Jeremy Uriz has some interesting comments on his blog today. In his quest to become bi-lingual and he’s trying different methods, including ChinesePod. I think he points to a change in perceptions, brought about by web 2.0 technologies and, perhaps the experience of ChinesePod. One point I found particularly interesting:
I have a short attention span. I need information, of nearly any kind, in small chunks. I go to class for 2 hours a week but I know going in that I will only retain a portion of what I heard.
In the traditional Mandarin classroom the individual has no control over the flow of input. The teacher is entirely in control. His rate of delivery is rarely determined by the learner’s actual needs. His curriculum is almost certainly an arbitrary one. Who said that a western, adult learner needs to learn 30 or more new words in a single lesson, for example? Where did that notion come from? (When I tried a taking lessons some years ago we covered 30 new words in my first one!)
I’m tempted to say that this type of input is targeted at no-one, but in fact it isn’t targeted at all. A better metaphor is that it simply pours out and it’s up to the learners to try to frantically/randomly scoop it up. I’ve seen this in local high schools and it actually has a purpose: the teacher uses it to control the students by keeping them on their toes. The threat of random comprehension questions is supposed to scare people into paying attention. Phew!
Lesson content has to be manageable, or it induces overload. In cognitive terms, overload is real bad.
Ken Carroll
Yeah, Chinese class here in china really don’t work for me, (if you’ve read my blog you’ll know what I don’t like about western schools then just make a whole curriculum from those things). I tend to start feeling like I’m back in primary school learning times tables again which makes me quite sullen.
There is a target to Chinese Education and it’s not a person, it’s exams. All the rote learning and random quiz lessons are all leading towards exams if you can learn the skills to memorize those thirty words (and a lot of Chinese students do) then your going to pass the exams. I’ve met Chinese students who can just rote learn huge speeches I’ve heard one kid give a huge chunk of the declaration of independence and if you think that’s weird there are more people in china dressed like American soldiers than there are People in the American Army! you see the odd SWAT team as well.
opps side tracked!
What I was trying to say is the Chinese education system is so focused on these final exams that’s what they teach for the good Chinese teachers know this and it’s the reason for the overload it’s target at the students with the ability to get high scores in these exams (those who can mass memorize) as their overload limit is higher.
This isn’t really that far from western teaching 50 years ago (and less). Our teaching style changed as business changed. A business must now “innovate or die” and rote learning isn’t going to create this. I think that’s what created drop out like Bill Gates making their billions they didn’t like the school system so they never let it change them.
Chinese Class is a business, and it’s about making money. It’s not about the student learning anything. It’s irrelevant. You have a bunch of teachers which can’t bring the method over. But most importantly, the fees come in.
I suggest to Jeremy Uriz to quit class today and learn by himself. ChinesePod can be one of the inputs. But it’s more efficient to have more inputs.
Ken said in C3 “input should be meaningful”. Meaningful to me means interesting. Class material is often far too boring. Ken is also right on grammar (waste of time) and wordlists (waste of time if they are not relevant right now). I suggest to Jeremy Uriz to listen to Steve Kaufmann and read how he learns languages. He just suggest input, input, input. That is audio in the target language, 30 times till you get it.
Ken, you’re preaching to the choir!
I remember vividly my Chinese teacher here in China saying he believed in me that I could/should remember 30 words a day.
You can imagine what I was thinking to myself.
I do believe that at some point, if one can turn on natural acquisition and tweak all the variables just right, the mind does somehow learn to combine, absorb and utilize something probably more than 30 words a day if looked at statistically over a long period of time.
Anyway, to add some fuel - as you were talking about changing mindsets, why not invite in some local Chinese professors to share their views. The ones with the BLCU 30 word plus lesson plan.
And note that although you may be advocating some sort of limiting control, the Cpod lessons often seem to have an underlying belief that they MUST PUSH VOCAB: note the 10 plus new words from Connie, the need for John and Jenny to review most of all the vocab in their intermediate lessons, the flood of vocabulary in the advanced level (Does vocab define me, does it does it?!), the Word Bank, the Word Game….
Personally I want fluency — and I believe I can do that with quite a limited set of vocab, and slowly, methodically, over my life notch it up in a painless and fun manner. There’s little to support fluency in Cpod or any current Chinese language program.
The only place it exists are in the private business one-on-one and spoken conversation lessons at private schools at an hourly rate that is out of reach for most people.
