Toshuō

Sometimes I can’t even fathom the world of self-delusion that CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) planners in Taiwan live in. Yesterday, I saw an article in the TaibeiTaipei Times titled, Teachers seek edge over China.

Great, I thought. A sense of competition will be great for us students. Maybe the schools here will even stop pushing zhuyin, get rid of all the local romanization schemes and teach pinyin, the way CSL schools everywhere else in the world do. Maybe, I thought, we’ll be able to take the HSK in Taiwan, or even, (gasp!), learn the simplified characters used in modern China. I guess that was really naive of me. The entire article was about some knock-off test that Shida made a couple of years ago.

The [Chinese Proficiency Test (CPT)] has been computerized this year, the first step toward competing in the global Mandarin learning market, said Chou Chung-tien (周中天), the director of the center.
…
Chou said that more than 500,000 people take the HSK every year, but now with the computerized CPT, Taiwan’s test can be taken worldwide too.

What he didn’t bother to mention, is that while half a million people take the HSK each year, it’s unlikely that half a million CSL learners have even heard of the CPT. HSK scores can get us into Chinese universities, and interviews at many, many companies that use it as a standard. What does the CPT do for us?

Also, the simplified Chinese characters taught by China’s language schools do not have historical roots and meanings, unlike the traditional characters taught in Taiwan.

Really? The characters in China don’t have historical roots and meanings? Gosh, and I’d figured that they had been selected based on simplifications already in use before the PRC even existed. So, if “simplified” characters don’t have any historical roots, then why would “traditional” characters? I mean, traditional characters have changed quite a bit since the era of Oracle Bone Script (甲骨文), right? If it isn’t okay for characters to change now, why was it okay for them to change in the thousands of years before they became what are currently known as traditional characters?

Does my little tirade mean that I don’t think learning traditional characters is important for those interested in Chinese culture, literature, or history? Absolutely not. Actually, the biggest reason I came to Taiwan was that people here still use traditional characters. However, I’m a bit of an oddity. I probably would have happily studied Chinese 30 years ago, when almost nobody was. The huge numbers of students who want to learn Chinese now, though, are different. They’re learning Chinese because China is a growing power, and they probably think it will be good for their careers. At least having the option of learning simplified characters would make Taiwan an attractive CSL location for more people.

As for romanization, I don’t have so much sympathy for the prevalent Taiwanese view. I can’t think of anybody who comes to study here for the zhuyin or non-standard romanization systems. What I really wish I could tell Mr. Chou Chung-tien (周中天) is that while Taiwanese people are free to use whatever whacked-out funky romanization system they please in their textbooks, their street signs, or even their names, 99.9% of CSL learners are going to want to learn pinyin, standard pinyin.

Considering the “colorful” romanization schemes, the large numbers of Taiwanese people who can and want to speak English, the greater cost of living here, and the different character script, I can’t honestly say I’d recommend Taiwan as a place to study to any of my friends. Computer-based test that nobody’s heard of or not, you just won’t learn the same Chinese here that a company back home would want you to be able to speak and read if they hired you for your Chinese ability. Unfortunately, due to political reasons, that sort of Chinese is hard to get in Taiwan, even in the classroom. The only people that I’d feel okay recommending Taiwanese schools to are those that have scholarships and those that are interested mostly in history or classical literature. Taiwan is a pretty good place to live, though. And for English teachers, it’s a completely different story. The pay is much higher here than it is on the mainland, and from what I understand, there are more interesting higher-end opportunities for teachers here, too.

Update: David blogged on the same article a couple of days ago.

Related posts:

• Chinese Character Simplification
• Taipei Times Insanity Continues
• A Test Nobody Wants
• Taipei Times: Studying in Taiwan

One thing I’ve noticed about the more successful bŭxíbān owners I’ve worked with is a certainty that kids need their schools or else they’ll be ruined for life. I can understand how the idea that people who don’t learn English will never be anything more than garbage truck drivers would motivate a school owner to put more effort both into improving the education they offer and into marketing, but enough is enough. Learning English well does not guarantee financial success or happiness, nor is it the only way. The two Taiwanese people I’ve met who had the best English skills of all those I’ve met were both over-worked and paid less than what an engineering major would would make one year out of college in Taiwan. This situation isn’t constrained to Taiwan, either. Just look at Chén Tiān Qiáo (陳天橋), the founder of a computer gaming company called Shanda (盛大). He’s a 32 year-old self made billionaire, and he didn’t make it through his English skills. Driving garbage trucks, indeed.

