Thinking of moving from Taiwan/She-da to China

“Jive” is spot-on about the teaching problem. But a quick search of the archives will turn up umpteen-million rants of mine on this topic, including opinions on how Chinese should be taught.

Essentially, the key to acquiring a language (not just learning about it) is to get things in small, comprehensible pieces, and repeat them endlessly. The problem is that a teacher already speaks the language, so repeating something, say, five times seems like a LOT to him or her. But to a new learner, particularly a beginner, 50 times is still not too many. The beginner is still experiencing that “um…er…ah! Yeah! I know that word!” phenomenon. That’s called “decoding”. But to use a language skillfully, you have to surpass the decoding stage – you have to know all your lexical items so automatically that you can use and understand them in all contexts (including completely un-anticipated, crazy contexts) without any hesitation whatsoever.

Balance your tires.

See? If you’re a native English speaker, you know what that last sentence means, automatically, without thinking, even though it has NOTHING to do with what I’m supposed to be talking about here. But a learner of English would probably get hung up on it. Naturally part of that is context – something learners usually do not use to its fullest potential – but making the words you “know” into words you REALLY know is the key point to acquiring a language.

I taught a year of high school Spanish. We threw out the textbook (it was awful) and I concentrated on giving them lots of repetition of high-frequency items, including complicated grammar points in Spanish (like the preterite/imperfect distinction in the past). I never taught them grammar, just exposed them to it in ways they could understand.

At the end of the year, my kids outscored the other kids in the department on grammar-based exams, despite the fact that I hadn’t spent 5 minutes all semester teaching grammar. AND, as one of the native-Spanish-speaking students in the class commented (she was there for an “easy A”), “Wow, I can actually talk to the students in this class, but when I try to talk to the students from other classes they can’t understand anything I say.”

The students in the other classes did better on written tests of the vocabulary in the textbook (duh! my kids never saw it) but as of the beginning of the next school year, all the students had forgotten almost all the “book” vocabulary, but my kids still retained the material they had acquired. I know which I’d prefer if I were a language learner. (Doh! I am a language learner! Cool!)

I think it would be good to go over to China just to experience the Chinese used over there.

However, learning Mandarin there is a completely different matter.

In any Chinese city, you will find that there are people from all different parts of the country - meaning that they will all speak a slightly different type of Mandarin which is often far from the “standard”.
There might be a strong “curly” Beijing accent - Cantonese-Mandarin
-*point: The Mandarin used is not “constant”

unlike in Taiwan - even if people complain that it is not “standard” (eg. beijing type)

however, the Mandarin people use in Taiwan is basically the same throughout the whole nation. You won’t see any big variations as in like:

“fa” being pronounced “fe”
1st tone becoming 4th tone
“ji” becoming “zhi”
“gou” becoming “gu”
“w” sound becoming a “v” sound

i remember speaking with a person from Jilin, China (up north) - and I could only understand about 5% of what she was saying (no it wasn’t a dialect)

so personally i think China would be a good choice if you can speak relatively good Mandarin - it would be a good opportunuty to experience all the little differences in how the people speak.

If you are just starting from scratch, unless you get good teachers - or stick to one specific area - i would say that Taiwan is a better choice

Thanks Ironlady. I always feel better after reading your posts. Actually I was wondering if you could critique the basic procedure I use these days. Puleez!

The way I learn Chinese is very similar to the way I teach English I think. To start with when I am studying Chinese I try to focus on words and sentences that I will actually be using in the next week or so. This compares with telling my students to describe, at the beginning of each class, whatever real English language situation they have been in recently or whatever situation they know they will be facing in the near future. From this I can (hopefully) introduce a lot of useful words and expressions related to their real needs. This material is written down, tape recorded, repeated and cross referenced to whatever points of grammar or pronunciation that seem relevant to them. I think this is a good way to introduce or review basic concepts (long and short vowels for example) without straying to far from the general purpose of the conversation which is to prepare them for a real life event.