I think both systems would work. It sort of depends on priorities. Either you fit the classes into your schedule or you fit your schedule into the class schedule. The entire formal educational system of the entire world works pretty much on a fixed schedule. (I love Chinesepod by the way, and I try to keep up with the rate intermediate lessons are released -if they are relased faster, I would probably work harder and if they are released slower, I would probably work less hard)
Horses for courses.
For those of us living far away from China or even from large Chinese communities, having a local teacher can be vital. Of course it depends on the teacher.
Here in Cork, we have a class of three, plus lao3shi1, and our ‘classrooms’ are each others houses. Our teacher has her own techniques for getting the language across, and they are certainly more modern than what has been described above. But she is also very flexible, and allows her three opinionated students to make strong inputs into topics and techniques. The result is a bespoke, fast-flowing feedback loop, that once a week gives us an opportunity to speak Mandarin and also give us an injection of new words and structures.
Two out of three of us also use Chinesepod, and one of the more powerful learning events is when our teacher uses a word or phrase that is the same or similar to one we’ve just heard on Chinesepod. This re-inforcement from two different sources practically guarantees that I’ll remember more quickly, and understand more deeply, the word or phrase in question (in a way that learning from a single source is unlikely to do).
There’s also the value of face-to-face communication. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a nerd and I appreciate the importance of techology in education (keeps me interested too), but I’m into Agile software development, one principle of which says to “value individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. Each has its place of course.
That’s what I consider Mandardin on my terms.
>I could/should remember 30 words a day.
You have to find out what works best on you. Have you read the book “remembering the kanzi” by Heisig? You can get the idea and make it work for Hanzi. You can d/l the first 120 pages online somewhere…
>having a local teacher can be vital.
Early learners don’t need a teacher because they have nothing to say to each other. Early learners need input, and more input. Listen to CPod, but also find other sources, preferably with script.
30 is the absolute lower boundary of new vocab I find in a zh-lesson (I posted my average counts in the internal-e-mail-thread). Yesterday in the train I fought against Monday’s “Media” lesson text. That provided me with about 65-70 formerly unknown words.
And I don’t mind. Much the opposite.
I love to “learn” a great number of new words each day - in the sense of learning about their existence. Of course I do not at all recall many of those in the evening - that number might sink down to 1-2. But this way provides me with the whole width of the language and even a blurry memory of those words can help a lot later on when trying to understand natural language. Unlike Lantian I am convinced that fluency has to be a two-way-road and just like ADSL the “download capacity” should be bigger than the “upload capacity”.
From former learning efforts I know that after “learning” a word between 20 and 40 times (on different days!) it has become pretty much hard wired.
Hi Fox,
I bought and valiantly tried Heisig for Kanji when I was learning Japanese. It was fun for a while and it gave me a better understanding of Chinese/Japanese characters, but it never helped me learn hundreds and hundreds of characters. I eventually mixed up my little stories and would eventually forget them with non-use.
I disagree that early learners have nothing to say to each other. I remember having LOTs to say. Now whether others found me yelling “Look! A pencil.” interesting was out of my control.
I agree with what Brendan said. Having a native teacher, if possible, is vital even/particularly for very elementary learners. Once you have bad pronunciation at the early stage, it would be very difficult to correct it later. Of course, this policy does not necessarily apply to learners with good sense and ears.
Providing multiple input sources is important too. It would create synergy effect just like Brendan explained beautifully with his experience. I am learning Chinese with several kinds of textbooks, ChinesePod as a matter of course, online news/video/radio, and last but not least, great help from my Chinese friends.
I have never learned Chinese in classroom setting. However, I did work through many 30+ word lessons in BCLU’s Chinese for Beginners (with the listening book companion). This was not really a problem for me simply because I was not expected to learn 30-50 words in 1 day, but to chew on the many aspects of the lesson for a week and talk about them with my tutor. After two years I had finished books 1-3, plus the reading companion. I scored INT-High on my ACTFL test. (Keep in mind that many c-pod users express their frustration that after going through ALL the elementary lessons they are still not ready for the INT level lessons)
Upon coming home to the States, the BCLU Intermediate stuff didn’t fly for me because I didn’t have a tutor and they didn’t define every word that was new for me. My Chinese study stalled until C-pod came along. After just 6 months of using c-pod and talking with my tutor over Skype, I took another ACTFL OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) over the phone. I knew I had done well, but I didn’t think I would score ADV-High, which I did. (Actually, I think I’m more ADV-Low to Mid).
