Evan Osnos at the Chicago Tribune describes how ‘China Tries to Grab the World by the Tongue’. The article is good on the historical backdrop and political complexities behind the growth of Mandarin as a lingua franca. Never in history has a languiage been spread around the world this fast. And, hey, I guess we’re doing our bit to enable that too.
Ken Carroll
I’m curious what the distribution of Mandarin learners across levels is like (that is, a pyramid with newbie, beginner, intermediate, etc.). I would suspect it’s nearly flat, with newbie and low beginners outnumbering everyone by a huge margin.
Lots and lots of students, but not that many who stick with it long enough to get any good.
JohnB, I agree with your shape but not the reason. If numbers of people learning Chinese increases, then the extra bodies will all be starting from scratch, won’t they. So the base of the pyramid is going to braoden to the shape of a line with a tiny little pyramid in the middle. Not because they give up, but because they’re just starting for the first time.
HSK participation can probably be used as a proxy here : “…More than 200,000 people took the HSK tests last year, and about 30 million people worldwide are learning Chinese as a foreign language.” (source http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/c.....715153.htm)
That number includes “Chinese beginners who recognize less than 1,000 Chinese characters and know only basic grammar rules” but are still above CPod Newbie and Elementary level in my estimation.
You can work out the shape of the pyramid by further assuming that not all intermediate and beyind take the HSK…
Yv
Dang I can’t resist.
They ain’t going to do it until they find a way to start injecting Chinese into the youth culture.
I am sure a few schools in the UK will run Chinese language lessons but only for the academically gifted, it will still be seen as an academic language, where French and/or German may be compulsory at some point for every Child, Chinese will be an option for the gifted (like Russian before).
I bump into more people who have some Japanese knowledge than Chinese and the driving force is often Anime or martial arts, rather than business reasons.
Maybe it is different in America but I think John B is correct to some extent, there is a huge “I have never encountered this, is it really a language?” hump that many young people will never get over. Either they need something to make the Chinese language connection in their everyday lives or the education process needs a funky way to address the problem.
We have a whole bunch of motivated adults who still often have the expectation that they won’t be able to read Chinese or have a casual chat for years and years. You give the average youth even a whiff of that kind of thinking and he will drop Chinese faster than you can say “Gangsta rap”.
I don’t think so many Europeans would speak such good English if it hadn’t invaded their culture via films, music, books etc. I don’t care how well the Europeans teach in their English classes if there wasn’t a more pressing reason than “hey this is going be really useful when you are much older, wearing a suit and forgotten how to be kewl” they are surely not going to bite.
You can lead a Westerner to Chinese but how are you going to make him really learn?
I actually se the challenge of growing the numbers of Mandarin learners in the US, say, as not so much one of appealing to young people, becasue that’s unlikely to happen. The issue, to me is simple: lack of provision. There are few good programs, very few trained teachers, and not much distribution. If those things start to come on line, then the learners will follow. It will be the parents driving the growth at that stage.
The tipping point into the mainstream will come later, if it comes at all. Something that appeals to kids and rappers may be the type of thing to induce that.
Ken Carroll
Chris, that’s a good description of a point they’re probably missing. Kids in our countries choose to study whatever they feel they’d like to study, usually because it’s kewl or enjoyable. Kids in China study what their parents advise will be good for them, and when they grow up and try to sell the same sales pitch on foreigners, but it won’t work over here, kids will laugh them out of the school.
If China is spending money and effort in a drive to get the language going all over the world, there is one simple thing they could do to encourage or enable a lot more learners. Produce an excellent classroom course package of student materials - text, workbook, video and mp3 CDs to cover the first year or two - totally FREE to anybody. Then people could run very cheap community courses for students on low incomes including teenagers, it would relieve the expenses for impoverished uni students, and some might struggle on with the materials after classes stop, meeting in study groups with like minded friends, or add them to the reference shelf while studying here. All that’s necessary is to put the whole lot on the net and say please share.
The way the standard student course materials are going these days, it’s a huge investment before you know if you’ll like the course. No longer do you buy the little green book and maybe a dictionary, oh no, you buy the text book, then the workbook, then the reading book, then the listening book, then the audio CDs, then the DVD, then the character writing book, … Who wants to invest hundreds of dollars like that before the first lesson, or commit to years of spending hundreds of dollars each term? So teachers try to save the students money by mandating only a few components, so the package is incomplete, not shown in its best light. If you drop the course then you have to try to flog the books to recoup some of their high cost, but if they sat on your shelf instead, you might pick them up next year and have another go, or give them to a friend.
