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Review of Foreign Service Institute Standard Chinese A Modular Approach


sima

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Thanks for that careful and comprehensive review.

 

I’ve begun watching

show which is aimed at Chinese language learners.

 

 

Those videos look pretty challenging and the ones I previewed involve lots of colloquial speech.

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I've found that the script is fairly understandable and reflects a lot of what I've learnt from the FSI course. They sometimes use 儿化 quite liberally though. Overall I think the main advantage of the show is that it revolves around the everyday life of an average family, so you get a lot of exposure to daily situations, rather than the drama, romance and crime series which I've started and very quickly stopped.

 

I wonder whether the show is actually intended for speakers of regional dialects so that they become more famililar with 普通话 rather than for 学汉语的老外. I used to watch Dora the Explorer before this, it was nice and basic but I wasn't interested in so many animal names

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If you are interested in the old FSI or DLI courses you would probably want to read about the method behind them, the Audiolingual Method:

 

http://recursos.udgvirtual.udg.mx/biblioteca/bitstream/123456789/1435/1/the_audiolingual_method.pdf

 

This explains the theory behind the method and why it fell from grace during the 1970s.

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Re Sima's original post: of course times have changed but pre-1949 spoken Mandarin had a decent stock of polite language, both honorific & humble, although of course not as elaborate as what we find in Japanese. When I was a kid I bought a Teach YS Chinese book (printed in the 70's but probably written in the 40's) which contained dialogues replete with those terms. I wish I hadn't lost it--it was charming. Sadly by the time I got the chance to try them out, in the 80's, most had died out(in speech anyway)--even in Taiwan.

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Years ago I did some lessons in Malaysia and my teacher decided since I was working at a fairly senior level, we'd use a text that focused more on embassies and government and business scenarios, as opposed to the student oriented vocab that my already purchased textbooks had.

 

It was actually quite a good decision and I still use quite a few of the phrases and terms from that course -- they have not yet come up in my more recent textbooks (which are usually ongoing discussions about life and times of overseas students).

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If you are interested in the old FSI or DLI courses you would probably want to read about the method behind them, the Audiolingual Method:

 

http://recursos.udgv...gual_method.pdf

 

This explains the theory behind the method and why it fell from grace during the 1970s.

 

 

That was an interesting discussion of the Audio-Lingual method. Do you think Pimsleur would fall into that camp?

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Years ago I did some lessons in Malaysia and my teacher decided since I was working at a fairly senior level, we'd use a text that focused more on embassies and government and business scenarios, as opposed to the student oriented vocab that my already purchased textbooks had.

 

Good decision, as you found out.

 

I got so very tired of the heavy emphasis on "college-student-focused" vocabulary in several low-level text books. I really didn't want to know how to say "What's your major?" and "Where is your dorm?" in half a dozen different ways. It was a major stumbling block. I had no use for that stuff.

 

May have been good in the end, since it forced me into the habit of relying heavily on tutors and language exchange instead of just resigning myself to what was served up in class.

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I agree with both Tysond's and abcdefg's sentiment about school-centered-vocabulary. With more and more of us Baby Boomers studying Chinese, we need more dialogues about where to buy Depends, hearing-aid battery sizes, having cataract surgery, where did I leave my pills, and who was that lady I just saw downstairs in the sitting room – my wife! Who? J

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Drills.... Really long drills!

 

I think drills are a really good way to learn language, a little step up in terms of cognitive challenge from repetition. I've listened to the first two, which are predictably basic, but also nice and quick and showing a bit of flexibility, which is the important thing with drills that are reinforcing grammar points or vocab usage.

 

I'd seen this course before, but guess I didn't check out a 'D' tape - thank you very much for the review, sima, otherwise I'd have missed out. I've been looking for drills in Chinese for ages.

 

I'm going to work through the unit using the drills only, will report back when that's done (which may be a while, there is a huge amount of content here)

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If you are interested in the old FSI or DLI courses you would probably want to read about the method behind them, the Audiolingual Method:

 

http://recursos.udgv...gual_method.pdf

 

This explains the theory behind the method and why it fell from grace during the 1970s.

 

Interesting read, thanks for that. I recognise that some techniques are better than others, but I'm of the opinion that success rests more with the student than it does with the method being used. Combine the two in a great way and excellent results ensue (as the article suggests in the first part). Personally, from my limited experience with the new methods of language teaching, I find them to be less rigirous and celebrate small achievements unnecessarily, as well as boasting too much (with our technique, you'll be speaking in x number of days effortlessly!)

 

 

That was an interesting discussion of the Audio-Lingual method. Do you think Pimsleur would fall into that camp?

 

Probably. Although the program goes on about how Paul Pimsleur developed this remarkable new technique, going through 45 hours of 'Listen and repeat' and 'How do you say' didn't strike me as innovative. The idea that you will passively pick up the grammar patterns and such is not one I subscribe to. As far as I remember, they never even explained the tones, instead hoping that you would notice, and often repeating 'Listen carefully' etc

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