I’ve thought about this issue for years, but what really brings it to a head is a boy who’s recently dropped down into my newest class. He’s been at the school for over a year and a half, but he just keeps failing. His former classmates are reading 45 page stories about Pocahontas and Aladdin. He’s practicing sentences like, “Can you swim?” and, “Yes, he is. He’s a boy.” I never imagined a kid could go for so long without making any real progress, and I feel his pain every time I have to grade one of his quizzes. He doesn’t really put any effort into his homework, and, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t want to be at my school.

Today, as my boss was going on about how it was irresponsible of this kid’s parents to let his older brother leave after failing a similar number of times and saying that he could just keep doubling the kid’s homework and flunking him down until he was a 19 year-old in a class of 3rd and 4th graders, I just felt sick. The idea that you have to break kids down until you “fix” them just doesn’t fit with my worldview. I don’t think letting the older brother quit or switch schools was case of bad parenting at all. Not every kid is going to respond the same way to the same school system. What works very well for most kids, doesn’t work at all for others. It wasn’t worth getting into a half hour debate consisting of little more than uhm-hums on my side, though, so I didn’t really disagree very vocally. Still, I hope the poor kid’s parents do let him quit. An unpleasant and unproductive year and a half can’t be redeemed by forcing him to continue along the same path for another two. The way I see it, he’s just getting used to failure, and few things are harder to watch a kid do.

Tonight, I stumbled across another podcast for learning Chinese. It’s doesn’t have that much content up and it’s not worth a whole review, but it does some things pretty well. The blog is in English, so it’s easy to tell what kind of podcast you’ll be getting, but once the pod starts, it’s almost completely Chinese. The podcasts are all recorded by a Chinese woman who’s accent sounds pretty clear to me. Other than the odd foreign student or two she interviews on occasion, there aren’t any weird accents, either. I think it’s pretty good for intermediate students like myself, but there is one huge problem. All the pods don’t seem to be organized by level of difficulty. In other words, if your Chinese isn’t good enough to understand some of the pods, you’ll have to hunt around quite a bit to find the easy ones.

April’s Learning Mandarin Podcast

Note: She’s with the Mandarin Second Language Learning Center

For me, the difficulties in learning Chinese have always been due to society more than linguistic details. Nowhere is this clearer than in the issues surrounding learning Chinese names. Learning to recognize names is an important part of learning any language. In many cases, recognizing which words in a sentence are names is the difference between getting the general gist of the sentence or hearing a confusing jumble.

The problem is that many Taiwanese people have a strong tendency not to use their real names with westerners. Many prefer to use “English” names with their co-workers and friends, too. The reasons for doing so are numerous and varied- it’s clear that it isn’t just for the purpose of communicating with non-Chinese speakers, though many will offer up that excuse. I’ve actually encountered office environments in companies that don’t conduct any business in English, but are still filled with employees who go by “English” names at the office. Even a lot of people who don’t do this will use their Chinese name with their friends and family, but use an English one with the westerners they know.

Unfortunately, since I don’t look Taiwanese at all, Taiwanese people are very unlikely to tell me their real names when exchanging introductions with me. A common experience of mine is to know a person only by an “English” name for months, and then to hear other friends referring to his or her real name. I often don’t realize it’s the same person. Some people that do this have said that it’s because “foreigners are bad with Chinese names”. Well, that’s probably true. It sure is hard to get “good with Chinese names” if nobody’s willing to use them with you. I realize that people can call themselves whatever they please, but I do wish people weren’t so into using “English” names. It’s taken me three years of living here to learn as many names as I learned in a year and a half of studying Japanese.