So as you can see, I am grateful for both BCLU and Chinesepod!
I think the HUGE problem with traditional Chinese classrooms is not vocab, but the insistence on learning to WRITE characters by HAND. This requires soooo much time it can squash all the other domains. With the added negative that you are bound to forget how to write many of them as soon as you stop practicing. I have a friend who is studying Japanese at a major university. She is required to learn to write 40 kanji characters per week. She said she feels like she is learning nothing, just cramming in characters into her short-term memory.
Teachers, life is open book! If I want to write something in Chinese by hand (which I almost never do) I can just pull out my electronic dictionary for help!
So the irony is that with my ACTFL score, I qualify for and am applying to become a classroom Chinese teacher in U.S. k-12 schools (an ESL/Chinese dual teacher); however, I myself have never learned Chinese in a classroom setting.
So I’m always asking myself how to best use what I know about ESL and my experience as a Chinese learner to create an effective Chinese classroom.
Here are some thoughts:
A blend of shared reading/listening and free reading/listening.
We need to study some things as a class so we have some shared language and shared topics to discuss. But I can preserve some of the self-directness by providing classtime or home assignments for students to choose their own listening or reading texts of interest.
Also, I think learning centers might be cool. This is a time where students break up into small groups and work on tasks indpendently. For example, some centers could be a free-reading center, a listening center, a character writing center. Then the teacher could have a center with a small group of students to do a communicative activity. Hopefully, in small groups students won’t be afraid to speak up.
Finally, I want to maximize cool things that can happen in a classroom community that c-pod or any independent learner can’t do:
1. task-based activities - like information gaps, or a group project. For example, in an ESL class I once had groups create an invention, create a sales pitch. We then had an expo. The salesman stayed behind while the other students visited all the other stations. We all had a blast!
2. role-play
3. CREATE WITH THE LANGUAGE - commercials, short stories, plays, dialogues - and there’s an audience to publish for. The only creation I can do with c-pod is write a chinese message on the blog.
I think the best article that outlines what a foreign language classroom should focus on is Rod Ellis’ Principles of Instructed Language Learning. You can access that here:
http://www.asian-efl-journal.c....._05_re.php
I seem to agree again with 海宁 / Henning that fluency has to be a two-way-road and just like ADSL the “download capacity” should be bigger than the “upload capacity”.
I certainly will always “consume” a lot more content than I can produce, and that goes for speech as well as text, which in the case of Chinese proceed almost independently - for me at least.
This is not just in a language training context, but also applies more generally, and so it’s ok for me to be bombarded with more vocab than I can use or memorize. I guess it was Lantian in another post who had said how important it is to get the “glue” sorted out, all the little words and structures that connects parts of discourse together. When you’re comfortable with this, specialized vocab becomes much less of an issue, a commodity you grab on demand…
Yv
Hi Henning,
Did I say fluency wasn’t a two-way road? I think it is ESPECIALLY a two-way road.
Was it my opinion that trying to memorize 30 characters a day is mostly wasted time? I didn’t mean anything one-way from that…?
In contrast I believe it is very vital and important to be exposed to hundreds of words a day. I did a count of a simple two-page comic book once and it had over 100 different vocab words. I suspect the same is true of any normal conversation, whether between adults or two 5-year olds. The exposure to lots of words in context increases your chances of hearing familiar ones, learning them, and acquiring lexis and the patterns of the language.
However, when one is doing a ‘learning’activity, I think most mere mortals can’t remember 30 words a day after listening to a lecture and reading thru the lesson in a book. I think in-depth focus on maybe 3-5 words and key patterns and lexis is more within the optimal range of most brains. But I do know one Chinese supergirl who remembered after several months the word ‘intersection’ after I said it to her only once. Maybe I am under-utilizing my brain.
是我的看法！
Ken,
I couldn’t agree with you more. I just started an Intermediate Chinese class and unfortunately, the teacher follows this method. For the first hour of the class, we are simply reciting words from a vocabulary list, which is not only boring, but not too useful in terms of retention and learning useful language patterns. Yes, this is just sensory input overload.
The second hour is supposed to be practice conversation based on the homework assignment. The teacher handed out a picture and we were expected to get creative and write a dialogue incorporating new words we had “learned”. Great idea, however, most people in the class did not put the effort into preparing a practice dialogue.
