How should we teach Chinese?

Back when I was an elementary education major, I visited Seattle's Wing Luke Elementary School. From what I recall, they have a really good integrated program for both Mandarin and English immersion in the Asian communities in Seattle. We have a very large Asian community in this area. Their webpage is at: http://www.seattleschools.org/schools/wingluke/ Looking at their programs page, I can't find anything specific about their program, however. You're probably referring to adult learning, though, aren't you? I'm going to be checking the resources listed at: http://www.seattlelanguages.com/mandarin.htm How is the traditional Chinese teaching method different from the typical western methods?

speaking of facilitating, perhaps it would be easier to track thoughts and responses by allowing for a way to reply to a specific post right under that post (like topics within topics within topics...)--for clarity's sake. scrolling through pages to see who may have responded to this or that, or to weed out what has or has not already been said, while one may glean chunks of useful information in the process, 'tis a tad time consuming, which, i think, a bit of a (re)organization could remedy. And i am still shouting for at least some grammar points, understandably they could be a double edged sword for some BUT how will they know until they've been cut (by constructive feedback) ;)

Is there another way to learn to write characters besides practice, practice, practice. Because if somebody knows one, I wish they would share it with me.

My approach to characters is to focus on recognizing them, not being able to write them by hand. So, my practice is mostly reading and entering into a computer. It's less tedious than writing each character hundreds of times, but my grasp of characters is a little more loosely held than if I were to do it the traditional way.

I figure there are many more characters that I should learn, than ones that I can learn. Therefore if I go through sentences and whole passages, and let the ones that want to stick in my brain do so, I'm still learning the same amount with none of the displeasure. The ones that don't want to stick, well, by the time they're left over I'll have seen them (and looked them up) so many times that they'll stick by themselves. I mean, hell, why do slog work that you don't have to do?

The teaching methods (for Mandarin) I've experienced in universities and private classes here in (southwest) China are the worst I've seen, especially for higher-level students. Ever teacher I've had in a class (as opposed to private tutors) seems to think that making everyone read the text aloud a dozen times actually does something. Well-documented (and old) psychological research has shown that reading aloud doesn't really help one grasp the content; the reader is too concerned with pronouncing everything correctly. Its main purpose would be pronunciation correction, which would be fine if that were the reason we're attending a 高级班, 口语 or otherwise, and if it didn't take up half the class time! But it's not why we show up; we want to learn how to comprehend things and communicate effectively! Almost every teacher I've had has stuck to the textbook like Garfield to the last slice of lasagna in the world. We do get to produce sentences to practice grammar points, and sometimes we even get to present a topic or a point of view to the class. However, not a single teacher has ever taught us how to structure our presentations and arguments to make them more Chinese. Not a single one has ever tried to really revise or critique a student's oral presentation or story-telling, outside of correcting word-level and sentence-level mistakes (and that itself is rare!). Not a single teacher has ever focused on true communicative ability, centered around actually developing students' ability in varying language situations. They've all been happy (to varying degrees) to just throw the textbook's content at you, regardless of how useful it is, and regardless of whether or not your actual communicative ability is improving. Of course we're learning new words and characters (it's not TOTALLY useless), but for the larger language picture, you really have to develop that on your own. In essence, the teaching methods I've experienced are pretty much the exact opposite of the methods they advocated in my TEFL course. I've had some mediocre language teachers (French and Chinese) in the USA, but every single one of them (and probably me as well, and I'm not a great teacher) EASILY outclass all the formal class instructors I've had here. Chinese Pod, on the other hand, is golden. My passive understanding has grown tremendously since starting here, and it's even seeped into my active discourse (I don't know how many times I've used a Pod-learned word and had another Poddie nod knowingly and mouth a single word: "Pod?"). The stress is on current, communication-oriented (for the most part) language, as it should be for what the site is trying to do.. 加油加油！

I'm with wei1xiao4 on that one, also see my comments on Ken's blog.

No pain, no gain! It's the same for Chinese. wei1xiao4 I like to use Chinese Writing Master 4.0 to see the character written for me before I attempt it. This conveys the stroke order and also subtle things I might not have noticed "that stoke relative to the preceeding one is smaller" and go you get the whole picture. There is also the book Learin CHinese Characters in which the 800 HSK1 characters are 'storied" by which I mean the constituent parts are used to create an easy to remember story eg woman + child = good and make up a story about this. To many this can be too much overhead and it is really down to the way you think. John Pasden has remarked before that he doesn't really need to write out the characters a lot - as long as he can tie together the parts - that can be quite effective. Also John has mentioned that learning chinese can and probably needs to be a near obsession. I liken it to launching the space shuttle - a concentrated effort is needed at first in order to learn how to learn but eventually the force of gravity lessens! As for Ken's blog, I think learning chinese is like learning French with the words back-to-front and upside down! No wonder CHinese programs get canceled before they get off the ground. Chinesepod allows us to share the pain - "we're all alone in this together" and it's a great way to hear chinese daily and interact. They do puncture a hole into the vacuum of learning Chinese outside China!

