised and too bourgeois. When the cultural revolution took place, it was a language you didn’t want to speak.

"The interest to learn English basically shows how far China has come and basically how much it has changed in a way," she says, adding that China has now successfully adopted capitalism and also English as a working language.

English has been taught in schools, colleges and universities for some time now but most Chinese barely converse in the language because they are not confident about their pronunciation.

Pek believes that learning English is not just a fad in China. "I think even before the Olympics, there was a hunger to learn English but when the Games came, there was this big push.

"I think English will be a working language for a long time more and they are very eager to learn it, do business with it and do trade with the outside world."