Comments on: Worse than Grading Sloppy English

By: amy

amy — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:45:22 +0000

LOL i have to say its a bit worrying, making that kind of mistake…(”doctor” vs “life”.. XD)

Maybe the use of msn and internet is really corrupting the literacy/language skills of the next generation …

(but i must confess..when i was in elementary school, I found it was Really hard to distinguish between “ㄣ” and “ㄥ”. Well, i still can’t tell their difference easily now :p)

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:25:11 +0000

But Amy, Mandarin isn’t a foreign language for my students. They’re all Taiwanese kids. Unfortunately for them, the accent most common in Taiwan confuses several Mandarin sounds, that the elementary school textbooks keep distinct.

By: amy

amy — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:30:15 +0000

haha this is funny
I suppose anyone learning a foreign language would have this problem… the local accent is just not the same with what u leaned from text books!

I am a taiwanese studying in Australia, and i remember how frustrated i was trying to understand the Aussie accent…

By: Prince Roy

Prince Roy — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:25:21 +0000

Hey Mark,

I answered your question the best I could. Go check it out…

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:05:19 +0000

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not my job to correct their zhuyin. It’s just that grading the listening comprehension sections of their quizes is more difficult when their first language is still a bit shaky. I’m still pleased with the results of comprehension based exercises, though.

By: JT

JT — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:06:30 +0000

I think for ㄘㄚ and ㄔㄚ, their Chinese school teachers really need to take up the responsibility for this matter. This is way, way beyond the English teacher’s concern.(I just pisses me off if I EVER have to correct their Chinese pronunciations.) Or maybe you can get a part-time teaching them Zhuyin. (You’ll sure be in the news and maybe get bashed by some “Taiwanese Bastards” that you’d be glad to meet!? lol)

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 17:16:16 +0000

That’s for sure, JT. Zhuyin is a little weird in a few ways. ㄔ (which sounds like “chir”), ㄨ (sounds like “oo” from “boot”), and ㄥ (which sounds like “ung” from “lung”). When you put ㄔㄨㄥ together it’s pronounced as “choang” not as “chir-oo-ung”. Still at the syllable level, zhuyin is totally consistent.

English phonics, on the other hand, seem to have been designed by a crack-smoking madman. Even after learning fifty or so phonics rules and hundreds of morphemes, it’s only possible to know how to spell about 75% of the new words we hear correctly. There’s no good reason “swallow” and “fallow” don’t rhyme. A total language geek might be able to beat the rest of us by asking,

Well, is the word from Latin? If so, it ends in “-ible”; otherwise it’s “-able”.

or some similarly ridiculous questions.

The issue for these little kids is different though. Their problem is just that their parents’, all of their friends’, and all of their acquaintance’s Mandarin has been heavily influenced by Minnan. As Jake so clearly pointed out, I have the same problem.

By: JT

JT — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:45:34 +0000

How funny and disturbing at the same time haha. I haven’t been THAT fortunate to correct something like that in the longest time.

Yeah, they need to work on their Chinese skills equally as they put on English. Probably the same as many 1st or 2nd graders in English speaking countries.

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 17:18:32 +0000

Ha! I love how you didn’t even bother to mention that the first kid wrote ㄘㄚ on #11 and the second kid wrote ㄔㄚ. Either, you’re showing remarkable restraint or else your own Chinese has been fucked over by living in Taiwan so long. You should blog about this stuff more. It’s been several years since I was in Taiwan, but this post sure brings back the memories.

-Jake

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 04:39:48 +0000

I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. I’ve frequently heard locals “over-correcting”, i.e., pronouncing 4 as shì. At least once or twice a month I’ll see Taiwanese people at my school having to use hand gestures to ask for clarification about whether other Taiwanese people have just said 4 or 10.

As for myself, I totally ignore whether if they juănshé (curl their tongue) or not. I just go by the tone. It works. People here obviously can communicate with each other (though I’ve read studies that say they have to ask for more clarifications between native speakers than English or German speakers do). The thing that sucks as a foreign learner is that the total number of distinct sounds is decreased, which means we have to rely even more on context.