Of course a lot of them come to class with nothing that they urgently need to learn so I encourage them to create a second language environment using DVD. Repeat viewings is the name of the game here. Usually I suggest that they watch it at least once with the English subtitle and write down the vocabulary that they feel inhabits a place somewhere on the outer edge of undertsnding for them (I don’t put it exactly that way of course). They then need to watch again but with the Chinese subtitle to see if they can connect the two. Ironically perhaps this has the effect of forcing them to REALLY listen. Next they come to class and we play a mind map game that connects the vocabulary they learned to other aspects of the language - part of speech, opposites, translations, synonyms, alternate meanings in the case of homonyms etc. I have really just finished putting the finishing touches on this game but so far it seems to be working like a dream. I keep getting that Aha! look. Gotta love that.

Finally I am in no way reluctant to use Mandarin in class. Language learning should relate to the total person and a big part of our students total personality is Manadrin speaking. If they want to ask in Chinese how to say something in English I am thrilled. If I really want to say something in English and they still don’t get it after a couple of tries then I just say it in Chinese. This seems to me the most direct way. I usually write down the sentence and EVERYTHING we do is recorded as well. They really seem to benefit from the listening to the tapes again. A couple of students even said that it cured their insomnia!

O.K. IronLady that is pretty much the general outline of what I do these days. What do you think? Please be gentle.

(P.S. There is another whole set of things I do when actually using a TV in class but my two typing fingers are getting sore.)

[quote=“bob”]To start with when I am studying Chinese I try to focus on words and sentences that I will actually be using in the next week or so.
[/quote] Good, material that you are motivated to learn (internal motivation vs. external motivation – you are learning this for your own purposes) and which you will likely hear others use and/or practice yourself in a real communicative situation in the near future.

[quote]…This material is written down, tape recorded, repeated and cross referenced to whatever points of grammar or pronunciation that seem relevant to them.
[/quote] I do not teach grammar overtly. Not in Chinese, not in English, not in Spanish. But this requires that you use an entirely different method of language teaching for all your instruction. Also, it’s important to keep the number of new items very, very low and allow for sufficient repetition in unknown, unanticipated and novel contexts. Just hearing the same thing on the tape over and over won’t do it. (although it doesn’t hurt.)

[quote]
Of course a lot of them come to class with nothing that they urgently need to learn so I encourage them to create a second language environment using DVD…[/quote]
DVD is good for interest, but I doubt you can obtain DVDs that are at the 10% unknown word level (and these students are undoubtedly not in total command of the words they are supposed to “know” already) so there will be considerable gaps in their acquisition as a result.

Of course in most cases, if you can “teach” them a few new words and keep most of them from falling asleep or at least have them come out with a vaguely positive feeling about English, you’ll have done all that’s humanly possible given the circumstances surrounding English teaching in Taiwan (I’m thinking 60 students per “conversation” class and so on). I used to teach “Seinfeld” in the old days but that was before I learned to teach; it was the best thing I could come up with. Used to type full transcripts for them. Sheesh!

Well that was discouraging.

Do you mean that you “never” make referance to parts of speech or identify a verb form is being used as an adjective etc? Honstly, NO grammar. Nada. Meiyou…?

Everyone in the DVD class is involved in choosing vocabulary to incorporate into the class. Sometimes I’ll veto something but not often. If it doesn’t seem useful to me I just won’t spend much time on it.

I get people coming to my classes for two hours a week and with the stated intention of doing “no” homework. After getting into the rhythm of the class many start spending 5-10 hours a week just on preperation. They come back to me with the feeling that they are learning something and not just about English.

I am not saying that this should be the only thing they do or that it is the best but it does seem to be a lot more interesting and effective than anything they have done before.

If you raise the amount of language that the person actively attends to then you will be increasing the amount of exposure that he has had to the most common vocabulary and the patterns that contain that vocabulary.

To be honest I think that what I am doing probably works in ways and for reasons that few could explain.

I will definitely act on what you said about keeping the number of new items low and trying to use or illicit those items in new contexts. Cheers.

bob,
Everyone’s results vary. The most important thing about the way I teach is that I did not have to teach to a particular test.

In Taiwan you are often being held to X% of your student passing some ridiculous exam. I’m sure you know what I mean. It really takes away any motivation that anyone has for actually mastering English.

If I had to teach to the test again, well, I just wouldn’t teach if I could possibly avoid it. In fact that (plus the required annual syphilis test for ME but no one else in the entire university, just because I was the only foreigenr) was one of the major reason why I stopped teaching in formal settings in Taiwan.