The students share some of the blame here for not taking responsibility for directing their study. Learning really is a two-way street.
Let’s get real here. I agree that we should be exposed to hundreds of words/items every every day, but definitely not hundreds of NEW words or items every day. That just can’t be done. Nor, for that matter, can 30 words per day.
It takes time and context to get to really ‘know’ a word. A word-for-word translation is usually just the tip of the semantic iceberg. You have to know it’s grammatical forms, it’s behaviors, where it occurs, appropriacy and social nuance, etc, before you can say you know an item. With Chinese you also have the writing element and the memorization invovled.
Do not kid yourself - no-one can memorize all of that at the rate of 30 new items per day. And remember that all the conscious ‘learning’ has no impact on your acquisition anyway. You’d be spending all your days memorizing with no chance to go out and acquire it.
There are dozens of reasons why such a linear approach won’t work, but I don’t have the space to go into them all. Any teacher that forces this upon people is a classroom menace to be avoided.
Ken Carroll
>Having a native teacher, if possible, is vital even/particularly
>for very elementary learners. Once you have bad pronunciation
For those just doing CPod, how can they learn bad pronunciation? I find Jenny’s speech actually rather good. You can argue about Ken, but remember that even 40% of Chinese speak no Mandarin and many speak it fairly bad. So even if you speak bad Mandarin you will just fit in perfectly.
And what input can a teacher give that you don’t get from CPod? In opposite, the possibility that you can ask question is rather distracting.
You can even consider to skip the teacher and as an advanced learner go straight to free speech.
In my teaching, using techniques grounded in the concepts of comprehensible input, and less is more, students are introduced to very little brand new material. Focus is on a very limited number of new items. Three is the magic number in TPR (Total Physical Response): three new items in any lexical category times three lexical categories, so roughly nine new items in any given class; the same axiom holds for TPRS (Teaching for Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling). With both of these techniques, the teacher gradually introduces the new lexical items and, using the whole language you’ve been using up top that point, circles back through the items, weaving them into various stories to maintain student interest and attention. Repeating items a hundred times in any given class is not unusual. The same material is also woven into stories that students can then read, to reinforce their listening by circling back through it with reading.
These methods are tried and true. TPR was created by James Asher in the seventies and has been used by mainstream teachers for a dozen years. Asher, a psychologist, not a language teacher, understood that, just as everyone digests food the same way, so too does everyone acquire language the same way. The brain is pre-wired for language acquisition. TPR makes full use of this pre-disposition. So, too, does TPRS. TPRS was created in the eighties by Blaine Ray, a California high school Spanish teacher. Ray wanted to find a way to utilize the very effective techniques of TPR to teach more abstract and complicated whole language. This technique, like all radical changes to education, has taken twenty years to begin to reach the mainstream. Only very recently have teachers of Mandarin begun using TPRS. The teacher only has to let go of the idea that characters rule the day. I personally give my students pinyin below each character they receive. They are welcome to a character-only copy, but since the emphasis is on comprehensible input,, and circling through the material, TPRS requires the romanization.
Once a teacher tries TPRS, it will set her free; once a student experiences it, and the rapid pace of language acquisition that accompanies, he will quickly lose patience with the slow pace of traditional language “learning”.
戴仁迪
——————————————————————
塞翁失马 sàiwēngshīmǎ
Who’s to say it’s bad luck.
I’d actually be interested to here about what text books people think are good and for which level (as sometimes the whole series isn’t good but they write well for beginner or intermediate).
The most common text book here in Kunming is Hanyu Jiaocheng by Beijing Language and culture university press. I think it is quite possibly the worst textbook of any type I’ve ever come across. It is definitely of the 30+new words a lesson school of teaching. not only that though heaps of the “new” words are never used again or not until several lessons latter.
Another thing I’d like to be able to have as input from chinesepod is groupings of say 10 lessons and then a longer story (or pref more than one) that utilizes only the words used in those 10 lessons. I think i’d prefer a story to a dialogue.
Just my thoughts about a couple of the things that have come up in this discussion
1. Beginner pronunciation: I don’t think any Beginner coming from a none tonal language to mandarin has good pronunciation. I think it really is something that is learned over time. no real opinion on if it’s better to have a native teacher from the start or not.
