Wendy Lin is a high school Chinese teacher and the author of 

• “Daily Chinese”
• “Practical Chinese”
• “Chinese for Children”
• “Games for Learning Chinese”
• “Chinese Learning Games 10 in 1”
• Articles regarding overseas Chinese learning
• Plus Chinese curriculum for several school districts

Wendy Lin has published more than 20 Chinese learning materials.  She has helped the Woodbridge school district successfully build and expand their Chinese program to four full time Chinese teachers in three years.  She constantly writes articles for the local newspaper and gives workshops for the Chinese teachers.

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese is notoriously one of the hardest languages to learn.  Yet, with a well-designed textbook and appropriate teaching strategies, learning a difficult language can be fun, easy, and sustainable.  

The Chinese language is known by most westerners as a difficult language to learn.  In order to attract more learners, many educators tend to use various cultural activities to initiate the program.  Especially for younger learners, cultural introduction often becomes the core curriculum.   Usually the older the learner, the more the language is emphasized in the curriculum. It is when they go back to learn the reading, writing, and speaking that various problems start to show.  It either ends up being that the learning does not sustain, or the students feel frustrated and lose interest.  When the purpose of learning the language is to be able to use it, there should be more focus on the language rather than the culture in the beginning - not to mention the younger the learner, the more benefit there is to learn a foreign language.  Whether or not the learning is interesting depends on how the teacher teaches it.  There are so many games or activities that are fun, easy, and effective (See “Games for Learning Chinese” /practicalchinese.com).  Emphasis on the culture will sometimes become an obstacle to the learning process.  

The Chinese language is like any other foreign language. It has an easy and a challenging component.  Chinese people have said, “Knowing yourself and your opponents well before the battle is the key to win.”  

How Chinese is easier than other languages

1. Verbs do not have different tenses: e.g. Chinese people would say “I go to China last year.”, “I go to China next year.”   
2. Nouns are neither singular nor plural: e.g. “one book”, “ten book” are both correct.
3. Genders do not exist orally as they would in English, French, or many other western languages.  
4. One means many.  One character could cover several English words.  For example, the Chinese Zodiac only has one character to represent each of the twelve animals, but in English, there are several different translations for one animal.  Therefore you might have seen several editions for the Chinese Zodiac signs.
5. Numbers, months, dates, and weekdays are easy to learn: You only need to learn the numbers from 1 through 10, and you will be able to count from 1 through 99, since the numbers between 11 and 99 are a combination of numbers 1 through 10.  In addition, you only add an additional character “month” 月plus the numbers 1 to 12, and you will be able to name all 12 months of a year.  It is the same for dates and weekdays; add the character “day” or “weekday” followed by a number (See Daily Chinese/practicalchinese.com).
6. The structure of questions and statements is the same but the question word is used.  Following are just some examples of how question words are used.  
   a. The use of the question word “嗎／  吗 Ma”: The question word “Ma” is used when the response “yes or no” is expected, and it is placed at the end of a statement. When it does, it will convert a statement into a question.  
   b. The use of the question word “幾／ 几  ji”: 幾／ 几 is a question word for numbers.  When it replaces all the numbers in a question, it converts the statement into a question. 
   c. By applying the formula, “Positive Word + Negative Word = Question Word”, students can flexibly come up with a question word and conduct a dialogue.  This avoids the learners having to deal with the complicated grammar structures and makes the learning more flexible.

There are more question words, such as “Who”, “When”, “Where”, etc. that are used to replace key words as the example “ji” shows above.

Expanding drill makes the learning easy and sustain: 

The learning process is as building up a pyramid – the Chinese language has the advantage of applying this teaching strategy since it is based on characters, starting from the individual words, to sentences, and then paragraphs.

For example:

• Cafeteria  
• One cafeteria
• Has one cafeteria
• Upstairs has one cafeteria
• Down stairs also has one cafeteria
• Downstairs, upstairs both have one cafeteria

Through this learning process, the new words will have been repeated several times along with the structure.  Reinforcement can be done through various activities in reading, writing, and speaking.  

Repetition by including contents based on the previously learned materials will make the learning process like a snowball rolling, by increasing vocabulary as well as sentence structure.  

Following are some typical situations that cause frustration in learning.  In order to make Chinese language easy to learn, they should be avoided.

One of the major things that confuses or frustrates students’ learning is the ambiguity of the objective in terms of content as well as the teaching process:

There shouldn’t be more than one major concept in the same chapter, and the topic itself should be clearly explained.

