Posts tagged submission

“We Learn … 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear 30% of what we see 50% of what we see and hear 70% of what we discuss 80% of what we experience 95% of what we teach others.” -William glasser

One of the main themes of James Zull’s The Art Of Changing The Brain is greater interaction with subject material leads to better learning of it. Naturally, Chinese learners benefit most from a native teacher, but that doesn’t mean we learners can’t stick our two cents in when the opportunity arises. You can have an intuitive sense of how Chinese works and do fine. To teach it, however, you need to be able to explain it. Explain it in detail. This requires deep understanding. In language learning there is the concept of passive and active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary is what you understand but can’t produce in a conversation-for example. Active vocabulary is vocabulary you can produce.  When you set out to teach some of your passive vocabulary, or grammatical structures, or idioms you’re interacting more with them which will move them to active use. To teach anything you need to go through a process. Using David Kolb’s Learning Cycle as a starting point, we can extrapolate a relevant framework that enables you to learn as you teach. You have the concrete experience when you first learn something, there is some overlap with the next part as you go over the material again. Organise content - Here all your notes and references are pulled together and put into some sort of structure.  Present content - Now you have to explain all that information so it is coherent to the intended audience. Answer questions and receive feedback - Questions are good, they let you see where people aren’t getting it. And it gives you another chance to teach. This can be done very quickly or over a period of time. It depends on your knowledge of the subject.  If you see room for improvement you can always revise the lesson based on the feedback you received. This, again, benefits you more.

Who? Me? Teach?

Yes, you! Think about your level of Chinese. Now give yourself a grade between zero and ten. If you haven’t started learning yet, you’re zero. Tens are fluent or native speakers. If you didn’t choose zero, then you have something to offer the numbers below you. Unless they are experienced teachers, advanced learners often forget what it was like at the beginning. One benefit of receiving help from someone at a similar level is they may give the details that really help you. An advanced learner, however, may consider them trivial and gloss them over.  This creates a negative experience for the learner. They may think twice about asking questions if they don’t understand the answers and are conscientious about looking dumb.

This Doesn’t Require A Career Change

You don’t need to turn this in to a vocation. You can make it a part of your learning process. I started my blog Chinese Reader to teach people how to read Chinese starting from nothing. It’s been challenging and really beneficial for my enthusiasm in my own studies. Writing a blog is not for everyone, but there are many ways you can help learners with what you have. You may have a friend who is learning Chinese who could use your help. Participating on forums and in the comments section of blogs is another good option. If you are taking lessons in a class, you can also help your classmates. Even if you only have an idea of the answer, if you know how to find out more then you’re going through the teaching process described above. Now you’re an expert on the matter, and you will probably remember better than the person you just helped!  People will notice you being generous with your knowledge and be more likely to help you when you need it.

Graham posts simple lessons at Chinese Reader

(Source: twitter.com)

Study Tips for Learning Chinese

Even if you have a great teacher, much of your learning potential depends on you and your dedication to learning Chinese efficiently and successfully. There’s only so much that can be taught in the classroom during relatively short time periods. This means that it’s up to you to keep your study habits consistent and effective outside of the classroom, which will enable you to internalize material from class with increased speed and accuracy. To learn how you can facilitate better learning for yourself, try reading through the following tips on studying Chinese.

Understand Your Advantages

If your background is in English, romance, or other Western languages, you’re probably concerned about learning Chinese because of the many differences between it and your native tongue. But despite these differences, there are some aspects of Chinese that might come easily to students who speak romance languages. For example, Chinese grammar is fairly basic: subject + verb + object. What makes this even better for students who are used to romance language verbs is that there are no conjugations in Chinese. There are also no gendered or plural nouns, so the main factors that can make Spanish or French so frustrating to learn are absent from the Chinese language. Sure, there will be other difficult things to focus on, but you won’t have to worry about many of the problems you’re used to encountering with language study.

Understand Your Challenges

In addition to its difficult written characters, Chinese is a tonal language, so simply changing the shape of your vowels in a syllable can generate several different words and meanings. If your first language is a Western or romantic tongue, you’ll probably have difficulty with the idea that tones can change meaning. To help prevent this potential problem, make sure that you’re well grounded in the four tones and can reproduce them with accuracy and versatility. If this seems overwhelming, don’t give up yet – the rising and falling tones of English correspond roughly to the second and fourth tones of Mandarin Chinese, so that leaves you only two unfamiliar tones to contend with. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can just ignore the second and fourth tones in your studies, but it should give you a boost in confidence to help you through your practice.