If you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy for them. If you want to be certain they’ll do something, make it the easiest to choose of the available options.
I just finished six months of university extension classes in Mandarin. I learned a lot about China and Chinese people in general from my native Beijing teacher. It seems to me like China is a giant ball that is starting to roll and there may be no stopping it. I heard that if the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction. I don’t know if that is true but whatever the case it sounds scary. Today on the news I learned that Iran is one of China’s biggest trading partners and the Chinese are talking to Iran about opening up previously undeveloped oil fields. I think that the current crop of students at ChinesePod are doing the right thing. I think that many more people are going to be studying Chinese and Chinese culture in the near future. Chinese history goes back 5000 years or more and I think that the past two hundred years or so was just a bump in the road for China. In any case, what developes will be interesting. It is a good time to be alive…at least I hope so
Ken is very realistic about his tipping point (nice buzzword!) comment.
In the US at the high school level, Chinese has too many hurdles to overcome to be taught widely. With resources and funding tight for public schools, directing dollars to Chinese programs would ultimately be seen as taking away dollars from other programs. There are too many entrenched interests to allow this to happen. 比如説, Spanish language programs are here to stay, but implementing Chinese programs would come at the expense of German, French, and Latin programs. (can anybody explain why Latin is still taught?)
Of course, there are exceptions that could overcome this (grant money specifically for Chinese programs, strong willed school administrators), but these would be few and far between.
This leads to the chicken and the egg problem. If school boards don’t have the political will or funds to make long-term investments in Chinese programs, then how do you get students to make investments in themselves to get the necessary training/certifications to teach at the high school level?
Of course this is crying shame, because as many of us C-Podders know, wouldn’t it be nice to get in our time machine and go back to high school to receive effective Chinese level instruction at the critical ages of 14-18.
I see the number of people studying Chinese getting bigger and bigger, due to China’s more obvious political relevance these days, but as for the number of people who continue on with it after high school/college? Not as big.
Granted there is a huge need for Mandarin speakers in many job sectors in the West, the only way to land a job like that (for good reason) is to have spent some time in China. It’s different than Spanish, where knowing it is relevant and applicable without ever leaving the country.
I guess this ties back into the inclusion of Chinese language in Western media outlets and the like. But whether that would ever happen remains to be seen…
The percentage of people who start a foreign language and abandon study without achieving even a minimal proficiency is very high. It isn’t just Mandarin that has a high dropout rate.
There is an institutional resistance in academic institutions to effective programs do develop oral proficiency in languages. Lower level instructors resent competition from recorded language materials. They prefer programs where they can spend classroom time discussing grammatical points. They want to mark written exams, not to mark people on oral proficiency. Higher level instructors want to teach literature and culture.
Many students in language programs are not really expecting to achieve fluency. Some simply want language credit. Others, the Hermione Granger types, are good at memorizing word lists and grammar rules, and do not want to lose their status to people who are merely skilled at oral communication. Some are merely shy and feel embarrassed sitting in the language lab and making strange sounds that others can hear. An academic institution that rewards oral proficiency over other types of proficiency tends to encounter both passive and active opposition from both students and faculty.
Since World War II, the most effective language learning programs have been found in the military, intelligence, and religious groups. In World War II the military was able to train people to a useful language competency in as little as six months. I once spoke with a Vietnamese person who told me of speaking with an American intelligence officer who had native-like proficiency in Vietnamese. Several Vietnamese people have told me of how amazed they were at the language proficiency of members of a particular religious group.
The only programs of this type that I know of that have been available to the general public are the Foreign Service Institute programs. These have never been really popular and are about forty years old. I am sure that there are much better materials available now, but you can’t buy them at Amazon.com.
The real challenge is to develop language learning materials that are not just effective, but also enjoyable, popular and therefore profitable. I think we are heading in that direction, but we aren’t there yet. The internet and computer technology are changing everything.
I expect that in the future, in languages and other areas, the stranglehold that institutions have on education will be broken. People will educate themselves online with methods that are both fun and effective. They will demonstrate their proficiency by passing proficiency tests and people will not care where they developed this proficiency.
Chris’ point is definitely one of the biggest ones. Unless you get some Chinese anything into popular culture, people are only going to be learning Chinese for business purposes and that’s not really enough. Getting Canto/Mandopop onto radio stations, start a wuxia revival, get Joss Whedon to do a Firefly style thing that’s actually bilingual, anything popular culture. Maybe Chinese rap could get a market.
Also true is the drop-out rate on language learning (not just Chinese). The drop out rate on any language is going to be high, because getting anywhere with a language does require a certain amount of dedication/obsession or something.
