Mandarin Mashup June 28, 2012
- At US hotels, Chinese treated to comforts of home - San Jose Mercury News NEW YORK—Major hotel brands are bending over backward to cater to the needs of the world's most sought-after traveler: the Chinese tourist.Click photo to enlarge
In this Friday, June 15, 2012, a group of tourists from China take in the sights of the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall National Memorial. Major hotel brands are bending over backward to cater to the needs of the world's most sought-after traveler: the Chinese tourist. Now arriving on American shores in unprecedented numbers thanks to a streamlined visa process and a rising Chinese middle class, Chinese tourists are being treated to the comforts of home when they check in at the front desk.
Now arriving on American shores in unprecedented numbers thanks to a streamlined visa process and a rising Chinese middle class, Chinese tourists are being treated to the comforts of home when they check in at the front desk. That means hot tea in their rooms, congee for breakfast and Mandarin-speaking hotel employees at their disposal.
Chinese "welcome programs" at reputable chains like Marriott and Hilton even address delicate cultural differences: No Chinese tour group should be placed on a floor containing the number four, which sounds like the word for death in Mandarin.
In this Friday, June 15, 2012, a group of tourists from China take in the sights of the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall National Memorial. Major hotel brands are bending over backward to cater to the needs of the world's most sought-after traveler: the Chinese tourist. Now arriving on American shores in unprecedented numbers thanks to a streamlined visa process and a rising Chinese middle class, Chinese tourists are being treated to the comforts of home when they check in at the front desk. ((AP Photo/Mary Altaffer))
"They're very relieved, like finally somebody's doing these things that make sense," said Robert Armstrong, a sales manager who handles all bookings for incoming Chinese travelers at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. "Finally somebody's catering to them."
More than a million Chinese visited the U.S. in 2011, contributing more than $5.7 billion to the U.S. economy. That's up 36 percent from 2010, according to the Department of Commerce. By 2016, that figure is expected to reach 2.6 million Chinese.
In a striking departure from the traditional Chinese business traveler, a growing number of them are simply coming to America for fun—with lots of cash on hand. (The average Chinese visitor spends more than $6,000 per trip.)
And so hotels are openly competing to win the hearts of the Chinese, who generally travel in large groups and stick to a tight itinerary, often packing multiple cities into a two-week American tour. What they're looking for is a hotel that makes them feel at ease with their surroundings, said Roy Graff, a travel consultant who educates hotels in proper Chinese culture and hospitality.
That may take the form of slippers and a tea kettle in the hotel room or a Mandarin-speaking employee
at the front desk—or all of the above.In this Friday, June 15, 2012, photo, a tourist from China poses for a photo in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Major hotel brands are bending over backward to cater to the needs of the world's most sought-after traveler: the Chinese tourist. Now arriving on American shores in unprecedented numbers thanks to a streamlined visa process and a rising Chinese middle class, Chinese tourists are being treated to the comforts of home when they check in at the front desk. ((AP Photo/Mary Altaffer))
"They drink tea. Eastern style, everything cold," explained Charlie Shao, president of Galaxy Tours, a New York City-based Chinese tour agency, who used to frequently request special amenities for his clients. "They don't walk inside the room with bare feet."
It's rare that Shao has to ask hotels for anything anymore. Marriott International, for example, now offers not one but several Chinese breakfasts, depending upon which region of China the traveler hails from: there are salted duck eggs and pickled vegetables for eastern Chinese, for example, and dim sum and sliced pig's liver for the southerners.
Major chains are also training employees to avoid cultural missteps that
would offend a Chinese visitor. Superstition is a big one: Red is considered a lucky color, along with the number eight, which signifies wealth. The color white, meanwhile, is frowned upon, not to mention the cursed number four.In this Friday, June 15, 2012, a couple of tourists from China, take a break on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial, in New York. Major hotel brands are bending over backward to cater to the needs of the world's most sought-after traveler: the Chinese tourist. Now arriving on American shores in unprecedented numbers thanks to a streamlined visa process and a rising Chinese middle class, Chinese tourists are being treated to the comforts of home when they check in at the front desk. ((AP Photo/Mary Altaffer))
Failing to respect the pecking order in a Chinese group is another common blunder by hotels that have limited knowledge of Chinese culture.
"We try to make sure nobody's on a higher floor than their boss," Armstrong said. "Even if the boss is on a beautiful suite on the eighth floor, if the assistant is in a standard room on the 38th floor, it doesn't translate."
As hotels fine-tune Chinese outreach stateside, the race is on to build loyalty within China's borders.
Last year, Starwood Hotels—which has a Chinese "specialist" at each American hotel—relocated its entire senior leadership team to China for a month. The Ritz-Carlton rotates general managers and other hotel staff into its Chinese hotels for three-year stints at a time. And both chains are banking on the success of their customer rewards programs, which have been a big hit in China.
