Learning Mandarin, whatever it takes - The Economist (blog)
Learning Mandarin, whatever it takes
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.
There are different levels of fluency - good enough to ask for directions is not the same as good enough to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement - but I have found that Chinese is taught very differently in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the West.
I learned Chinese primarily on the mainland and in Taiwan, worked for many years in Hong Kong (pre- and post-handover), and have taught Chinese in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
(I was brought up in a Spanish-speaking household in the US, and went to school with primarily English speakers.)
Learning the stroke-radical system, as the Chinese do, to me is the heart of learning the language. Most English curriculums leave this till the last; most Chinese curriculums focus on them from the outset. There are syllabic qualities associated with character forms, as Dr. John DeFrancis pointed out in his excellent "Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy." I think the approach that is often taken by Western scholars to the language hinders, rather than helps, lingustic development.
At its essence, a language with essentially no verb tenses, conjugations, or exceptions to a rule is much easier to learn that one that is rife with numerous conjugations, a bewildering array of verb tenses, and an extraordinary number of rule exceptions. Fearing the characters and tones, rather than embracing them, is a Westerner's problem; solving it requires you to think like a Chinese.
Wasn´t so hard for me...
I´m a bit rusty now, but then I was never a poor student. Hardest things are tones, then learning a lot of characters.
I've studied Mandarin for over 6 years, 2 1/2 of which were while living in Taiwan. In my experience characters were the more difficult aspect simply because there seems to be an infinite number of them. I would recommend learning to speak first, gaining a solid speaking proficiency is far more useful than writing. Once you feel comfortable with speaking (tones and all) dive into character study.
You do realize a human only lives 60~80 years? Wasting precious time on learning some peculiar way of expressing yourself so some odd tribe would understand you is not very smart.And knowing their language would bring you precious little of advantages you were hoping to get by sinking all those hours in training.
I could disagree more who advocate neglecting the tones, or even worse thinking reading characters is not important. I really cannot understand either of those approaches. When your tones are off, people notice. Its that simple. If you want to speak crappy Mandarin with the accompanying "wtf is this guy saying" looks from the listener then yes you can neglect the tones, but the only way to speak clear, accurate mandarin is to pay attention to the pronunciation. That does not mean enunciating even character like the way a computer program "speaks" a language, but they need to be accurate. As for neglecting characters IMO thats even worse. How many people can have powerful speaking skills but are illiterate? Probably none. By only leaning pinyin you will never be able to read, which is I feel the best way of language acquisition. I read newspapers, novels, shop signs, ads on the MRT, anything I can understand. I'm by no means fluent, but the constant reading and writing is nothing but a massive, massive help. Without being literate you're blind to the essence of Chinese language.
At the end of the day I think all these people taking part in the learn mandarin fad are wasting their effort. Moving your family to Chengdu for a year is a waste of time. The only way to get good at this is serious hard work over a long timeframe. I don't think Chinese is difficult..... its just there's *alot* of it.
Everything sounds the same and a bit as if scrap metal is thrown onto the ground.
No reasonable person would try to apply tones to pure hissing sounds such as si, shi, etc.
Generally, too many tones (about 4 too many).
Too many letters.
Too many dialects. (Hard to find proper Mandarin speakers in many parts of China.)
Too many Chengyu. I can remember 3 at most. If I learn a fourth, I will forget one of the other 3.
Too contextual. Most sentences can be one thing and its opposite at the same time.
On the plus side, I can say almost anything with a pretty limited set of words, and it is possible to arrange words within a sentence almost arbitrarily.
Day day study, day day fail.
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十
umadbro?
As a fluent Chinese speaker (second language), I'd say learning tones is not that important: most Chinese don't speak Mandarin as a first language, and they will be unable to distinguish your tonal inflections. Rather, they'll wonder at your non-Chinese face, and try to use whatever English they know.
The problems I had with pronunciation had to do with speaking Mandarin with a Beijing accent in Taiwan. I was regularly misunderstood, until I adopted the Taiwan accent of Mandarin. It didn't have any thing to do with tones: some of the sounds, the pronunciations, had been conflated. This in a language with a paucity of phonemes, reduced even more.