ADSL like language learning: I think I can say more than I can understand by listening as my brain seems to be able to put sentences together to say something faster than it can to break them down to understand a reply. My reading is probably better than my speaking by a reasonable margin however.
okey looks like dai has mentioned an answer to one of my requests both TPR and TPRS sound very interesting. what text book/s do you teach from dai?
How many words per day you want to learn depends upon your arithmetic and how long you are willing to wait to attain reasonable fluency. In my (always humble) opinion and also that of many others it takes a vocabulary of about 15,000 words to be able to claim proficiency in any language…about the same amount of words in the C-Pod Glossary. If we assume that you only study five days per week and take two weeks off for vacation each year the numbers break down like this:
30 WPD (Words per Day) = 7500/year = 2 YPT (Years To Proficiency)
20 WPD = 5000/year = 3 YPT
10 WPD = 2500/year = 6 YPT
5 WPD = 1250/year = 12 YPT
Conclusion (mine): The Chinese teacher method has a lot going for it. Better break out those flash cards, People
Dai,
I’ve read about TPR, but never really seen it used for Chinese or more advanced levels of proficiency. I’m really interested in hearing more about how you do it. Also, do you do TPR exclusively or is it part of a larger teaching method. And in regards to Bob’s point, how well and in what kind of time frame do you see your average student progress?
P.S. I went to your website but it was a site for Senator Sky Damon. Is that you or are you just messin with our heads?
Bob,
Good point. However, the ESL rule of thumb is 2-3 years for BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) but anywhere from 5-7+ years to develop CALPS (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) for success in an academic environment. And these are students who are immersed in the language environment, with special instruction, everyday for 7 hours or more. I don’t know exactly what that means for us who use Chinesepod in our spare time.
While I do still use textbooks (Communicating in Chinese for the first two levels and Integrated Chinese for the last three), my goal is to be textbook-free in a couple of years. These methods don’t lend themselves to either traditional textbooks or to autonomous learners. They require a teacher who makes stories up, often on the fly as she gages student comprehension.
That’s not to say there aren’t TPRS books. There are for English, French, Spanish, and German. These are basically books of stories for the students and a guide for the teacher. Again, they require a teacher.
Chip,
TPR is just another arrow in any teacher’s quiver of tricks. I personally also use the Rosetta Stone software. TPRS, though, can become an all-encompassing technique to be used at all levels of language. You will see classes now advertised as TPRS (which by the way is not a copyrighted term), as well as “fluency fast”. Also, many schools are now actively recruiting teachers trained in this method; some require it.
Students make fabulous progress in acquisition using these and other techniques (e.g., Krashen’s Natural Approach; Rosetta Stone) that are based on comprehensible-input and low-stress models of learning. As part of this approach, students are NEVER forced to speak; speaking emerges when it is ready. Since my students don’t take any standardized tests, as part of my program, it’s hard to compare them with students in other programs. I will say, though, that every single one of my students acquires the language. This is quite different from programs that rely on a few students who have an aptitude for memorization and a facility with grammar. These types of learners make up about 5 percent of any cross section of students.
As for the website, it’s a Yes Men-esque ( http://www.theyesmen.org/ ) attempt to humorously skewer Republicans, Republicanism, and our own venerable Republican senator, Charles Grassley (here in the great state of Iowa) and to raise an awareness of what they all really stand for. I am seriously considering a run against him in the 2010 Republican primary race. Of course, I’ll be running to the right of Chuck.
Dai said:
TPRS (which by the way is not a copyrighted term)
he meant: IS a copyrighted term.
Dai’s such an idiot.
I had a look at “Rosetta Stone” some month ago. I have no word to describe it - or, what is below “boring”? But I am not friend of any CD-Rom type material.
“Dai’s” target to be book free is a good approach for those who want to speak (and not those who need to learn a language formally, need to make good grades, and never speak). I am in favor of the audio only method. You need a stress free input, preferably without teacher.
For characters you need of course books. But you need to mix learn books with material you are REALLY interested in. With 500 of the most common characters you can read about 90% of text. Doesn’t matter if you don’t understand all characters, the relevant ones you can still look up.
Okey while searching into this further I found that ChinesePod has attempted this before
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/20.....-response/
will have to check that out.