If your students are happy and the admin is happy and you’re happy, then what’s wrong?

I don’t think anything is wrong exactly but I am sure that there is a lot I have to learn. For example I would love to learn some dramatic technique that creates an opportunity to actually use previously encountered material. I don’t work at a school so I have no worries about whatever administration might think. I just want to teach as well as I can for my own satisfaction. Anyway thanks. What you said about providing small, comprehensible bits used repeatedly in a variety of contexts is something that I will definitely be focusing on more. :notworthy:

Sorry - just have to collect myself after that blasting from Jive Turkey…
(ego?)

Let me just clarify one thing - My comments were made assuming that we all know that the teaching of Chinese is not all that great - and that we’re trying to learn Chinese here…

Then again bob- you could take JT’s advice and join the US foreign service officers school.

My points are:
Get out in the world and use you’re Chinese - there’s only so much you can learn within the four walls of a classroom.

Join some activities with Chinese people - its certainly cheaper than taking classes, probably more fun, make some new friends, enrich your experience whether here or in China … etc.

Remember to that you’re teacher is just one person - with one way of speaking and thinking - out in the streets/ in the workplace/ etc. different people use the language in different ways.

Just try to enjoy yourself while learning - that will keep you’re motivation going which will spur your learning…

Of course taking classes can help but you’ve got to use what you learn with real people outside the walls of you’re school

JT - got a word for you brother…valium
[/quote]

[quote=“juvenilemania”]Sorry - just have to collect myself after that blasting from Jive Turkey…
(ego?)[/quote]

I apologize for the rough treatment. I just get a little irritated when it seems like students are buying into the same philosophy that most Chinese teachers spout off.

Me hot shit? I don’t think I said that. At best, I’m just luke warm shit. :wink:

The problem with most Chinese teachers in Taiwan and China is much more fundamental than just the techniques or methods they use in the classroom. As a teacher, before you can even look at methodology, you have to commit yourself to a few important teaching habits.

The most important habit would probably be reflective teaching and observation. Teachers in Taiwan and the mainland just don’t do it. Even though they see students falling flat on their faces day after day, they never really take that as a cue that they should adjust their teaching style. Any decent teacher will consider after a lesson how the lesson could have gone better and what went well. He might even make a note of it. The next time around he’ll try to adjust his techniques or materials.

Another important teaching habit is goal setting. A teacher should set goals for what his students should be able to do and for how he’s going to improve his teaching. When a teacher gets a new batch of students for a semester, he should set clear goals for what that group of students will be able to do by the end of the term. Even if the teacher taught the same class or subject in previous semesters, he should be adjusting his semester goals to fit every new batch of students. He should also be setting goals before every lesson. For most teachers, they just march through a dialogue or picture story book and try to get as far as they can in every lesson. That is a completely half-ass, text-centered way of doing it. Goals should not be TB based, but skills and language content based. You teach the students, not the book. A decent teacher will know when to throw the book away; he’ll also be in the habit of setting realistic goals for every activitiy, lesson and semester he teaches. After he’s taught, he’ll stop to think about how he achieved or didn’t achieve his goals. If he’s in the habit of doing this, he won’t need to write anything down. It just becomes second nature.

As I see it, these two habits (reflective teaching and goal setting) are two of the most fundamental habits for a professional teacher. I’ve known people who’ve had no formal teacher training but were pretty good teachers because they were willing to reflect and set goals. If you stick to these habits, then methodology can be learned on the side from books or other teachers. I’ve also known people who just plain weren’t willing to reflect on the quality of their lessons or teach according to goals. If you aren’t willing to do these two things, then no amount of theory about language acquisition or training in methodology is going to make you a good teacher. I know plenty of people who’ve done MAs but were still poor teachers because they just didn’t observe or think about how well students digested their lessons. Since they never really recognize the problems in their own teaching, they will never be able to set realistic goals. The next time you are sitting in a Chinese class, observe the teacher and think about whether or not he/she seems to have clear goals in mind for each task, lesson or semester. If you can’t identify the goal or pupose of what you are doing in class, then I think it’s a safe bet that the teacher can’t either.