Learning to speak was easy; learning to read was much more difficult, and I think is the biggest challenge to those who want to master the language. Mormon missionaries are taught only to speak the language, but that ill prepares them for living in an environment where signs are all in characters and not in letters.
I did Chinese at uni and lived in Taiwan for 20 years, where I saw many children suffer under the burden of hours of writing practise every day: teaching Westerners to write Chinese is pointless. Learning to read, however, is not all that difficult as Chinese grammar is much more straightforward than European languages. The tones are a bit tricky - lots of drilling needed - but pronunciation is not too difficult once the retroflex is mastered.
This article offers an excellent explanation of why learning to read and write Mandarin is oppressively hard, harder than learning to speak it and harder than learning most other languages:http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html/
"...imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation."
I have started as a kid, only 1:30 hr per week for 7 years.
Of course if I had been interrogated at any point I wouldn't have been probably able to give the right answer on the spot.
Because this doesnt matter. The brain works in ways that you can't check with surprise questions. If this initiation is followed by immersion, then chances are good that this kid will activate all this passive learning and kill it.
I did, and after just one year in Beijing i was an interpreter at the age of 19. Then i studied 4 yrs in university, made trips there every time i could, as an interpreter always.
My accent is close to flawless and im often mistaken over the phone for a HK or Taiwanese. I do come from a family with strong languages abilities though(Father fluent in 12, mother in 5).
But my point is that a kid has to learn with passion and really like it. There is no point at learning Chinese if there isn't a true passion for the language from the kid, not forced by the parents or teacher. Only passion gets one through hours of dictionnary immersion in libraries, hard studying, countless hours of practice, and traveling far from his/her family and culture.
The only true way in my opninion to learn Chinese, speak, write and read fluently is to practice altogether from the start. No need to spend too much time on pinyin, and i also strongly advise the language to be taught in Chinese, by Chinese. There will be lost in translation times, but that is what makes it an adventure and a true challenge that one can only be proud of when mastered.
I and currently undertaking a BA in East Asian studies and having lived in Japan and South Korea for a year each respectively, I speak Japanese almost fluently and Korean to a reasonable standard. I am also studying basic Mandarin as part of my course and I have to say that, in my opinion, the reading and writing is the easiest part - speaking it slowly isn't -too- difficult if you use certain tricks to remember how to make the tones (I take the orchestra conductor approach - marking out what the tones are with my hands as i'm speaking!), but speaking fast and listening is fairly hard. The only thing that can help with that is total immersion for at LEAST a year - and it does no good just in being there, you have to actively throw yourself into situations where you HAVE to use the language on a constant basis no matter how tiring or frustrating it may be.
Also pinyin should only be used to bridge the gap between languages and should by no means be the focus. Learning the characters alongside the pinyin is the best method until the pronunciation is memorised sufficiently. Just learning the pinyin without the characters will just end up becoming a vice and will hinder the student. Once you learn how Chinese characters are structured and built, and learn how to treat them less as words and more as pictorial formations, memorizing new characters shouldn't be horrifically difficult.
Overall, learning Mandarin is by no means an easy feat, but with perseverence and the right techniques it is entirely possible and can definately give one a great sense of achievement in achieving even just a basic level of proficiency.
I've lived in Beijing for one year. I only study pinyin and spoken language. I am proficient now and have been for 5 months. I did well because I was using google translate/an iphone dictionary often, worked in a chinese environment and eventually hired a weekly tutor. I have seen many other Westerners do very poorly. I think the reasons for difficulty are 1. wasting so much time on writing and learning characters, 2. no real need to learn the language even if you live here (the most basic things are easy to learn, and westerners prefer the western amenities) 3. the many stresses of living here are time consuming.
My understanding and experience is that younger children learn new languages as separate entities rather than through translation from their native tongues as is the case for adults. In other words, rather than building up an English-Mandarin dictionary in her head, a child would learn Mandarin from scratch as if it were her first language. Certainly this has been my experience.