Know Your Learning Style

As you’re probably aware, there are three main types of learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. You can take a short online quiz to find out which type of learner you are, then use these tips to help you study in the way that’s best for you.

·       Visual: Textbooks, flashcards, notes, lists, diagrams, colored highlighters to identify language functions, and videos in Mandarin can help you learn efficiently. Writing characters repetitively until you remember them correctly is a great way for you to drill written Chinese.

·       Auditory: Listening to MP3 files, CDs, recordings of classroom lectures, Mandarin radio, and Mandarin video will be helpful for you. You can also do yourself a favor by reading your notes aloud, recording them, and then listening to them as a review activity.

·       Kinesthetic: Find a partner and drill with flashcards, use interactive software or online games, play role-playing games with a partner, engage in dialogue, and study with others consistently. These study methods will allow you to get the interactive practice you need to complement your learning style.

Participate in Immersion and Interaction

No matter what type of learner you are, it’s important to keep the Chinese language in your mind all day – especially outside of the classroom. To give yourself reminders to practice Chinese and to keep it prominent in your environment, try some of the following ideas.

·        Actively watch TV or movies in Chinese. If you need subtitles, use them until you can understand what’s being said without looking at them. Leaving the radio on a Chinese station or playing Chinese songs on your MP3 player can also help you keep the language in your ears and mind.

·        Make labels for everything in your house or apartment. Include traditional and simplified characters, pinyin as a pronunciation guide, and tones to help you practice every aspect of the vocabulary words you’re learning.

·        Teach what you learn, and you’ll be able to remember and implement it more efficiently. Try finding a friend who’s interested in learning Chinese or even someone who will just listen to you for a while. The main concern is that you’re able to communicate what you’ve learned in class in simple, practical steps. If you can do this, you’ll be surprised at how well you’ll be able to think on your feet when you speak Chinese.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

When I was living in Beijing, I used to take private lessons with a teacher. Thanks to her help, I quickly got by in Chinese, but after a while, my teacher alone was not enough to progress, because I was not getting the best out of classes.

In this article I’ll explain how you can use immersion and homework to improve the efficiency of your lessons.

A lesson with a qualified teacher is the best value you can add to your language learning. Don’t waste that precious time with low value questions! E.g. after a few weeks, I kept asking my teacher for vocabulary. I could have searched all that in a dictionary, and use all that time to get some chengyu explained (idiomatic proverbs). My advice is: don’t ask you teacher for anything you can get by any other means, just ask him about complex points that need a live explanation. If what you need is a dictionary, no need to hire a teacher!

You don’t learn Chinese to speak with your teacher. You learn it because you need to speak Chinese with other people.

Talking to other people will teach you more than your classes. And seriously, that’s the fun part of learning a language. Ideally, your teacher should just help you with problems you noticed during the week, talking with other people. If you want to learn for real, immerse yourself. A friend of mine began dating his Chinese girlfriend one year ago, and hanging out with her Chinese friends, and now they live together. He has been exposed to the chinese language 24/7 for one year. Now he’s fluent. End of story. I’m not telling you to get a girlfriend, or to do all chinese all the time, but to experience Chinese under real conditions. A little chit chat every morning with your Chinese colleagues is enough to get started.

Especially in Chinese, there are some steps in the language learning where no teacher can help you. What you learn in a class is one thing, what you remember is another. In Chinese, memorizing the characters, their meaning and their pronunciation is even more important than in other languages. Review characters at home. Do your homework. Write characters lines or used a spaced repetition software to memorize them. Play memory games with your friends. If you don’t do the memorization homework by yourself, no one will do it for you, and it’s going to slow your learning.

William develops B-Speak, a tool to help students to memorize chinese characters.