I do have a few strategies for learning names, though.

1. When people introduce themselves with English names, always ask what their Chinese names are. Some will refuse to tell you, but others normally go by their real names anyway and will be happy you asked. You never know who might just be trying to help the poor foreigner who doesn’t appear able to remember Chinese names.
2. When people do introduce themselves with Chinese names, be very careful to remember them. Write down the pinyin and make sure you know how to address them the next time you see them.
3. Read about history, if you can find an easy kid’s book. However much young Taiwanese people may like to identify with English names, you can be sure that textbooks won’t be calling Sun Zhongshan, “Johnson Sun” anytime soon.
4. Read about politics. The day Chen Shuibian starts going by “Steven Chen” will be a sad day indeed. Even politicians who do have and use English names are almost never referred to by them in Chinese publications.
5. Watch mainland movies. Taiwanese movies and Hong Kong movies seem to be filled with people using English names. The mainland movies I’ve seen haven’t been, so far.
6. Keep going to Chinese class. One good thing about the classes and the books at Shida is that we were all given appropriate Chinese names and we had to learn them. The characters in the books we studied all had Chinese names too. It was a good start towards getting familiarized with the most common names.

Note: I put “English” names in quotes above due to the fact that many of the most common “English” names in Taiwan aren’t even English names at all. Yoyo and Coco are two examples that spring to mind, but I’ve also met an Anterny, a San, a Weelial and a host of other people with odd names. Heck, my old dentist went by Decay. If you’re not sure which names are common, I suggest the Name Voyager. It’s got the most convenient interface of any baby name site I’ve seen. You can check the “English” names above on the voyager and see that none were in the top 1000 names in any decade after 1880. If anyone knows of a similar site for Chinese names, please post the link in a comment!

Since an email conversation I had with Big Ell, a while back, I’ve been thinking about what would be the “ideal” teacher in terms of language skills. What sort of language skills should someone who teaches ESL to Chinese speakers have? Obviously, there are a lot of variables to consider. The short list I’ve considered is as follows:

1. The level of the students: More advanced students have less need of a teacher who can speak their language. Higher level students might have a stronger desire to be taught by a native speaker of the target language.
2. The number of hours of study per week: The more class hours per week, the more likely an English immersion program would work.
3. The age of the students: For college students learning a new language, few would argue against using L1 in class. For toddlers, it would be the opposite.

My students start from the absolute basics, only meet for four hours a week, and have quite a bit of homework. Clear communication with their parents is also an absolute necessity for a successful class. As a result, there’s no way whatsoever a teacher who couldn’t speak Chinese could teach my classes. Big Ell’s school, on the other hand, teaches smaller children, and meets for many more class hours per week. As far as I know, they don’t assign that much homework, either. Consequently, teachers don’t need to know any Chinese at all to work there.

Now that I’ve acknowledged how important these factors are, I’m going to set them aside and try to rank each type of teacher. Obviously, this is pretty subjective.