One of the consequences of that is that younger bilingual children are often very bad at translations. My kids are perfectly bilingual English-Dutch and when they were eight each of them had trouble translating words and short phrases from one language to the other. But both could carry on conversations, read and write at the eight-year level in both languages.
Perhaps if the author had tried to engage the child in a Mandarin conversation rather than ask for translations, he would have found the child more capable.
Useless to do a immersion with a kid that is too young and will end up forgetting everything if she/he is not exposed to the language anymore. That's nonsense. If you want your kid to learn it, you have to spend some years in China. That's it. Mandarin is very hard to learn if you are outside China, because it doesn't relate to any other language we know in the West. We build vocabulary by using the language day after day.
Started studying Chinese three years ago, it's really not as hard as WSJ makes it out to be. The spoken language is actually easier than languages with cases, like Russian. The written language does not overlap with the spoken as much as in alphabet-based scripts, but it's not all that bad, either. There is a structure to characters, and each one can be thought of as a word, composed of roughly 40 radicals.
Most of the reason it takes so long is due to what we could call culture studies, necessary when learning Chinese, but something that is already acquired when beginning to study German or French.
As far as the kid in the example -- he just must have had a terrible teacher, I routinely see 5 year olds American kids who appear to be conversing with native Chinese kids at full speed, really not a big deal.
I studied Mandarin in college (UCLA) for two years more than forty years ago. The tones are no problem and neither are the logograms. What made Mandarin particularly difficult (as opposed to French and German, which I also studied) was the unavailability of off-class reading materials and movies or TV shows. Maybe the web has made this less of a problem now.
In "Johnson" comments the word "fluent" often arises. It is very common when discussing languages other than English for various posters to pop up and claim to be "fluent in four languages". Or more.
I am very dubious about most of these claims. Large blocks of salt, not just grains, must be taken with them.
What do we mean by "fluent"? Looking it up is easy enough and most dictionaries will give something like, "able to speak or write a language easily and accurately". This is pretty subjective.
To me it means that the person understands and speaks the language like an educated, native speaker with only a slight foreign accent.
The level of fluency that many speakers claim is wildly exaggerated. I have received curricula vitae as part of a proposal in which the tenderer has claimed that its staff members' English ranged from "good" to "fluent". I met these people and found that it ranged from "practically non-existent" to "poor" at best.
Many native English speakers, from all English-speaking countries, are far from fluent. And a very, very small percentage of the population is really fluent in a non-native language.
I, a native-speaker, consider that my English is barely fluent. My command of a couple of other European languages is adequate for normal daily social intercourse but to claim fluency would be a gross overstatement.
"Fluent" is a word that should be used sparingly, like awarding the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honor.
While I share your skepticism of the linguistic feats of Johnson's readers, your definition of "fluent" is off-base. Your definition is emphatically NOT the way "fluent" is used in language education. Generally, fluency is considered to begin around B1 of the Common European Framework of References for Languages. The most salient bit of the B1 definition is probably that the speaker "can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken."
The idea that a native English speaker is not fluent is laughable. Just because someone doesn't speak English with Cambridge correctness does not mark them as lacking fluency. Fluency is the ability to interact without difficulty with other users of the language.
To cut this reply short, I think you have conflated "fluency" and "mastery." True mastery of a language (CEFR level C2) does indeed elude most of us, even native speakers. But you do yourself a disservice in denying yourself fluency.
Interesting article and posts. A few comments:
We often hear how difficult a language Chinese is to learn. Well, every three-year-old in China speaks Chinese fluently, so how hard can it be?
That said, children learn languages much faster than adults. Perhaps the 'plastic brain' as someone claimed; I have no idea. But their facility with languages is astonishing.
I have a Chinese friend whose daughter was 1.5 years old at the time. If I asked her a question in Chinese, she responded in Chinese; if I asked in English, she responded in English.
I have Chinese friends whose children speak Cantonese at home, Mandarin to their other Chinese friends, and English to everyone else, with no apparent difficulty switching repeatedly between the three.
I've watched small children from different language backgrounds begin playing together, and within 30 minutes they were communicating with each other and there appeared to be clear understanding of whatever limited vocabulary they were using - some combination of languages.
