Hi i was wondering if anyone could give advice for designing a quality reading course. I have a private chinese tutor but she only teaches what i ask her to teach. My goal is to practice reading only in this class. I currently can recognize between 1200 and 1800 characters and can read childrens books. But i’m limited by the fact that i don’t know bo po mo fo and so i have to look characters up by stroke count.
So does anyone have advice about what input i should give my teacher to get the most out of this class? suggestions aobut materials or anything else? I’m afraid my teacher is a bit passive so if I don’t give her a ton of feedback the class doesn’t go all that well.
[quote=“dointimeondarock”]Hi i was wondering if anyone could give advice for designing a quality reading course. I have a private chinese tutor but she only teaches what i ask her to teach. My goal is to practice reading only in this class. I currently can recognize between 1200 and 1800 characters and can read childrens books. But i’m limited by the fact that i don’t know bo po mo fo and so i have to look characters up by stroke count.
So does anyone have advice about what input i should give my teacher to get the most out of this class? suggestions aobut materials or anything else? I’m afraid my teacher is a bit passive so if I don’t give her a ton of feedback the class doesn’t go all that well.[/quote]
How about just going ahead and learning bopomofo as well as Hanyu Pinyin? The time you invest in learning it will pay off in the long run in looking up the dictionary.
Right. Since you’re in Taiwan, learn bopomofo? It really isn’t as hard as you think it is, especially since you can already read a lot of characters. It took me only two weeks at one hour a day to learn. There are only 32 “letters” in the bopomofo alphabet, and they never vary in pronunciation. You can have your Chinese teacher drill you, and use flashcards. If you work at it, I imagine you could be fairly good at it in less than four hours. And once you learn it, you’ll find that the ability opens up the library to you. Students in Taiwan use it until fifth grade, although by the end of third grade students know a lot of characters (partly because they’ve seen each character in their books thousands of times alongside its associated bopomofo pronunciation guide).
Secondly, since you’re ahead of me in reading already, maybe you already have a system going. My advice does come from an ESL perspective, not an CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) one. But at least I can tell you, as an English teacher, extensive reading is surely the key to student success. Just go to the public library, check out five books at a time, and read, read, read, with minimal use of a dictionary. That means that you should be able to read all but about five words on each page. (This is for reading by yourself). If you can read >10 pages a day by yourself on the side in addition to your Chinese class, you’re on what the ancient Japanese royalty called the “Golden Road” whereby a language may be acquired while reading for pleasure and self-education.
When your Chinese teacher is there, you can choose some (slightly) more difficult texts. Unless your teacher is a great teacher and is able to 1. read the text to you while 2. asking questions every 1-5 sentences, perhaps you will need to do the reading and asking to make sure that you understand what the story is all about.
If you’re interested in learning about the research that backs up this method, you can start with S. Krashen’s work on extensive reading.
If you already know more than a thousand characters, I think learning bopomofo would be a waste of time. (I think it’s a waste of time for anyone, but that’s a different thread.) With practice, you should be able to look words up fairly quickly without it - I can look words up in a Chinese dictionary almost as fast as I can in an English one.
I totally concur == if you are in Taiwan, take the minimal time needed to learn bopomofo. Then anyone can be your teacher, because most people can get pretty close to the right pronunciation using bopomofo.
You may enjoy reading electronic materials with something like Dr. Eye on your computer that will help you with any words you want just by moving your mouse over them.
One thing – NEVER write the Romanization next to the character – always use footnotes to record the pronunciation and meaning. Your eye will invariably be drawn to the letters before the characters, and if you re-read your books you won’t be able to see if you now know those words or not.
I remain unconvinced about learning bopomofo. I attempted to learn it when i first arrived and I thought it was a complete waste of time. It’s basically like learning a separate language in order to learn a language. bopomofo could a be a useful tool for native speakers who are illiterate i.e. kindergarten students. But I think it’s not very appropriate for second language learners unless your one of those people that likes to memorize useless things for fun.
If this is the case, I really can’t imagine it taking you more than 10 minutes to get started on bopomofo. Don’t worry about mastering it right away. Treat it like the pronunciation key of an English dictionary. When you don’t know a sound, find another character you know that has the same sound, and then you have the pronunciation by analogy. There’s lots of children’s reading material out there you could use that has bopomofo next to every character. Just start using it, and eventually you’ll have it down cold.
Sure, bopomofo is useless, unless you want to do something silly like ask one of the 99% of the people living in Taiwan who can’t use standard Hanyu pinyin to write down the pronunciation of a character for you, or even “sound it out” phonetically for you. Or unless you want to read some of the articles in “guoyu ribao”, which come with bopomofo next to them. OR if you want to write down a word for which you’ve forgotten the character and have some slim chance of anyone in Taiwan knowing for sure which syllable you mean.
Other than that – yeah, not much point. I wouldn’t recommend bopomofo for, say, someone learning Chinese in the US, who does not plan to be in Taiwan or deal with Taiwanese people primarily for his/her Chinese learning needs. Although, even for such a person, bopomofo is just another skill in the set. Knowledge is power, etc. etc.
I’ve noticed that the bopomofo skills of adults here are not very good. I just ask someone to say the word for me and I write down the pinyin. You learn quickly here that you can’t rely on their opinion for ‘z’ or zh’, etc. of course, but it works pretty well. It will be close enough to find it in the dictionary, anyway.
But if you get used to reading bopomofo instead of the characters, it slows down your reading progress. The same goes for pinyin - I don’t want textbooks with the pinyin right next to or under the characters, because then my eyes are drawn to what is easier for me to read. When I started using textbooks without pinyin, my recognition of characters and reading speed increased a lot.
Doingtime,
I would listen to baba and ironlady. I studied Chinese for a year and a half and didn’t learn bomofo. Thinking it wouldn’t be of any true benifit. eventually I did and what a difference it made. For me, I realized that I would read pinyin like regular phonics but when I learned bomofo, I was able to pronounce the sounds. It only took a day to learn bomofo.
If you’re reading 12 to 1800 characters a day, then you should be able to learn bomofo in an hour.
twocs said:
[quote]
Secondly, since you’re ahead of me in reading already, maybe you already have a system going. My advice does come from an ESL perspective, not an CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) one. But at least I can tell you, as an English teacher, extensive reading is surely the key to student success. Just go to the public library, check out five books at a time, and read, read, read, with minimal use of a dictionary. That means that you should be able to read all but about five words on each page. (This is for reading by yourself). If you can read >10 pages a day by yourself on the side in addition to your Chinese class, you’re on what the ancient Japanese royalty called the “Golden Road” whereby a language may be acquired while reading for pleasure and self-education. [/quote] Great advice. Thanks
Go to the Lucky Bookstore by ShiDa. They have lots of textbooks for all levels and some of them are going without the bopomofo and more with the pinyin.
I still think bopomofo helps you out. It’s like a form of shorthand and better to write in your textbook(book) beside the character you just studied.