The other thing I found is a curriculum for TPRS in mandarin:
http://www.tprstories.com/ntpr.....iculum.doc
A barrier to this becoming a larger part of ChinesePod is that it would require that you follow a particular set of lessons. Rather than the higdly pigildy way that ChinesePod currently uses (though how many students actually take advantage of this I don’t know). I really don’t think that this would be a bad departure though. I personally like the idea of a set curriculum that follows on from one lesson to the next. I like the ChinesePod way in that it means I can choose subjects that interest me or that I feel will be useful to me in the short term I recently bloged about how I choose topics but even with this I would like to see a bit more structure otherwise I worry that my learning style ends up with the same complaints as I have about the textbook at my school. Me learning relevant input but then not getting the repetition it deserves, I create my review lessons to get additional repetition.
I think that TPRS doesn’t really need a real life teacher. The actions could be shown using a simple video or cartoon and the stories could be just read out as the podcast to help with students there could be just a bit more vocab work at the start of the lesson.
Bob your acronyms aren’t quite right are they? shouldn’t it be YTP I thought it was Years Part Time when I first read it
You are absolutely right Charles and my face is very red. It should be YTP and not YPT. You can sleep tight tonight everyone because Charles is awake and watching out for us
No, TPRS definately requires a teacher.
Chip,
I think the link to Rod Ellis’ article is good, if a little technical for general discussion here. I’ll try to review it later and myabe post something on it.
Bob, I truly admore your spirit and focus, but I’,m not sure the proficiency arithmetic works the way you describe it. You mentioned the need for 15,000 words to be fluent, but one question is What exactly is a word? Is ‘house-boat’ one word or two? Does set in, set out, set up, set down, set the table, etc, count as one word or many? How many? Is school, schooled, de-school, schooling, etc, one word or many? Counting what words are is often a matter of varying opinions.
I don’t think any learner needs to know 15,000 unique Chinese characters. My guess is that, by the time you’d gotten to the end of that list, you’d have forgotten lots of the earlier ones. Meanshile, you can do a hell of a lot of communicating with even a few hundred high frequency items.
Of course, all of this is a matter of choice. I’m not sure I’d find learnign this man ycharactes very rewarding, but I can see that you do. Excellente!
Ken Carroll
Hi Paul,
I think you’re wrong about that two-way road, it’s a old-school-learn-Chinese expressway and the students are little mopeds going the wrong way.
I also was in classes EXACTLY as you describe. The first few lessons are fine…then one gets behind on 5 words, 10, 20 …it becomes a semester of learning how to flail wildly in a sinking pool of word-water.
Only the Olympian memorizers get the class gold. Exactly what the Chinese system strives for.
Me…I need a little winding path for a day hike.
Hi Bob,
I think you’ve bought into some of the old-school hocus pocus and there ain’t nothin there.
Think about how you’ve acquired your native vocabulary or learned any subject to a high level. How do we acquire all that vocabulary? I can open up a Websters and pretty much it seems like I know every word. Am I a genius? Where are my English flashcards? I can’t find them in the closet? I know I ain’t no genius.
I’m waiting for one of our brainy Cpoder’s to explain this ability humans have to express themselves in so many words and how people acquire them. I think the actual ’science’ still is a bit fuzzy. Even Krashen was relatively vague on this. But it HAPPENS. Build the first floor and the building magically rises.
Just like the atom…I don’t understand it but I know it’s nuclear and pretty darn powerful.
I’m firmly of the mindset that my Chinese vocab will go something like this:
50 words rote memorization
100 talking, using, forgetting, having fun
300 studying, chatting, reading
800 watching tv, movies, reading, chatting, some studying, Cpod
* (I think I’m here right now)
1500 kinda mellow, reading a lot
4000 huh? You say I speak a lot better now? I don’t sound dumb?
8000 I’m kinda living, speaking and arguing
10K + Years have gone by, people ask me how I learned…
———-
Here’s how it went after one semester in college
30 new lesson
60 words, writing a lot of hanzi
10 words, forgeting, confused and mixing them up
100 I’m in college, I can do this
300 I rock, I’m doing the lab, I got the flashcards
500 Did okay on the test, spring break
40 maybe
… Test coming up, new vocab
50 New words
100 I’m not doing another quarter of this
300 Enough to pass the class
5 我，你，爱，不，是 six months later
I sympathise with Paul’s situation. I have seen and experienced this type of thing way too many times.
