In the thread of how many people here can read and write Chinese characters.
Jive Turkey has made such an excellent reply that I think it should be a thread by itself.
I post it without asking Jive Turkey permission. It is not a good idea. But I have to say again that is because Jive Turkey has made such a good point.
A serious learner will surely learn something from it.
If Jive Turkey has objection, I will delete this post at once or Ironlady or any other moderator can do it.
I will greatly appreciate that.
Jive Turkey
Newspaper Copyeditor
Joined: 22 Sep 2003
Posts: 464
Location: Dong Jianhua’s Magic Kingdom
Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 9:18 am Post subject:
shengmar wrote:
Using the way that the Chinese use to teach a foreign adults is too difficult or actually a mission impossbile , which I think has been a fact.
How would you know? You obviously haven’t tried teaching foreigners the same way you were taught as a child.
Do you give your foreign students four to five years of instruction in just speaking and listening before having them pick up a brush? I doubt you do. That’s what a Chinese child gets. Did you start drilling away on pinyin the first day of class, before your students had any useable vocabulary? I’m guessing that’s exactly what you did. I’ve never met a Chinese kid who learned that way. Any Chinese posters here who were drilled on Hanyu Pinyin/Zhuyin Fuhao from the age of 12 months? I didn’t think so.
Shengmar, I’ve never seen you teach, but I can guess with a high degree of certainty about what your teaching methodology is like: crap. Don’t worry. Most other teachers of Chinese as a second/foreign language are in the same boat and at least you are curious about why you have been unsuccessful in teaching your students to write.
Shengmar, here are a couple of rules that I think every Chinese teacher should follow:
1.) Teach at least a few dozen useful lexical items before teaching any pinyin. That’s right, don’t give them any written record of the vocabulary they’ve learned, or at the very least, don’t show them the pinyin until after you’ve taught, drilled and used the target vocabulary in class. The only thing you should really need at first are flashcards and props.
Some of the sounds represented by pinyin are new to most foreigners. The letters that represent them in pinyin only serve to confuse the learner, not make pronunciation clearer. Only show them the pinyin for lexical items AFTER they have pronounced them correctly in teacher led drills and pair/group drills. Teaching pinyin in a vacuum is a waste of time. Ss need words before pinyin so that they will know what the pinyin is representing. It’s no different from a native Chinese speaking child.
2.) Don’t teach any characters until your students are speaking fluent survival Chinese. Until you’re satisfied that they could use spoken Chinese for eating, sleeping, shitting, getting the bus, train or taxi, going through immigration, making appointments with friends or teachers, etc., you shouldn’t teach them one character. This is no different from a native Chinese speaking child. Why would you want to make it even harder for a non-native speaking adult by throwing speaking and writing at them at the same time?
You have got to get it into your head that characters do absolutely nothing to help an elementary or low intermediate learner improve his oral proficiency. In reality, the time and effort spent on learning characters is only slowing them down on acquiring oral proficiency, which will slow them down in learning the whole language. Depending on your students, you should not teach them any characters for one or two semesters. Judging from what I’ve seen most Chinese teachers do, and I’m assuming that you are doing the same, writing is being shoved down students’ throats before they have established a good foundation in speaking, listening and the grammar of the language.
, I’m sure you could convince them to give you a copy of the text so that you can make your own copy. They all bring them over with them. If you can’t stand the lesson, just invite them to dinner or for a game of hoops. They’ll be so glad to feel like they’re working whilst enjoying the chance to speak English for a change, they’ll probably fall all over themselves to help you.
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