David and Helen : key to the listening exercises?

[xxl_male]

I'm plowing through "David and Helen in China" which I find to be damn good. Only the package I bought (book or on the mp3 audio files) includes no key to the listening exercises . I've searched the web to no avail. Yale University has a site with plenty of things around D&H in China but the key to the exercises is not among them.

So if someone knew where to find those... Alternatively, if someone happens to be doing the same course, we could pool our guesses and come up with fairly reliable answers.

[zhang laoshi]

Hi, I'm the author of D&H. I'd love to help you, but I wonder what's the best way to do this. If I post the key, would students still try as hard? What's your suggestion?

[xxl_male]

Dunno, I bought the books + mp3's for self-study. The introduction says (line 2) ".. is designed for college classes or self-study .... Obviously, if a course is to be used for self-study, it should be self-contained.

[roddy]

I certainly think they should be available somewhere - for self study students it's quite easy to be convinced you've got something right when you haven't, with nobody around to correct you.

[zhang laoshi]

I will find a way to post the key along with the questions/answer choices. Will try to make it available before 2007.

[necroflux]

I had the same problem, and believe it or not Professor Zhang was incredible enough to offer her personal help in checking my answers - which is more than I can say for any professors I had at the school I was actually paying for... haha. I couldn't possibly monopolize her time like that as a non-paying student, so having a key posted online would be very, very helpful. The books are really good and I'd like to get back into them (I stopped somewhere around lesson 4).

That said I can understand the concern of putting these answers out for students using the book in their classes. My response would be that any students who take this shortcut will inevitably fail their tests; Chinese isn't something you can fake or BS. ;)

If there's anything I can do to help Professor, let me know. If you have the answer key in Word format and need time to get everything onto a Web site I would be more than happy to do that for you.

[xxl_male]

Having the key of the multiple choice exercices in the audio files, in the form Question 1, answers = A + B would suffice.

Regarding lazy students, I suspect students in a school setting would share resources anyway, even to the detriment of good learning. So answer sheets, possibly written by senior students, would circulate down the line or get e-mailed.

For people learning on their own, the issue is irrelevant.

[kudra]

One solution I remember from physics and math homework, is to give answers to even numbered problems. I'm thinking of freshman level Calculus or Physics texts, with answers in the back. Of course just because you can verifiably do questions 2,4,6, doesn't mean that you might be fooling yourself about the answer you got for 3 and 5. And this may be more of a problem with listening comprehension than with calculus homework.

There probably needs to be a compromise. Sure we self study students would like an answer key, but the bigger market is in the universities and colleges. [it could be bigger by a factor of 100 or more] Obviously students need to take responsibility for their education, but professors also have to be smart to keep students challenged and motivated. Obviously handing out answer keys with the homework assignment (or only a coule google clicks away) is going to be a temptation to even the most serious students to cut corners.

And of course there's the economic argument, if having an answer key out on the web degrades the value of D&H in it's main (university) market, I wouldn't expect Prof. Zhang to be too keen on letting it out.

I suggest having alterate multiple choice answers available, and others can be discussed here or through pm. I'mm not signing up to be a tutor in perpetuity, but if you have any specific questions xxl_male, let me know and I'll see if I can figure it out. Not because I'm a master of DH, but rather because I'll probably learn something in the process.

@ necroflux -- there may be some way to use water marks or some other security technology to at least put up a bit of a barrier to wholesale copying. I'm not an expert, and I'm skeptical.

[kudra]

Got this in my email.

Online exercises for David and Helen in China for self-study learners are now available on the Quia website:

http://www.quia.com/pages/dhlearners.html

-- Phyllis Zhang, the principal author

I took a few of the quizes, and to paraphrase roddy, there is nothing like an authoritative check to focus your attention and find out what you really know.

Signing in, and creating an account is not too big a hassle. The site seems like a reasonable way to balance the needs of the self-study learners with the need for a barrier on the part of instructors who adopt the text and who don’t necessarily want answer keys for exercises too easily available.

You will want to have the mp3's handy to do some of the quizes.

[xxl_male]

That's great! Thanks a lot!

Now I must muster the courage to get cracking on my Chinese again. I'm only emerging from the laziness of a longish holiday and it seems all the Chinese I've assimilated over the past year has vanished from my mind.