Ken Carroll
“Fluent” is not related to the number of words, it’s rather related to the words you know. I can say “nihao” very fluently. In fact, most vocab I actively know I can use quite fluently.
15,000 characters? I guess 99% of Chinese don’t know so many.
For 15,000 words you need about 3-5,000 characters. Sounds more reasonable.
It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it that matters.
Teachers fail when they walk into the classroom thinking “what can I show them!” instead of “what can they show me!”
haha Aunty you start of with a comment like that and your whole post seems suspect.
I think the difference between characters and words in Chinese causes a lot of confusion in these conversations as is everyones reletive ideas of what constitutes fluency. Even within native english speakers if you have a larger vocab it’s quite easy to come up with a sentence that the other person would need a dictionary for. I have one particular friend who has quite a small vocab and she quite often asks what a particular word i use means but that doesn’t really make her less fluent in English than me.
I always think that fluency should just mean that you are able to express yourself in a meaningful way. The size of your vocab doesn’t affect this. One person might say “the government is creating a dystopia” another might just say “we’re up S**t creak in a barbwire boat”. As Ken is always willing to point out even if we don’t know we are doing it a lot of what we say is just chunks of language.
charles: Your example highlighs an intersting point.
Words and phrases considered to be “difficult” in a native language are sometimes dead easy for foreign lerners and vice versa. “dystopia” can be easily translated into “Dystopie” in German, “we’re up S**t creak in a barbwire boat” has some more juice in it (what is a “barbwire boat”?).
In Chinese I find this even more extreme: When the speaker does not point out that a certain word is “difficult” it is often just like any other vocab. The “easy” street language on the other hand often is much more idiomatic, used at a faster pace, and contains more syllables…
3 WORDS - and I can say you are fluent or not.
Fluent: I like you. 我喜欢你。
Not: Like you I. 喜欢你我。
Kids are fluent in their language but they have a more limited vocabulary, cultural repertoire, interest set, etc.
I think the common interpretation of fluent however usually includes an adult level of sophistication in terms of communicative ability, breadth of vocabulary, accent, comfort, etc. But this common interpretation really muddles a discussion.
Actually is there a better word for what I’m trying to say? Intrinsic? Native-like generator? Intuitive? Is there some other proper linguistic term?
Maybe Chinese expresses it better, ni hen liu li 你很流利。
流利：liu2 li4 (flow - favorable) fluidly. 她说一口流利的中文。
I want to speak very “flowing and natural” Chinese.
(even though currently I have a limited vocab set)
Hi Fox! Thank you for your comment.
Although the qualified teachers of ChinesePod provide you with opportunities to listen to their beautiful Chinese, there is no way that they can correct learner’s poor pronunciation individually.
Without the help of native teachers/tutors, it wouldn’t be so easy to imitate exactly what you listen to. Needless to say, non-native teachers would be acceptable provided they speak good Chinese.
Let me tell you my experience. In my first year of learning Chinese, I read textbooks and listened to CDs, but I didn’t have a tutor. As a result, my pronunciation was terrible and never improved.
In the second year, I found a native tutor. Thankfully, she made great efforts to correct my pronunciation in every lesson. After a while, my Chinese friends finally came to understand what I said!
Changye
I know what you mean. You have to be aware that pronunciation is important and have to spend some effort to “get there”. With a lack of tutor you could just get a cheap mic and record your speech.
But I think we both agree that audio learning is still much better then from a book.
One more point, I find “teachers” which constantly criticize ones pronunciation really annoying and frustrating. Once in a while it’s OK. I spend a good time in China and talk to people often and have no problem to communicate on my level, so can’t be too bad.
＞ I find “teachers” which constantly criticize ones
＞ pronunciation really annoying and frustrating.
I couldn’t agree more! In that sense, I was lucky enough to find such a capable native tutor, who taught me Chinese for one year very patiently. I think that once you have not-so-bad pronunciation you can learn foreign languages by yourself to a great extent.
I hope I haven’t waited too long to jump into this discussion.
My blog post was primarily about dropping the FSI material and how useful I found CPod to be. I’ve definitely retained more and enjoyed the experience far more than any other “method” I’ve tried.
As for the classroom, we don’t cover material the way any of the classes I’ve heard discussed here do. The class itself is very open, there are no tests, and we are free to change direction at any point, as long as the class agrees.
The instructor is native Chinese and does not have an agenda other than to help us learn Chinese. He is always open to new ideas.