OK, enough of the general teaching school platitudes. For teaching Chinese, I think teachers should at least adhere to a couple of principles:

  1. Teach meaning and spoken form first, then move on to pinyin and characters. Teachers should not be teaching vocabulary or grammar out of the book. That’t not really teaching since a student can learn that way on his own. Learning straight out of a book is just plain boring. Everything is kept within the context of the printed word rather than put in something that resembles the real life context where that bit of language will be encountered. If I were teaching vocabulary, I would use flashcards or props to try to elicit the target words. If they don’t know, then I’d tell them and drill the pronunciation. They still haven’t seen anything in pinyin or characters. They don’t need to yet. After thoroughly drilling the pronunciation, I’d get them into a controlled practice activity using the target vocabulary. This would be an activity where they are interacting with other students instead of with the teacher, but the setup of the activity is restricted in a way that they won’t be able to make too many mistakes. After that, I’d sit them down and cover the written form. If they were beginners, that would only be the pinyin form. I would not spend a week or so at the start of a beginners Chinese course drilling pinyin in a vacuum. I’d teach it to them with useful vocabulary. I say this because seeing the written form first before learning any meaningful words usually just leads to more confusion. There are letters in pinyin that represent sounds that are not in many of our languages, or are represented in different ways. Pinyin can confuse as much as clarify. That’s why I think it’s best to learn the sounds first, and then a few minutes later show them how it is spelled in pinyin. Once you’ve gotten students into that routine, you can stop telling them the pinyin for any words you’ve just taught and just ask them to guess it. Then you just correct their mistakes. I’ve seen teachers do it this way here in HK; it is much more effective than the traditional way of doing it. After you’ve introduced the new language bits, drilled them, given them some controlled practice and introduced and perhaps practiced the written form, then you might move on to some sort of more authentic language activity, but the length and depth of that will obviously be restricted by students’ abilities.

2.Don’t just teach language; teach language skills. A second language student doesn’t just need to learn vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. He also needs to learn a few “strategic” skills. These are things like how to read or listen for jist, how to read or listen for detail, and how to recognize relationships between words or structures that have similar components. These are all skills that we’ve learned and used in our first language. Unfortunately, these are things that we all seem to just turn off when we move to another language. When I see a newspaper article in English, the first thing I do is scan it so I can decide if I want to read it for detail. If it is something I’m intersted in, I’ll read more thoroughly. When I read it for detail, I usually just skip the words I don’t know and subconciously guess their meaning from the overall context. I don’t get bogged down by the meaning of individual words or sentences. When I read Chinese, though, I have to force myself to read “naturally.” If I don’t, I will waste too much time on words and sentences and then not get the meaning of the overall article. These are skills. It is very difficult to develop these “extensive” and “intensive” reading and listening skills in a second language if a teacher is not forcing you to do so with well designed reading or listening activities. What kind of activities would those be? Well, I think any reading activity should be ordered as follows:
a.) a short prediction or lead in activity based on a title or picture.
b.) a couple of scan or skim questions that will make students look for just the overall jist of the text. The teacher should set time limits for finding the answer so students don’t read for detail.
c.) questions that will require students to read for detail. They’d read a second time (after scanning or skimming) to find the answers. These questions could be content oriented or they could be questions that ask them to focus on a certain kind of structure or style in the text.
d.) perhaps a few discussion questions so students can use some of the language in the article in conversation.
All of these things could be done for listening tasks, too. Unfortunately, most teachers of Chinese think that the role of the teacher is to just pass on knowledge. In the case of a reading task, their way of thinking is usally that they should just read through the whole text with the student and explain it line by line. You tell me: do you think that works? Will the student become a good reader?

I’ll try to come back to this later. My wife is coming back from DG today and if I don’t clean the apartment I’ll be in the doghouse all weekend.

JT:

All very true. :notworthy:

Unfortunately, however, “goal” is a four-letter word…especially in Taiwan.

I remember one time during my long-lost English teaching days when I was at a departmental meeting. They picked up the textbook, flipped through it, said, “Oh, it has 15 chapters, and we have 15 weeks of school. That’s great!” and blithely assigned 1 chapter per week. No consideration of anything else. Mind you, this happens in the States and other places, too (covering the book vs. having students acquire the language presented in the book). But the problem certainly seems more pronounced in Taiwan, for many of the reasons you outline above.