"It's important for our leaders to understand what's going on there at a more personal level than just the statistics," said Clayton Ruebensaal, vice president of marketing for the Ritz. "Everybody's going after this market because of the sheer volume of luxury customers. At the same time, it's a very crowded landscape."
In response to the surge in Chinese visitors, the State Department decided earlier this year to spend $22 million on new facilities in several Chinese cities and add about 50 officers to process visa applications. And in February, the U.S. government announced that Chinese visitors who had obtained an American visa within the last four years did not have to reapply in person but could apply via courier instead.
As a result, visa interview wait times in China are currently just under a week—compared to last year's average of more than a month.
But some experts say the U.S. still lags far behind other countries, especially in Europe, when it comes to attracting Chinese tourists. Despite President Barack Obama's recent push to promote tourism, America is woefully ill-prepared to welcome China at an industry-wide level, especially at restaurants and major attractions, said Rich Harrill, director of the Sloan Foundation Travel & Tourism Industry Center at the University of South Carolina.
"We're not as ready as we should be," Harrill said. "We don't have the language skills. We have an opportunity to be on the ground floor of something that could be very, very big."
- Learning Mandarin, whatever it takes - Economist.com
Learning Mandarin, whatever it takes
Jun 27th 2012, 17:49 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
TODAY'S Wall Street Journal offers a useful update to the annual "Americans are rushing to teach their kids Mandarin" story. The reporters have found several families that have gone to unusual lengths. One Californian lawyer took a year's leave of absence from work and moved the clan to Chengdu, for the sole purpose of immersion in the language. Another family moved to Singapore in 2007, again only so the kids could grow up speaking Mandarin. Other parents are not quite so committed, but nonetheless,
families are enrolling their children in Mandarin-immersion programs that are springing up from California to Maine. They are hiring tutors, Skyping with teachers in Beijing and recruiting Chinese-speaking nannies. Some are stocking their playrooms with Disney videos in Mandarin—not to mention the iPhone apps aimed at making kids into Mandarin speakers.
The article goes on that
Mandarin is notoriously difficult to learn. The language is tonal, and fluency requires mastering thousands of characters. Mandarin competence takes 2,200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it's spoken, according to the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute, whereas Spanish can be learned in 600 to 750 class hours.
My upstairs neighbours' children have attended a Chinese-English bilingual school in New York for several years. It's the only public school of its kind in the city. Curious one day, I plied the younger one (eight years old) with a little quiz as we walked to the park with my son.
Me: "How do you say 'house'?"
Boy: "Uh, I forget."
Me: "How about 'car'?"
Boy: "Uh... hm..."
Me: "How about 'I am American?'"
Boy: "Wo shi Zhongguo ren."
Me: "Hm, I'm pretty sure that means 'I am Chinese.' Isn't American Meiguo ren?"
Boy: "Oh, that's right!"
Me: "How about 'he is my friend?'"
Boy: "Oh! Ta shi wode pengyou."
Finally a perfect answer on the first go.
This kid has been in this program since kindergarten. The Mandarin program is strictly speaking an after-school, voluntary one, but all kids go after school and study the language for 2.5 hours per day, I believe. At 180 school days a year, for just two years, he would have had roughly 900 hours of instruction and exposure, starting when he was quite small. (He may have had three years; I'm not sure.) Of course he's still quite small, and unlike State Department diplomats, doesn't have adult intellectual equipment to bring to bear. He does have a child's still-plastic brain, one of the reasons his accent was excellent. He's a bright kid. I can only take it that the State Department is right: learning Mandarin is very hard for a native English-speaker, and true immersion is pretty important.
I'm interested in the experience of those who have studied Chinese for a while. The Journal mentions both the tones and characters as difficulties, but I have a hunch one problem is rather bigger than the other. Which is a tougher challenge: mastering and using the four tones (several each second) for accurate and fluent speech? Or learning the thousands of characters needed to read and write?
I also know—because I've seen calligraphy homework around their apartment—that the kids spend significant time reading and writing. Is this a good idea? Or would you focus on speech and use pinyin first with young children? The answers are important, as more and more Americans are going to be studying Mandarin in coming years, and getting the pedagogy right will be crucial.
jomiku Jun 27th 2012 19:44 GMTMy kids studied Mandarin from 1st or 2nd grade on. One went to China for a semester of 10th grade, living with a family in Xian and going to a Chinese school (Gao Shin), in regular classes during the morning and with their group of 8 and a US teacher in the afternoon. That child also took Chinese in college. Our high school has one of the oldest exchange programs going, each fall receiving 8 kids & a teacher from Gao Shin and reversing that in the spring. The program is now, I think, 12 years old. When it started, the Chinese kids had British inflected accents - that was the language learning model then - and spoke a fairly rigid English. Maybe one kid a year would know American slang. Now they all do. They all speak like us. They know the trends. This is Xian, not Shanghai. (BTW, our elementary school had a grant to hire a Chinese teacher and we were amazingly lucky to get an Oxford PHD in Chinese Art - whose husband was then a museum curator in Japanese art. She's now at U of Kentucky. We miss you.)