• Doesn’t speak any English: Totally useless.
• Speaks English moderately well and doesn’t speak Chinese: the “fake American”, i.e., the Russian who knows just enough English to fake out the boss and secure a teaching job… not my idea of an ideal teacher.
• Speaks Chinese and English moderately well: the most common teacher I’ve seen of this type is the Filipino domestic worker who takes up tutoring on the side. This sort of teacher can communicate with the students well, and teach reasonably well.
• Speaks English fluently, but doesn’t speak Chinese: the typical fresh off the boat foreigner. This sort of teacher may be perfect for more advanced students, but wouldn’t be able to do much of anything at all for a beginner who only had a couple of hours per week of class time.
• Speaks English moderately well and speaks Chinese fluently: most teachers here fit this pattern. They can explain grammar and usage points to low level students, answer their students’ questions and motivate their classes. They may pass some of their own phonics and grammar issues along to their students, but those same students can always address those issues later. Unless the students are advanced, this sort of teacher can do really well.
• Speaks Chinese moderately well and speaks English fluently: most HFRB teachers fit this mold. This sort of teacher can provide a “perfect” model for pronunciation, grammar, and usage, and is capable of explaining it all to low level students, answering their questions and motivating them. The down side is that all explanations, motivational speeches, etc… spoken in Chinese are less clear and less efficient than they would be coming from a native Chinese speaker.
• Speaks both languages natively: Some Chinese-Americans and most children of westerners in Taiwan are in this category. They can provide a “perfect” English model, and communicate with their students with complete efficiency in Chinese when necessary. There’s no guarantee that people in this group actually are good teachers, but in terms of language skills it’s nearly impossible to get much better.
• Speaks both languages completely fluently, and learned one as an adult:These teachers have all of the advantages of those in the category above, and one additional one. They know exactly what it takes to become fluent in a second language… and they’ve done it. In my opinion, this sort of person is the ideal that every student could strive to become and that every school could dream about hiring. I’ve been told my buddy Mark, from Jiayi, is like this with French. Unfortunately, he’s a highly-paid interpreter instead of a teacher. The problem is, there’s a severe shortage of language teachers who have attained virtually native levels of skill in a foreign language. I mean, how many kids can “CCTV Daniel” and Dashan teach?

What would happen if you focused completely on phonics and practiced saying just a few phrases until you got them perfect?

Get video codes at Bolt.

I teach students English from the absolute basics. During the first class, the kids learn how to say, “hello”, “hi”, “how are you”, “I’m fine”, “good-bye”, and the names and sounds of the following letters: A, B, C, D, and T. They also learn “everybody”, “boys”, “girls”, “stand up” and “sit down” as comprehension items and learn how to spell single syllables with the above letters. While there are some false beginners (basically everyone who’s finished 3rd grade), the first class has been genuinely hard for more than half of the students I’ve taught.

Needless to say, I have to use quite a bit of Chinese at the beginning. Otherwise, explaining the new material would take a lot of time, and explaining what was expected, and how homework should be done would be impossible. Unlike many schools, my school doesn’t make it a goal to make the kids use as little Chinese as possible. They can ask questions. However, it is a goal to make the kids use as much English as possible, and so we have to make it inconvenient for them to use it as a crutch.

Starting in the second semester (i.e. after 100 class hours), students have to ask for permission to use Chinese in class and if they say something they’ve learned how to say in English, I make them do so. If I ask a question in Chinese or if I ask what something means, of course they can answer in Chinese. However, if they use Chinese in other situations without asking first, I take a point. The additional twist that makes the rule both brutally effective and fun for the kids is that if one can catch another speaking Chinese and tell me, then I’ll give a point to the student who told me. Here’s a common scene:

Jerry: Is Cindy an ugly pig?
Jackson: No he’s not. He’s…
Cindy:我是GIRL啦! (I’m a GIRL!!)
<30 hands are suddenly up>
Me: What do you want to say, Eric?
<Everybody who didn’t get picked to answer groans>
Eric:Cindy spoke Chinese!
Me: That’s right! Cindy, I’ll take a point!
Eric: 我加分! (I get a point!)
<30 hands are suddenly up and Cindy’s laughing>
Me: Michelle?
<Everybody else groans>
Michelle: Eric spoke Chinese! Give me his point!
…

It’s amazing. They’re becoming like vultures: anytime anyone makes a mistake, everyone leans forward, hands raised, vying to answer for the extra point. And when it comes to snitching on their classmates about anything, they’ll do it in a heart-beat… as long as points are involved.

Foreign loan words have always been one of the hardest parts of Chinese for me. Despite hearing it millions of times, I still don’t say 拜拜 instead of 再見, or other alternatives. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I just don’t like saying 叩 instead of 打電話, either. Above all, I have absolutely no desire to start throwing English words into my sentences like so many “trendy” people in 台北 do. I’m not happy with saying “打 tennis” instead of 打網球, and I have no idea why.