I’ll have to respectfully disagree… From my experience, I think it is much easier to learn simplified after you have a good grasp of Traditional, rather than the other way around. (It’s always easier to dumb down… pardon the phrase…)[/quote]

Agree. Even though only a small number of characters have been simplified (400-odd?), I still find people who learnt long-form first retain the characters better. For Christ’s sake, they took the “heart” out of love ! Once I saw that I became a committed Long-form Man ! On the other hand, lots of us who started learning Chinese over 10 years ago had to read long-form because there was bugger all worth reading in short-form. That is no longer the case. My advice would be get those radicals down pat in long-form, and develop an interest in calligraphy. Will help your writing IMHO. Memorizing the correct stroke order will help you write out the character.

[quote=“littleiron”]Also… I would avoid Beijing personally (and not just because of the greater bureaucracy or restrictions, or that I find the accent annoying… ha ha…). The ‘standard’ Beijing accent is generally not found outside of Beijing/Tianjin, while in many places the accent is more… ‘universal.’ When I went to Beijing last year, I could barely understand what people were saying, but when I went to Xi’an and Shanghai, I didn’t miss a single word that was said… and people in Shanghai couldn’t tell my Mandarin was learned in Taiwan - they figured I studied in China somewhere (granted, I’ve lost most of my ‘local’ southern Taiwanese accent).

In my opinion, Shanghai’s or Xi’an’s Mandarin (accent?) is much closer to Taipei’s than Beijing’s… Of course, usage still varies.[/quote]

Agree. The Bejing huar is too much for me. Would you go to Whitechapel [East End, Cockney Laaandaaan] to learn English ? No, you’d be down the West End speaking all proper so’s that people could understand you.

Worth bearing in mind that almost everyone who speaks it does so as a second language. Just as the Taiwanese ignorantly believe there is such a thing as one accent for the entire continent of North America, many foreigners believe there is a standard Putonghua accent. Well, there isn’t, although the variation is much less than the variation in English accents given that Mandarin raison d’etre is to be a lingua franca, and English never had this forced upon it.

[quote=“Hobart”][quote=“ac_dropout”]I would think Shanghai would be a better place than Beijing. Is a more active city in my opinion. And the southern accent of Mandarin is more similar to Taiwan than Northern accent in Beijing.

It’s not impossible to get use to but it will take time.[/quote]

But while you walk down the streets of Shanghai you mostly hear Shanghainese spoken, the same in restaurants. Of course they all speak standard Mandarin when they need to, but I think you hear more Shanghai dialect in Shanghai than than you hear Taiwan dialect in Taipei.[/quote]

I dunno. Ten years ago maybe. Everyone in Taipei city used to speak Mandarin, it seemed, and then when I returned to my abode in the county, not a jot of Mandarin. Galley gonging away in Taiyu for all they were worth. Now I feel everyone in Taipei is speaking Taiyu, and taxi drivers ask me why I don’t speak it, which they never used to. And they call Mandarin “Zhong Guo Hua” or “Hua Yu” rather than “Guo Yu” like they used to. Which is understandable. On the other hand, Shanghai is made up of the ten million or so Shanghainese people who lived there ten years ago, plus 450 million country bumpkins who’ve blown in to extract the gold paving stones from Huai Hai Zhong Lu. There’s also more Taiwanese living there than live in Taipei. Hell of a city really. But very very very very expensive. I wouldn’t go back. (The women are fabulous. But IMHO Taiwan has the most beautiful stellas in the world and Shangers just can’t beat Taipei for … oops letting my fantasies run away with me there)

A pretty cr8ppy school in Taipei that operates under the false pretense of teaching Chinese to foreigners. They don’t prepare for class, the textbooks they make are filled with glaring translation errors, and sometimes errors for Zhuyin and Pinyin.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where is a good place to study, but I’ve heard Taida’s expensive program (they have two) is good. Wenda’s teachers at least prepare for class, I’m told.

Shi-Da filled with Korean/Japanese students who seem to like the method of teaching there and with scholarship students who get paid by the government and then transfer some of the money to Shi-Da as tuition.
From next semester the classes might be three hours a day. Would cost more, of course. Ask yourself if you want two “Three Shi-Da” hours or two “Tai-Da” hours. Of course, if you’re a scholarship student you can come here and save money to go someplace else.

Disclaimer. might or might not have any actual connection to reality.