Some readers appear to have dismissed pinyin as a learning tool. I found it indispensable; without the pinyin, you cannot look up words in a dictionary and so have no access to meaning. Pinyin with tones is all I found necessary. Of course, I always wanted to see the words I was pronouncing, and that may have slowed my learning, but the character recognition was important to me.
As to the tones, I agree that practice is necessary, though I did that with individual words rather than running words through different tones.
Learning Chinese vocabulary is not more difficult than in any other language. Words are words.
English uses tones just as much as does Chinese, but we use them for emphasis, while the meaning remains constant. In Chinese, that change in tone produces another word, and that trips up most people.
In English, if we mispronounce a word, a listener can usually guess at the correct meaning, and that is often true in Chinese as well, which explains why some dialects are not too difficult to comprehend if one knows the context. But even with changed pronunciation, the tones remain constant, and it is that that permits understanding.
Changing the tone will render everything incomprehensible, as any Mandarin speaker will tell you when they listen to Shanghainese, for instance.
The trouble is that, for e.g., the sound of the word for dragon is the same as that for birdcage or chicken coop, the altered tone making the difference. So if you mean to say 'dragon', but mispronounce the tone, your listener does not hear a mispronounced dragon; instead he hears a perfectly pronounced 'chicken coop'.
That means that learning Chinese is rather like learning two languages, one of the vocabulary and one of the tones. Often, people can remember one set or the other, but not always both at the same time.
For practice, it is quite important to have friends with good standard Mandarin. It is common to be taught pronunciation by one person, and then discover that one person is the only one who can understand you. For that reason, it's best to avoid relying on one individual or even one DVD; it's best to repeat phrases with several Chinese people in a group, and ensure everyone understands you. The slight pronunciation differencess originating in different regions of China, when imitated by an untrained ear, may well render your Mandarin unintelligible to anyone else.
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Lastly, there is a frequent poster on these threads who appears to never miss an opportunity to claim that 100 years ago China's literacy rate was 10% or 20%, statements I would attribute to a personal ideological agenda rather than to historical fact.
That same person has made quite a few other false claims about China's history, most especially for the periods involving the opium tragedy and the foreign invasions and colonisation, and appear primarily designed to denigrate China and the Chinese as having been primitive sub-humans and entitled to no historical recognition.
I believe it was this same poster who claimed that the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan and its priceless collection of books and other written material was 'no great loss' because all Chinese were illiterate anyway and therefore lost nothing in the destruction.
It is true that China's literacy rate markedly increased after the war, to the high level it is at today, but there are not any reliable statistics of China's literacy rate of a century ago, and those claimed here are simply wild fabrications. And irrelevant.
About pinyin, I agree with comments above on the fact it is very important, however it shouldn't be the main focus.
When you learn the characters structure, you can search by their components/keys in a Chinese language dictionnary, which gives you more opportunities to learn other characters.
It depends how well one wants to speak the language of course.
+ TV etc are great tools to learn as well
I'm not sure what you mean by searching 'components/keys'.
If you refer to searching dictionary words by the radicals, that is seldom other than painful. I've done a great deal of that, and can still recall on occasion needing 15 or 20 minutes to finally locate one word.
It can be done, but that's a high price to pay for the lack of pinyin pronunciation.
I don't understand your point about the tones. If I change the tone of "long", the word gets a different meaning. If I keep the tone but change the sound to kong, the meaning changes every bit as much. No?
I claim no real knowledge of any Chinese language. However, living in Hong Kong did teach me that the national language is called "Putonghua". Certainly, the South China Morning Post and other English-language news media always referred to it as "Putongua", never "Mandarin". I understand, and I'm sure there will be no shortage of people to correct me, that "Mandarin" refers to a family of languages spoken in northern China. Putonghua is a standardized and officially mandated form of Mandarin which the government of the PRC has declared to be the official, national language.
So, isn't Putonghua what we're really talking about?
I learned to speak a little Mandarin by watching Youtube videos on the internet...
Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong
...not really sure what that means though
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