Maybe it’s because I already speak English fluently and don’t see throwing it into my Chinese as a sign of coolness. I don’t think that’s it, though. I always used to love using all the foreign loan words I could, when I was learning Japanese. I even found my self grinning and muttering things like offisu waka (office worker) or konpyuta saiensu (computer science) to myself during my first few months of learning Japanese. There’s something about how thoroughly loan words are turned into Japanese that I found appealing. Maybe it’s because the phonics of Japanese loan words are changed to fit the languages, where as Taiwanese people sometimes, but not always, try not to change the pronunciation of foreign loan words in Chinese?

One weird thing that doesn’t fit the trend I mentioned above, is that I love foreign loan words in Chinese when they are company names and foods. I like 谷歌, 肯德基, and most of all, 雅虎

Has anybody else out there loved loan words in one language, but wanted to avoid them in another?

I guess it’s time to write what I think of Chinese Pod. Unless JT really ramps up the volume of his podcasting and gets friends to help out, Chinese Pod is the only game in town. There really isn’t any other large collection of podcasts for Chinese learners out there… yet. There’s a pretty fearsome argument about Chinese pod going on over at Sinosplice, and I want to toss in my $0.02. One commenter, named Roy, said:

I have downloaded an intermediate lesson. First thing you are greeted in ENGLISH. The Chinese person also presents themselves in ENGLISH. “I am Jenny”. Are those at an intermediate level not expected to understand “I Am” in Mandarin?

The tones used by the Chinese person are very unimpressive to say the least. I would not hire her as a private tutor. It’s like she was thinking about ENGLISH while she was speaking Mandarin or something like that. Anyhow, the above commenter already stated this. I would not listen to their casts if only for this reason — her bad “tones” and pronunciation. I am very disappointed by this.

Not only this, but it followed by the English speaker in ENGLISH. Why is it necessary for the student to her this repetition from a native English speaker (I hope) in an unaccurate Mandarin? What does this achieve exactly??

Bottom line: get a grip, focus on Mandarin and dump the English wherever you can. And decent Mandarin as much as possible.

I agree with much of what he said. I tried out Chinese pod recently, listened to a few podcasts and didn’t like them too much. I didn’t mind Jenny’s “southern” accent that much; since I live in Taiwan, it sounded “northern” to me! But, the absolute deal breaker is all the English.

First, I tried pod#37, an intermediate lesson. As soon as I started the pod, I was greeted by a loud gong and an anouncer saying, “great resources on the web, blah blah blah learn Mandarin with Chinese pod!” in English. After that, it was “Hello, welcome back to Chinese pod, ah… coming to you from Shanghai China, my name’s Ken Carol (sp?).” in English. Then, “I’m Jenny” in English. Jenny tosses one Chinese word, 加薪, into an English sentence really slowly, Ken makes a half hearted stab at duplicating it, and then it’s back to chatting about the word in English. By the time the dialogue starts, 12% of the pod is over. Between all of the random bantering in English, the damn classical Chinese stringed instrument that won’t stop, and all of the branding related stuff, I felt like even if the pod were at the right difficulty for me, less than half of the time spent listening to it would have been productive.

They did say pod#37 was a “low intermediate” pod, though. So, I gave pod#33 a try. The same gong and intro routine took about half a minute, but at least Jenny introduced her self in Chinese, sort of. I guess she doesn’t like using her real name as much as an English one. Considering that foreigners didn’t have the luxury of learning Chinese names in elementary school, that many Chinese people prefer to use English names with us, and that we have a hard time learning new Chinese names, this sucks. Still, they got into the dialogue a lot faster on this pod. The guy’s pronunciation was appalling, though. It seemed like he just freely swapped “jue”, “zhui”, and “zui” sounds for each other whenever the heck he felt like it. He reminded me of a coworker I had at an HFRB, known for barking out a constant stream of mispronounced commands to his poor students in a language nobody could quite consider “Chinese”. I couldn’t take it. I quit the pod halfway through.