If you play a tonal instrument like violin, the tones are easy. If not, you will eventually get them but it will be a struggle. The first word play you learn by the way is the 4 intonations of ma, which of course means 4 completely different things.
Learning the characters takes forever. That is the problem with the language; my daughter found the translation work required in college was 30 plus hours a week. She was essentially fluent in conversation but there's a huge gulf between that and literacy. Her accent was perfect. She sounded Chinese.
Another issue is that even conversation is contextual. My kid used to say you really have to know what people are talking about to undestand what they're talking about because the sounds have so many meanings. As for writing, getting the radicals isn't hard, but then understanding what those little drawings mean when put together to make a character is really hard. The radicals are the little pictures of a house or a man or whatever inside a character.
And of course the worst is having someone who can read Chinese tell you that "strange flavored chicken" on the menu actually just says "strange flavored chicken", that you have to know what the dish actually is for the name to mean anything. Sort of like Chicken Kiev is what if you don't know what it is.
Pa5tabear Jun 27th 2012 19:27 GMTI spent a couple years using the most common language learning software (RS). For the first year, I was pretty committed and probably put in 300 hrs of focused study. This was sufficient to learn most numbers, colors, household items, animals, types of buildings, names of countries, sports, etc.
All these things are easily depicted by pictures. The difficulty came in learning how to string together your nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The transition words are not so easy to learn, because they don't directly translate, and a full immersion system can make it difficult to understand. They think this is still the best way to learn, but I disagree. If the student understands generic language concepts (I'd taken other linguistics classes, so for the most part I did), then I think it's more beneficial to teach the comparisons and explain the grammatical roles of each word or "particle".
Writing vs. using tones?
I'd say tones is easier. I'm a good speller when alphabets are involved, but I have difficulty remembering stroke orders for characters.
With tones, I can literally associate the tone with whatever the word is to form a connection and help remember.
Albertican Jun 27th 2012 19:09 GMTI spent a few years trying to teach myself Mandarin off and on. I mostly used Pimsleur's tapes, and only to speak and understand, not to read and write. I would highly recommend Pimsleur to anyone wanting to learn to have basic conversations in Mandarin, and probably any other language as well.
Pimsleur's Mandarin material has 90 half hour lessons. If you listen to one or two of them every day for a few months, you can pick up quite a lot. Because it's all listen and repeat I think learning the tones and unique sounds of the language is much easier than a traditional classroom situation. I think you also end up with a less atrocious accent. I took a couple of Mandarin continuing education classes as well, but didn't learn anywhere near as much as I did from the tapes. I also tried the Rosetta Stone stuff, but while it might give you a broader vocabulary I don't think it teaches you grammar and the ability to have basic conversations as well as Pimsleur.
Perhaps because I went the audio "question-response" Pimsleur route, in my opinion writing is by far the hardest part of learning Chinese. While spoken Mandarin is in many ways a very logical language grammatically, there is no getting around the thousands of different characters in the writing.
I found learning the language an interesting and rewarding experience. I agree with the author though - although immersion isn't absolutely necessary, if you're not listening to Mandarin every day or almost every day it's difficult to make progress.
guest-iinsnew Jun 27th 2012 19:00 GMTI'm a native English speaker, born and raised in Washington State. While studying Mandarin the past three years, I've found reading characters to be much easier than speaking the language.
My ability to retain understand and use characters easier might be attributed to the fact that I am naturally a visual learner. As well, I'm twenty one -almost twenty two- years old now, and, as I've come to realize, my sensitivity to new sounds isn't quite as good as the younger kids who seem to pick it up rapidly.
Conversely, when I visited China last year I learned that native Mandarin speakers have similar troubles with English. English is a required for most Chinese students from an early age, and so many Chinese people have the ability to read and write very easily, but for some reason they still struggle with speaking.
One explanation I was told is that there are a lack of native speakers to practice with, so many speakers have difficult time acquiring enough practice to make them fluid English speakers. Also, many Mandarin speakers have troubles with English pronunciation. Some of the sounds are completely foreign, which can cause for a real gap in learning when learning English from someone who is none native speaker.
Chinese parents will even pay extreme prices for their kids to learn English from a native speaker. Starting prices are usually somewhere near 300 Yuan an hour.
a simple Yank Jun 27th 2012 18:54 GMTRLG: "How do you say 'house'?"
Boy's thoughts: Dude! I thought we were going to the park, not for you to drill me on my homework.