I'm new here at Chinesepod so it's interesting to hear how others work with the learningpocess. Every afternoon I walk my dog after work. The last 2 months I've been companied by Ken and Jenny on my afternoons i the snowy Norweigian woods - speaking out loud all the lessons. I try to read and write some caracthers also, but I feel that for the moment it's enough for me to learn Chinese and Pinyin from a foreign language. Am I doing this in a totally wrong way?

wei1xiao4, Practice is the only way to learn to write the characters, though I would suggest writing meaningful tracts designed to communicate, rather than lists of words. Fortunately it's possible to make the other aspects of learning Chinese more cognitive. windwalker, I sympathize. I've seen so much of this it ain't funny. What you've described is par for the Mandarin teaching course. But keep using CPod and keep practicing and you will get there nonetheless! tsunst, Keep doing whatever makes you feel comfortable. It's all about 'learning on your terms'. We try to embed the types of structures that will help you learn into the lessons. After that it's up to you how you consume them. If you're motivated, listening, and having fun, then you are learning for sure. I think it is also precisely this type of discussion that helps you to get better at getting better. Sharing with other learners or practitioners can lead to tremendous learning insights that make it all more motivating and more effective. For me, this is the community of practice at work. Take advantagte of it!

julesong: From what I have heard traditional Chinese learning seems to be very much rote learning, drill patterns etc.

I learned, completely by accident, a while back that I could more easily memorize lyrics if I practiced the songs while driving. (A performer who can't remember lyrics easily, yep, that's me.) I started with ChinesePod while driving to and from work, about an hour's drive each way. It has occurred to me, that the same thing is working for me... I don't know what it is about driving, but somehow the lessons penetrate and stick with me a lot better that way. I've tried studying lessons sitting at my desk while going over the written dialogue at the same time, and while it's helpful it just doesn't work quite as well unless I've already gone over the lesson several times while driving already.

Knitting works the same as driving. I reckon that no matter how intense the brain work is, there is always a lot of brain that is not devoted to the task. That extra piece of brain gets bored and starts attention-seeking behaviour that upsets the concentration. If you give it something constructive to do, like driving or knitting, it gets satisfaction from its own little achievement and leaves the rest of your brain in peace to focus fully on the lesson.

julesong, I used to sing in a Gospel choir 10 years ago in Seattle, and listening to your rehearsal tape during your commute was actually the preferred method; a song was taught one week, and then when we came back the next week, everybody knew the song, all the lyrics, all the harmonies. That method became somewhat more difficult to pull off when tape decks started disappearing from car stereos... Part of that is that it was taught well, the director (Cora Jackson) had teaching music down to a science; as a language teacher, I could write a book about what I learned about teaching language from the way she teaches music. Another part of it was that in your car, you don't just listen to your rehearsal tape, you sing along, out loud to yourself in the car; that was huge. Finally it's worth noting that learning in this method was paperless. At first the visual learners would say, "help, I need to see stuff, I'm not an audio learner," but those complaints lasted about 30 seconds, once they realized that this method wasn't audio either, it was kinesthetic. So am I saying that we should teach spoken Chinese with a kinesthetic method? Yes.

I am not a linguist but I am a Professor with more than a few years behind me. If I and my colleagues taught Engineering the way that Chinese is taught, the world would be woefully lacking in may of the comforts we enjoy today. And this would for the lack of engineers. Frankly the best way to learn in my opinion is by doing. What a teacher or a professor should do is guide the student in making good decisions and direct them away from bad decisions. What this means for language teachers is that students need to practice the language in such a way that they have to make decisions about what words to use. It is not enough to practice rote phrases! We need to put students into roles where they are force to formulate responses based on what they have learned to date. Students need to explore the language in a guided way. And whatever is used to do this must be relevant to the student. If Chinese history or music or ,,, is not of interest to student, then the effort of the teacher will be greatly underappreciated. For business students as many of us are, we want to be learning how to talk about business and how to persuade others to buy our product. For students in college, it is all about their future. They want to know what they will need to socialize and what they will need to be successful in their future endeavors. The language instruction needs to be tailored for this to be most succesful. In this respect, I really like what Cpod has done: they are providing relevant and timely materials rather than meaniless and emotionless epitomes of the Tang dyansty. Keep it going, Ken!

Taking JPVillanueva's musical comment a little farther, my children learned to play piano/violin/viola/etc. using the Suzuki method. I am not a Suzuki teacher, but I remember that part of it was always having a tape/CD playing the songs currently being taught. While playing an instrument requires some additional technical skills, when you sat down for a lesson, you at least knew what the song should sound like. At young ages there was no comparison with most "note" students. To be fair, Suzuki students often had problems making a transition to a more traditional musical environment involving sight reading. However, they grew up loving their music and usually continued it into later life. I intuitively feel that there are some parallels here between classroom learning and some of the new ideas being bandied about in language. Still, I'm just an accountant, not a linguist.