Of course there are things to combat this:
- Make it cool.
- Make it necessary for something important (not just obligatory, because then everyone will do it but not properly).
- Make it fun.
- Make it useful.
- Make it practical.
- Make it cheap.
Question is, how many of these are already covered by CPod? I say at least 3 or 4. It’s cool (for some), fun, practical, useful, cheap is relative, so is harder to judge, and it doesn’t have the legal power to make it necessary…
Reg Violin says:
The percentage of people who start a foreign language and abandon study without achieving even a minimal proficiency is very high. It isn’t just Mandarin that has a high dropout rate.
This is absolutely correct IMO. While my experience is only with Chinese courses, that experience confirms what you say. Our class last summer started with some 37 people, and by the end we had about 20 left in the class, but only 10 or less had really absorbed a lot and most of those were the ones who had had previous exposure, either because they were ABCs or whatever.
He also says:
The real challenge is to develop language learning materials that are not just effective, but also enjoyable, popular and therefore profitable. I think we are heading in that direction, but we aren’t there yet. The internet and computer technology are changing everything.
Well, I am not so sure. Motivation matters. When I was put in a situation where there were lots of Cantonese speakers around me (even though we lived in Australia, in my household, for a long time I was the only 鬼 until my daughters came along, so I was immersed in another language) I simply had to learn in order to understand some of the conversations.
So, immersion is the most effective way, and motivation is important.
While the internet can help, I do not think that it can propel you from leaner to proficient … to do that I will need to spend time in China or Taiwan.
I’d like to take the chance to say that I fully agree with M-Phil.
As a teacher of French (as a Foreign Language) at the High School level, we only have Spanish as our other languages (German & Latin were phased out). So really, I get a lot of students taking French to either get away from Spanish, cover for their second year of a language for college, they think it’s cool and well known, or I get the few, rare, dedicated students who mostly make it through French III, sometimes French IV. Would funding for a Chinese Program take away from the current French program and Spanish program at my school? Most likely. But, there would have to be a compromise somewhere. (Realize that a department has a set account for each group to share. Foreign Languages has a set amount they can spend in classroom supplies alone this year- and it’s only “perishable” items!)
However, with what little Chinese I’ve learned in the past three days on C-Pod, I’ve shared it with my French III/IV students, and they thought it was neat! A few of my French I students also thought it was neat.
I think that the biggest push for students to learn Chinese would be so that they could sound completly different to others. Let’s face it- kids love that stuff. And they love to imitate Chinese, ’cause most of them are in the “Is this really a language?!” phase. Once I shared what I had learned with my higher-level students, they really seemed to enjoy it.
The key with teaching Chinese is to really, really break it down, just like Ken and Jenny do. If we could manage to do that for our students, and combine it with all of the things that Will says, I think we’d be on the ball. I’ve heard of at least one school in my area that’s really looking to get into Chinese big time and actually teach it! I myself, am looking to go back to school pick up another language. While the idea of Chinese classes might be intimidating, C-Pod makes me feel immediately successful!
Perhaps you guys should think of syndicating C-Pod for students and schools? (; Your material is top rate!
And yes, motivation is of the utmost importance. As I tell my students, “if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t do well”. You’ve gotta’ love what you’re learning.
I’d reiterate about resources and such, but I feel others have done so well before me. I just wanted to let the views of a fellow Language Teacher/Linguaphile known. (:
Yes, Newbies on ChinesePod certainly outnumber them all.
I’m not sure what Will means by ‘it doesn’t have the legal power to make it necessary…’ In fact, there are no legal restrictions on anyone using our content in any way - as long as they attribute it to us. (We use a creative commons license.) I’d be more than happy to see people use our content in schools or colleges.
Ken
Ken: Highly Interesting!
But - resuming the discussion of AuntieSue and JohnB at the top of the page - I suspect the fluctuation is also highest at the Newbie level - dropout rates outshining all other level (here: measured by discontinued subsriptions per 100 users)?
And I guess the upper levels still are mostly comprised of “adopted childs” who got to their level someplace else. It will be interesting to observe how many students bite their way up the levels…Do you keep statistics on that?
Anyone here who already crossed 2 levels at and with Chinesepod (e.g. Newbie to Intermediate or Intermediate to Advanced)?
Henning,
It’s difficult to assess attrition rates, because there are several time/payment options. The rates vary between them. For example, I don’t know what the attrition rate is for full premium subscribers because we’re just one year old.
We are very stats driven, in fact. However,I always caution against seeing learners as stats, and this is why I stay in the audio and on the blog. If this stops being about people, I’m out the door. (I have no inherent love of numbers.)