Ah Beng Jun 27th 2012 18:50 GMTMoving to Singapore is useless (that is, for everything but Singlish) unless you put your kids through Singapore's primary school education system with mandarin designated as your mother-tongue language. This also has the unfortunate side-effect of being unable to fluently read and write in English until about your 4th or 5th year. I've known a few kids who've managed to go through that and then successfully transition to the American or British education system, but it's always difficult, and not only because the school years are out of sync. Either way, moving to Singapore might help you, but for many expats they move straight into "Little America" in Woodlands and send their kids to Singapore American School pre-K thru 12. The closest thing those kids'll ever get to a cross-cultural experience is eating a bowl of chicken rice from the Woodlands hawker center.
"Some are stocking their playrooms with Disney videos in Mandarin—not to mention the iPhone apps aimed at making kids into Mandarin speakers."
When I was younger my mother bought the entire corpus of Miyazaki's films dubbed over in Hokkien. Thanks to that I have extremely limited fluency in the dialect, but not much else.
I'm an American and have been speaking English most of my life, including in the home because my father's Chinese is horrible. In terms of learning the language I've run the gamut, since I started out with some limited native fluency and have been through heritage schools, formal high school classroom education, college courses, and immersion. In terms of systems I've learned both zhuyinfuhao and pinyin, simplified and traditional.
Anecdotally, here are the things that I can relate:
1. There really is no significant difference in ease or difficulty between traditional and simplified characters; if anything, learning both is annoying because there are weird character mergers in simplified and no clear orthographic correspondence between certain characters.
2. My greatest success in learning Chinese has been through storytelling, music and other media. I can honestly say I have learned more vocabulary from Jay Chou and mandarin-subtitled Japanese anime than I have from my teachers. The fact that I lost interest in these types of stories has significantly contributed to my declining progress in maintaining my language ability.
3. Accents matter. I can easily understand the mandarin of people from Taiwan, Fujian, Guangdong/Hong Kong, and Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia, but it's very difficult for me to parse Beijinghua or any mandarin from the interior.
4. Writing is harder than speaking. It's the first thing to go if it's not exercised, and is worse if you're near a computer and can type in pinyin. Reading goes next. I still try to regularly read the WSJ front page headlines in mandarin but it's becoming a struggle.
5. Zhuyinfuhao is extraordinary at teaching Koreans to speak mandarin since they are familiar with a similar syllabic/phonemic system in the form of Hangul. Not really relevant, but interesting.
6. I have met almost no one with the ability to speak fluent Chinese without immersion in some other form of media. In immersion school I was roomed with a guy with a similar ethnic background who could speak fluently enough to understand news broadcasters but couldn't read a single character, but those people are rarities. You need other sources of stimulation in the language to maintain it. Sounds like your neighbors' children are writing but aren't doing much in the way of speaking.
Ah Beng in reply to Ah Beng Jun 27th 2012 19:15 GMTOh, and as a final note, that family would have been better off moving to Taipei and sending their kids to Taipei American School. While mandarin language fluency was common enough in Singapore American School, literally everyone I met from TAS (from sporting and music events) except for the recent arrivals had language ability above or beyond my own. That's the power of immersion for you.
TarH33l Jun 27th 2012 18:44 GMTMastering tones and characters are equally difficult for beginners. But I have seen kids speak fluent Chinese without knowing many characters, so I guess tones are easier. But for adult learners, few could achieve the perfect tone and pitch in their speech, so the opposite is true. Generally speaking, characters are a brain/memory thing, while tones/pronunciation are a muscle thing.
guest-ialisos Jun 27th 2012 18:25 GMTI'm of Chinese background (but Australian born + raised), but I still struggle to speak in my mother tongue. My parents sent me to "Chinese School" for 6 years where I spent my afternoons looking forward to the football match over reciting character strokes. This Sunday I'll be flying to China to attend a University "Mandarin-intensive" program. All in the name of making myself "future-proof".
What I did take away from 6 years of bludging is pinyin and basic pronounciation, which is suffice for a taxi trip from airport to hotel, buying street food "xiao long bao, xie xie", and typing into my smartphone app when messaging my parents. Pinyin is easier and more comfortable for English-background learners.
Connect The Dots Jun 27th 2012 18:18 GMTPresident Obama's children are learning Mandarin.
Publius50 in reply to Connect The Dots Jun 27th 2012 18:27 GMTIt was a condition of the loan.
Connect The Dots in reply to Publius50 Jun 27th 2012 18:38 GMTThe young one may be a double agent.
Publius50 in reply to Connect The Dots Jun 27th 2012 18:45 GMTPersonally, I suspect a Portugal may have a spy at the highest levels.
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=bo+portuguese+water+dog+obama&hl=en&sa=X&...Ah Beng in reply to Publius50 Jun 27th 2012 19:40 GMTIf that's the case, then one Canadian province has the most powerful spy network in America.
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