Ken, practice is the only way to learn to write the characters, it's the only way to learn 'full stop'. There is no reason why practice would preclude having fun, but I'm not sure why 'cognitive' would mean more effective in a language learning context. I guess I can be considered a long-term user and advocate of ChinesePod, learning without any formal classroom setting, not at all enthused by rote learning and quickly bored. Yet for the average person that I am, repetition is key, be it in listening (great musical analogy here), talking or reading, and I do think that those who are trained to learn, such as actors or people schooled in traditional ways, have a major advantage. You ask, how should we teach Chinese : where I think ChinesePod could improve is by starting Chinese-only discussion (banter) way earlier. That would take the crutch away and a lot of people would likely walk away, but as far as learning goes I contend this would be way more effective. If you look at what CSLpod or iMandarinTools do (just came across that one yesterday), their intermediate levels which seem to be closer to your Elementary, hardly use any English. They are also much more systematic in their vocab repetition within and across lessons. With ChinesePod, you really only approach this at the Upper Intermediate level, with normal speed Chinese only at Advanced. I know everyone loves you and John and would scream if you hinted at changing anything, but that's essentially what immersion would mean, it would work and in fact I think it's essential.

This is a subject which I can't resist commenting on because (i) it means a lot to me; and (ii) Ken has so graciously asked for opinions. After reading Ken's blog, and the very thoughtful comments thereto, I would like very much to say, "Whoa please!" and express my total bewilderment at any suggestion that language learning is all about entertaining the student or letting the student become her/his own teacher. Is that so "retrograde"? Chinese, a so-called "analytical" language, is so different from Indo-European languages that any wannabe learner from a non-Chinese background really does need to work with a real teacher, and trust and respect that teacher. To this extent, I can't agree with Goulniky more. I keep reading incomprehensible posts in Chinese characters on CPOD, using words which are very "advanced" for me, but which posts don't make any sense AT ALL to me because the author did not understand Mandarin syntax. For me, there is nothing sadder than unintelligible posts, using "big" language, by people who began expressing themselves freely before they had gotten a good grip on Chinese syntax. I believe in rewarding every effort, but learning is a two-way street, a dialogue between teacher and student. I should (humbly) like CPOD to never, EVER relinquish the role of teacher, in the broadest Chinese sense. Having said that, I hope that CPOD will be bolder in reminding us students -- as often as it takes -- NOT to fall into the trap of using the language -- and basic assumptions -- of English (or French, or German) grammar to direct their study of Chinese. To learn Chinese well, we really need to keep the mind as open and flexible as possible. And it would not be a bad idea, IMHO, if CPOD would be a little bit less afraid of using straight talk to grasp the "Chinese grammar" bull by the horns. Judging by the number of questions following every lesson on things like word order and -- yikes! -- "predicates", why not consider having a brief grammar section in every PDF which does the simple job of confirming what the listener thinks that that he thought he heard Jenny Zhu saying by way of explaining grammar. Finally, I'd like to ask CPOD to look more closely into their "demographic". If you find that you have a lot of overseas Chinese in your base, you may be able to make A LOT of money, in mere terms of "Basic" subscriptions, simply by raising the level of the "Basic" services a little bit. I know that you want to preserve the incentive for people to go for "Premium", but the answer may not be "keeping Beginner's so basic that only an idiot or a financially irresponsible person would resist upgrading to Premium". Seriously, overseas Chinese will probably never need your full "Premium' services, and I'm willing to bet that many of them are gritting their teeth and toughing it out as "non-paying" subscribers because (i) at a pinch, they can get by without the pdfs; and (ii) the pdfs don't seem like enough of an incentive to become full paying members. Believe me, overseas Chinese users could easily be your easiest customers, but the trick is to bridge the gap between $60 per year and $240 per year. Thanks for asking, CPOD!

auntie68, don't we as a community have an obligation to provide some of that support constructively? Based upon my observations, I've seen three reactions to grammar/character mistakes: -- Nothing said at all -- the worst of all worlds. The offending user doesn't know he/she made a mistake, not only failing to advance his/her knowledge, but possibly leading other users down the same wrong path as well. -- The offender is slammed by a more proficient user(s) with a 3-screen post, leading him/her to avoid further posts in written Chinese; better than no correction, but still not ideal. -- The offender is corrected positively and simply. For the best example of this, see Amber's corrections. The bottom line, and the point which is germane to the post subject, is that all users have something to contribute; and user errors, if corrected positively, are just as educational as "picture perfect posts" if, and only if, they are clearly and succinctly corrected, preferably by other users. This is, in my opinion, the strength of the new medium at its best. But it requires the concerted action of the user community: Cpod is only a facilitator.

Actually the last comment was @ riddal.