For example, “Greetings” should not include nationality or occupations in the chapter contents.  As a matter of fact, the difference between formal and informal occasions based on Chinese culture should be explained clearly.  Or “Family members”; the complexity of titles in Chinese family relationships is more detailed than in Western culture.  One chapter can be based on relationships from a student’s position (father, mother, elder or younger brother and sisters etc.) and the other will be based on the parent’s position (son, daughter, child, children, etc.).  They should not be combined in the same chapter, or partially covered in one chapter.  Other topics such as “Date and time” should be introduced in a separate chapter because some of the words lack proper connection.  (Please refer to the “Daily Chinese” textbook for details.)

Another major confusion is the learning process regarding reading, writing, and speaking.

Chinese is not phonetic, as are all romance languages.  The whole process of learning a new word takes about triple the effort as learning English.  In order to make Chinese learning less frustrating and easy to adopt, all the listening, speaking, reading, and writing should be introduced step by step.  It makes the learning objectives clearer as well.

Suggested exercises:

• Listening ~ The teacher says the new word in Chinese and students guess the meaning through all the clues the teacher provides (Teacher pointes to pictures or objects, etc.).
• Speaking ~ The teacher gives a word in English and have students say it in Chinese.
• Reading ~ The teacher writes the symbol on the board and says the word in Chinese, so students will connect the sound and meaning with the symbol.
• Writing ~ Introduce the stroke orders for each new character.  (See “Daily Chinese” workbook)

The character, the basic unit of the Chinese language, is so much more different from the words of romance languages that make many people think that Chinese is very difficult to learn.  In order to build up a good foundation and prevent repeated mistakes in writing characters, the stroke order should be carefully introduced.  Moreover many characters share the same components.  Once students are familiar with the strokes, it will help them write a new character that contains the same components without help.  Counting the number of strokes will also help students to look up a character in a dictionary.  Conventionally, the Chinese dictionary arranges the characters by the number of strokes in the character.

There are other difficult aspects of learning Chinese other than writing characters:

Sentence structure is another challenge to a non-Chinese speaker.  There might be several ways to express one situation, for example, “I have learned Chinese for two years” is the same as “I Chinese have learned for two years”, and “Chinese I have learned for two years”.  Another example, “What is your name?” in English could be “Your name is called what?” or “ You are called what name?”.  In some cases, some words can be omitted and the meaning remains the same. 

Measure words are another obstacle even to native speakers.  The major words usually changed with the objects and there are more than one hundred measure words in Chinese language.  For native speakers, measure words were introduced to children at a young age.  Since sentence structure is not a major problem to them as it is to the second language learners, they are able to concentrate on distinguishing the different usages of different measure words.  However, it is quite confusing to non-Chinese speaking learners. To prevent from frustration or confusion, it is suggested that no more than three major words to be introduced to the first year non-native speakers especially the young learners.  

Learning through grammar is not as effective or easier as learning through rules or patterns.  Rules do not involve many linguistics terms as grammar does.  When learning through grammar they are required to be able to distinguish the linguistic terms, however, rules do not.  Moreover, there is no existing Chinese grammar system that has been adopted and commonly used regularly by schools.  

Repetition is such an important factor that will make the learning easier not only for the sentence structures but also for the character itself.  If the contents are not closely related, it might not be able to provide enough chances for students to review the learned material.  Since Chinese language is not phonetic neither alphabetic, repetition plays even more important role especially in reading and writing.  Every character is the combination of different strokes.  Even with the same strokes, a different length or position will make a totally different character (Please refer to “Daily Chinese” workbook for examples.).  Through constant writing exercises, enhance students’ ability to write and to recognize characters.  However, moderate writing exercises are necessary.  Repeatedly coping characters usually shut off students learning interest, which should be avoided.  A good writing exercise should give different aspects of writing practice.  

Regarding the assessment

To ensure maximum learning and minimum frustration, students should build a strong foundation before moving on to the next chapter.  The assessment should be done in two aspects - vocabulary and chapter wrap-up tests that cover overall chapter contents.

Conclusion

What has been mentioned above are some of the typical misconducts in teaching Chinese as a second language that make Chinese a difficult language to learn.  To make the learning fun, easy, and more effective, the difficult parts especially should not be imposed on beginners; instead, teachers should emphasize the easy aspects of the language.  In terms of writing exercises, mindless copying of the characters should also be avoided.

Various learning activities such as BINGO, “Simon (Teacher) says”, puppet shows, etc. should be used instead.  Constantly practice and creating authentic environment are always helpful.  

References

• Lin, Wendy. Practical Chinese. New Jersey: Creative World Ent., 2000. Print.
• Lin, Wendy. Daily Chinese. New Jersey: Creative World Ent., 2008. Print.

Wendy Lin from Practical Chinese