Next, I tried an advanced one- Murder over a Steamed Bun. After the gong and stuff, I was greeted by “Hello, I’m Jenny and today with me is Liv (another English name). And whenever Liv is here, it’s a good lead that it’s going to be an advanced show…” all in English. She goes into a little speech about how there are lots of levels at Chinese pod, if this is too hard, pick a different one, blah, blah, blah. I understand that they’re throwing that stuff in because they’re afraid of scaring beginners away. Personally, I think the risk of some beginner getting on their site, going to the advanced section, downloading an advanced pod and then getting scared away is much less likely than the risk of pissing of potential subscribers who don’t want to hear that junk in every pod they download. Once they got started on the actual dialogue, though, it was pretty good. I noticed Jenny pronouncing “eng” as “en”, but as somebody living in Taiwan, I’m used to that.

In summary, I’ll say this: I’m willing to spend $300USD/month on Chinese self-study related expenses. However, the way the podcasts are now, I don’t even listen to them for free. For a Chinese student in the west who can’t get to a China town and doesn’t have any way of getting a conversation partner, though, Chinese Pod is the best resource there is for listening material. It could also be greatly improved pretty easily. If the English were trimmed out of the intermediate and advanced pods and replaced by written vocabulary lists and explanations, it would be a service worth paying for. I’m not sure if $30USD is reasonable to expect college students to pay, but at least the service would be a good use of their time. Here are what I see as Chinese Pod’s strengths and weaknesses:

Pros:

• Downloading podcasts is free.
• The selection of podcasts is growing.
• Some of the dialogues are interesting.
• There are no real alternatives.
• They hired John, and he’s going to fix everything!

Cons:

• Too much time is wasted with branding, sound effects, etc…
• The constant classical Chinese music in the background is damned annoying.
• Way too much English is used in the intermediate and advanced lessons.
• They all use English names, despite the fact that they’re teaching Chinese lessons.
• The foreign host doesn’t speak Chinese very well.
• None of the hosts speak “standard” Mandarin; they’re all southerners.

Rating: 2/5
Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Update: Chinese Pod has changed quite a bit since I wrote this review. Make sure to check out my more recent review.

This my reply to the second part of Mike’s email from this morning. He was asking if people could tell the tones of Chinese characters from their written form.

I assume Mandarin doesn’t have this issue (of not being able to tell how syllables are inflected) since each syllable has (one of 5?) inflections: hook, straight, etc. Is that correct?

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the orthography of a Chinese character that tells you how to pronounce it. Each character’s tones must be memorized through exposure, mnemonics, or brute force. Making a horrible situation worse, several characters have different pronunciaitons and/or tones depending on what word they are in. Those characters are called pòyīnzì.

Once you know what tone each character is, you have to learn a few rules for combining tones. Sometimes tones change based on other tones in nearby syllables. This is called tone sandhi The most common one is when two third tones are next to each other. Normally, third tone words have a “hook” tone that starts at a low pitch, dips down, and then rises again (2-1-4). However, when there are two third tones (2-1-4) together, the first one becomes a second tone (3-5) + (2-1-4). Another very common transformation is when a third tone is followed by a second tone, the rising part of the third tone gets “cropped” (2-1) and the two tones together are (2-1) + (3-5). There are also some words like 不, the word for “no”, which change tones based on nearby words. Normally 不 is fourth tone, but if it’s followed by a fourth tone it becomes second tone. The number for one, 一, is first tone when it’s alone, second when followed by a fourth tone, or fourth tone when followed by any other tone. It’s really not as bad as it sounds, but it definitely confuses some lower level students. The shortened third tones are especially easy for beginners to get mixed up.

In Taiwan, it’s especially difficult to tell, since there are many words that most people pronounce differently from what’s in most (local) textbooks. In addition to the differences between which tones Taiwanese people use for words and which tones Taiwanese dictionaries use for tones, there are many words that set the local variant of Mandarin, or Taiwan Guóyŭ, apart from the standard dialect. I’m sure that’s going to mess me up big time if I ever have to use Chinese outside of Taiwan. Despite all of the problems though, at the end of the day I’m still thankful… thankful that I’m not learning Cantonese.

Links: John recently wrote a similar post. The comments on get into a lot more details than I did. Wikipedia also has a good article on this.