As a start-up (we’re still pre-funding)we have to be very aware of stats. Hank has embedded lots of data into the CRM database. I’m happy to share some of that with the Big Brain - let me prepare some.
In the meantime, I can tell you that the overall ‘attrition rate’
(that is, the percentage of customers who do not continue to renew subscriptions each month)is 8.6%. (I’m happy to share that because it’s quite good!)
Ken Carroll
Ken,
thanks! 8.6% is an impressingly good number - especially considering those short-time-subscribers probably started out sceptical in the first place. Even in a worst-case-scenario with one-month subscribers only you would still do way better on a 6-month perspective than the classroom of Richard Sharpe with an attrition rate of 45%-72% (and if I look around the people learning Chinese I met, even those are very good numbers).
With some professional interest in BI I am eagerly awaiting those CRM results. But I definately agree with you that one always needs to have some solid qualitative “grounding” before interpreting quantitative data.
Disambiguations…
Ken, I think Will was simply itemising the things that glue people to language study, and in the example of ChinesePod there were many types of glue but “legal” imperative (on his prior list) wasn’t one of them.
And to clarify my points on newbies… ChinesePod has a lot of support for the newbie level, and way more podcasts than needed already, but it doesn’t look to me like a newbie kinda place. It looks more like an intermediate kinda place, although the lower intermediate podcasts are particularly thin on the ground. My point is that it’s a strange disparity thing, we don’t always present the same as what we offer, but once we get them in somehow, they’ll find out the truth and stay.
By the way, after John’s blog entry I listened to a few of the intermediate podcasts. I don’t know what the intermediates think but I reckon John and Jenny’s recent bilingual chitchat is a brilliant formula. Now those podcasts have become useful for “listening to the general sound of the language” because although I don’t (try to) understand the content I can understand what it is that they’re talking about, so I’m not locked out of the party. And despite strenuous efforts not to learn from them just listen, a few words have seeped through by osmosis, how to say “fourth tone” “dialogue” etc. By contrast, the earlier intermediate podcasts were and still are of no use to me (high newbie). I hope intermediate students like their recent podcasts too, because it would be great if we had dozens more like that to choose from by the time I get up there, and I might even work a little harder to get there, maybe.
Oh, lost in blogspace again. Those comments belonged on another blog page, it’s around here somewhere, but oh well, this page will do now.
Aunty,
You’re right how newbies may perceive that ChinesePod is not really suited to them. Actually, it struck me very forcefully when you talked about it earlier in the week. (In fact, you talked about it in the more distant past, but it hit home this week.) I think this is the single most important piece of feedback I’ve seen recently. Now I’m trying to figure out how to act on it.
To be honest, we need a Version 3 of the site. That won’t happen within the next 6 months, but we do need to re-think the user experience.
In the meantime, I’m considering how to act upon your comments.
Thx for the input.
Ken Carroll
It’s interesting the way these discussions always hover around financing new programs and textbooks creation or selection, but I have found once I have been out of the school environment in the business world and around people who never went to college or who don’t care about anything beyond our borders is that the tougher issue regarding getting people interested in Chinese language is a bit more complex and uglier. In the US, there is a fierce, nasty debate about immigration, plus a strong “English only” movement very threatened by any foreign influence or language. I think that race is also at issue with this language, as well as general ignorance about East Asia in general. Certainly, the history of Chinese immigration into our country has been rocky, and the waves coming now are creating a bit of identity concerns. Many people are not enthusiastic about their children learning any foreign language, and while it is okay if ethnic asians learn it, it comes off a bit different when the learner is not of that race. Maybe more surprising, maybe less welcome, maybe more suspicious. The definite feeling, however, is that they’ll learn English anyway, so what’s the point in learning their language? These things must be taken into consideration when trying to attract students.
Spot check: I went to a bookshop in downtown Philadelphia (Borders) on Friday as I was going through the US. Typical store I guess on 3 floors, counted 36 shelves dedicated to foreign language (4 meters across maybe?) of which 1 for Chinese. I must say things probably aren’t very different in Europe, but I can’t resist comparing this with bookstores I visited in Xi’An and Zhengzhou in the summer, half a floor dedicated to learning English
Yv
As a newbie, I find C-Pod to be the best source of study material. In my town (Quebec City), there aren’t much resources for learning mandarin. In fact, many people don’t even know what mandarin is.
I was lucky enough to find a Chinese teacher in my area. I’m planning to study abroad in Nankai University, Tianjin next fall.
Immersion is the key to success and C-Pod is the closest thing to immersion I have right now and I love it !