At this point in my learning I take the class because it keeps me connected to other learners and the teacher, who is not just my teacher but a friend.
We also are able to tie the language to Chinese culture from a man who was born before the cultural revolution, lived through it, and was part of the first groups of college grads once it was over. That part of class (though not language related) is invaluable.
Back to the book, yes that part is tedious and I believe the only reason we use it is for commonality. We know where we are and we are all on the same page (content wise). As I stated in my blog my dream would be to drop the book and incorporate ChinesePod material into the class but I can’t control that. I can take private lessons which I have considered for some time. Private lessons are directed by the learner with the instructor. And if I want Chinese language bootcampt there’s the Octagon!
I forgot to mention, the instructor is never demoralizing and constantly encourages us in our learning.
Hi Lantian,
I’ve been to the old school. No hocus pocus there, just good old fashioned buckle down and do it hard work. I say go for the gold medal. Why not?
Jeremy,
Chinese boot camp…now you’re talking. If you don’t know the vocabulary get down and give me 20 push-ups. You will be chattering like magpie in no time.
The whole point of my post was a reality check for people who think they are going to learn Chinese in the short term…especially if they follow some of the current “just let your mind breathe it in” ideas. I have been involved in teaching English for a number of years. I have found that only the serious ever really learn be it either out of necessity or desire. The majority of people seem to just want to pay their money, have a nice time, impress their non English speaking friends by the fact they they are “learning English” and they expect you to put the language in their heads for them. My greatest success is with children. They are very open, they really want to learn, and we always have a lot of fun. In short, you may learn a language by picking up five new words a day but it is going to take you a looooong, looooong time
Bob,
Couldn’t agree more. It’s hard work and there’s no getting around that.
My point is that if I’m going to work hard I want to direct my energies in a way that will benefit me. For instance I can learn to read Hanzi all day long but if my focus is on comprehension and speaking, are characters what I want to focus on? I don’t think so.
I am going for the “total package” so to speak. I do want to learn to read and write Hanzi, I want to comprehend others AND I want to converse in Chinese. So I divide my time. Characters I typically work on in spare time. Comprehension and speaking I spend more time on.
And finally, everything I’ve tried has benefited in some way. I don’t discount any of it in the long run. I never know when some word, character, or phrase will come up that was covered in some really boring material. But, as I stated initially, I want to focus my time and energy on what works best for me.
And 20 push ups…it might work!
Jeremy,
I think we are pretty much in agreement. No matter what method you end up using…persistence, determination, regular study habits, measurable goals, and feedback are all key. I wish you the best of luck on your climb. I’ll see you at the top…and sooner rather than later!
Bob
P.S. You too, Lantian
Fox,
I’ll be sure to check out Steve Kauffman. Someone posted links to some interviews with him on my blog and I’m more than a little intrigued.
Thanks again!
Jeremy
20 Reps - Hi Bob,
We’re pretty much in agreement except we disagree. ;p
Why can’t adults take the easy approach too, as you said the most “success is with children. They are very open, they really want to learn, and we always have a lot of fun.” That doesn’t sound to me like flashcards, drill-and-repeat, and boring lectures.
It takes kids 3-5 years to gain some fluency, natural language generation. And then 10 plus to speak, think, understand like adults.
I figure if I take their approach, 3-5, I’m good to go. Sure plus a little ’studying’ and pushups. The tricky part is being an adult and creating an alt-Chinese childhood cocoon and not being thought of as a little too Michael Jackson.
Boot camp works for some very select skill sets for those who need to deploy in 12-weeks, but let us not forget that there is an attrition rate, some already got weeded out for flat feet, others self-selected to go to Canada, and several became officers so they didn’t have to do the grunt work. Plus most of us aren’t the few, the brave, the….
Okay, Lantian, whatever you say! Now get down and give me twenty push-ups
To perfect your mandarin you will ultimately need to work with local tutors in China and walk the streets of the country as much as possible. Your tones need to be understandable and your brain needs to become accustomed to the speed at which a local responds to your questions/dialogue. This is very different to the classroom/CD set up.
To get the most out of tuition - preferably one on one - get the course/lesson content in advance - put hours of effort into previewing this in advance and hours into reviewing the lesson content afterwards. This way your time in class is taken up with focusing on the things that can help you advance rather that having a confused brain because you are not connecting with vocabulary and sentence patterns.