If you’re learning Chinese then you’ll be all too familiar with the peaks and dips that come with the process.  One day you’re on top of the world speaking fluently and reading Chinese as if you were born in Beijing and other days you fumble every word and can’t seem to read a sentence even if your life depended on it.  Students who aren’t serious about learning Chinese quit learning the first time they hit one of these dips, each of which represents a hurdle or barrier that must be passed in order to ascend to the next level of learning.  As Seth Godin explains in The Dip, during any process when you reach a period of difficulty, or a “dip”, then you have the choice to either give up or continue on and make it through.  The choice is based on whether or not you will be successful after continuing, or will you just be wasting your time.  If you’ve learned Chinese to the point were you are about to enter the advanced stages of learning, then it’s safe to say that you aren’t wasting your time so you must continue and climb your way to the next level.
 
While you’re at the early and intermediate stages of learning, there is a clear course set for you - just stick to the provided learning materials and you’ll be sure to reach the next level.  Making it to advanced level isn’t so straightforward as there probably isn’t such a clear path to the next level, - you’re on your own! The choice is now yours regarding which learning materials to use, how to use them, and how best to divide your time. This is one of the reasons that not all learners progress to true advanced Chinese, along with the fact that most intermediate learners become complacent with their ability and don’t push themselves to break through into advanced level.   You’ve almost certainly noticed that the number of students in a Chinese class decrease in correlation with the increasing difficulty of the lesson.  

What can you do to maintain the motivation to drive yourself and continue improving and successfully proceed to advance level?

Focus on what interests you

One of the things that turns a lot of people off learning a language is the amount of time spent learning apparently useless words or mundane topics that text books are commonly filled with. The beauty of finally making it through to upper-intermediate and advanced levels is now you can chose what you want to learn.  Whatever it is that interests you, learn that.  If you like reading novels, business books, magazines, technology blogs - the choice is yours.  Don’t feel that you’re restricted to learning materials designed for foreign students of Chinese, venture away from this area and find books that are written for native readers, you’re sure to find a wealth of material on any subject.

Listen to and read the news

What’s the fundamental benchmark of learning a language to a decent level of fluency that you are guaranteed to be challenged on by a friend once they know you have learnt Chinese? “So can you read a newspaper?”  This is an ability that doesn’t come naturally during the learning process - to understand a Chinese language newspaper or a Chinese news reporter takes a lot of practice. There are many abbreviations, technical words, regional differences and other news-lingo that you need to learn. Luckily, with the Internet, finding sources for learning materials is easy - you only have to open your web browser and within seconds you can be watching television news reports from Taipei or reading the online version of the China Times.  Spend a few hours per week or once a day if you have time, reading and listening to online news reports.  Try to read news from a few sources and from both mainland China and other Chinese speaking countries such as Taiwan to ensure you get a broad view of the news.  When listening to Chinese news reports, don’t be put off if at first you can only pick out a few keywords - you’ll find after two or three listenings it gets a lot easier.

Choose your teacher wisely

Something that should also adapt as you progress while learning Chinese is the role of the teacher. You need to pick the right teacher for each level of learning.   When you were a beginner, the class might have been more one-way - just keep your ears open and listen to the teacher, you can ask questions but in the end what the teacher says goes!   At advanced level, to keep you interested and also help diversify and expand you knowledge, class should take the form of a guided discussion.  You’re already at the stage were you can read a lot of Chinese, your comprehension is at a competent level, so at this stage the teacher should point out subtleties, help in comparing and analysing texts, and provide diverse listening exercises from multiple sources among other activities. The class is more of a forum with the teacher guiding the students rather than the students simply listening and repeating which is much the case at beginner level.  That’s one of the benefits of ChineseTeachers.com - you can select your teacher, and if you prefer one  teacher over another then that’s your choice to make.  There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a class where the teaching style is directed at a different level than your current ability.

This is by no means an extensive list and simply a few key areas to get you thinking about how you can maintain your motivation for learning Chinese.  Everyone is different, so the areas chosen to focus on will be different for every person.  The main thing to understand is that however you choose to take your learning to the next level it is going to require a huge amount of time and effort, and you’ll need constant and consistent exposure to Chinese.  Although you’ve made it this far, the next goal is in reach you need to push on to achieve it.

We’d love to hear about what level you’re at and how you spend your time learning Chinese. How you keep your motivation up during the “dips” and what do you think makes a great teacher at each level? Please let us know in the comments below!

Dave from ChineseHacks

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