A Bump from the Past: "Stop Teaching Me to Write, I Tell You!"

[889]

Ridiculously verbose and repetitive posts by one self-taught MBA who doesn't like Mainland teaching style, especially the emphasis on writing. That was 17 years ago. Would he be any happier today?

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/7074-my-rant-problems-with-the-chinese-teaching-system/

[Moshen]

Wow, that sure was a harsh critique.

 

The part that struck me as the most unreasonable was this:

 

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3) Forcing culture down the throat of the student:

How many students have I met that have complained about having to learn about famous poets, songwriters and other such stuff. This also goes towards the priority of learning. As an example, we spent a whole week during the summer on a chapter dealing with hu tong (the famous old building style). While this is interesting it seems as though it is not necessary when we cannot communicate effectively enough yet. (The equivalent would be forcing the study of log-cabin related vocabulary on the learner of American English._

I didn't read far enough to get a sense of this person's goals in learning Chinese.  But for me he's trying to strike down one of the biggest charms in learning another language: learning the culture as well.  I left a blistering review of Rosetta Stone somewhere online years ago because they used the same vocabulary set in their Chinese lessons as in their lessons for European languages.  No "jiaozi" or "pagodas" there.

 

He seems to be saying you should learn German with no awareness of Beethoven, Kant or Goethe, French with no knowledge of Rabelais or Victor Hugo, Spanish while being ignorant of Don Quixote or why Spanish speakers say "permiso" so often when they leave a room, and so on.  That is ridiculous.  I wouldn't want to take language lessons where they left all the cultural stuff for much later!

[Jan Finster]

I will bump his thread to see if he is still around and what he thinks today. Would be interesting.

[realmayo]

I broadly agree with the original rant - seens a bit daft to bother with cultural stuff in Chinese for beginner or intermediate students.

If cultural stuff is a priority, study it in your native language: far more efficient, far more interesting, far less childish.

Use Chinese language study time to study the language. Then, when language skills are advanced, do the cultural stuff in Chinese: and in fact, the better your language skills, the more you will simply pick up plenty of that cutural stuff.

[Jan Finster]

On 7/17/2022 at 8:16 AM, realmayo said:

I broadly agree with the original rant - seens a bit daft to bother with cultural stuff in Chinese for beginner or intermediate students.

 

Depends on what you call "culture". I would find it bizarre if a Chinese lesson would explain how to say hamburger, steak, tacos rather than Chinese food. Chinese food is Chinese culture. I have never come across a culture that talks about food as much as the Chinese. I would also find it strange, if you learned how to prepare for a trip to New York and what you could see there and learn strange transliterations of NY's sites. Instead explaining Beijing's most important sites (incl. Hutongs) sounds natural to me.

[realmayo]

I don't think anyone was saying a beginners textbook should teach the Chinese for "tacos".

I'm simply suggesting that primary aim of such textbooks should be to teach the Chinese language in a structured and sensible way, and anything that gets in the way of that is undesirable. The Chinese for "Mcdonalds" and "KFC" are much more useful than the Chinese for "paper cutting" or "sericulture".

 

 

[Moshen]

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The Chinese for "Mcdonalds" and "KFC" are much more useful than the Chinese for "paper cutting"

 

Not in the world that I live in and treasure. 

[realmayo]

OK, but in a world where you talk to normal Chinese people, Mcdonalds and KFC will be commoner topics of conversation than paper cutting. "Why do Westerners like fast food so much" is a more likely conversation than "Why don't Westerners like paper cutting", for instance. It would be like a Chinese student of English understanding "blasted heath" but not understanding "Chinatown": opportunities to improve the language via regular chat would be diminished.

 

Also if you limit yourself to Chinese language materials in order to study paper cutting or Xunzi or gardening, your knowledge of those topics will be very basic and childlike, until you reach a more advanced level of Chinese. The only beginner-level textbook that I know of which dives into culture in an adult way is Chinese Through Poetry by Archie Barnes, and even there I don't think a proper conversation in Chinese would be possible after completing that book.

 

 

[sanchuan]

The original post, as far as I understand,  was about what to prioritise when beginning to learn the language. 

 

When your linguistics supervisor sends you somewhere in the jungle for a couple of months to figure out a newly discovered language, your priority - strictly for the purposes of language learning - will be to quickly work out the set of basic verbs and nouns that comprise the majority of communication and practise using them as fluently as possible in all the major grammar and sentence patterns. Some common foodstuff and local idioms (jiaozi, chifanlema?, etc) will be part of that set, but rote memorisation or repetition of the names of plants, gods, myths, festivities or menu items (!) would be a nonstarter (so would be discussing hamburgers and KFCs, btw) - but again, that's only if the goal is to prioritise language learning. You'll be able to ask about, learn and discuss those other cultural items later on, out of necessity or leisure. But I would argue that language learning is, or should be, the priority of any language learning textbook or course, especially at the beginning. 

 

I don't think anyone's ever argued here in favour of dismissing the study of culture, writing, etc. (Why else study Chinese? Especially as English is already everyone's second language.) But is it worth prioritising the study of cultural items in that language at a time when the student can't yet confidently navigate a basic real-life encounter with the language? You can study all the culture you want, in depth and from day 1, from the comfort of your own language and/or with the aid of your own language (at least for Chinese). Why mix the two and get the worst of both worlds (ie delayed fluency development + superficial cultural understanding)? 

 

[Moshen]

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When your linguistics supervisor sends you somewhere in the jungle for a couple of months to figure out a newly discovered language, your priority - strictly for the purposes of language learning - will be to quickly work out the set of basic verbs and nouns that comprise the majority of communication and practise using them as fluently as possible in all the major grammar and sentence patterns.

[snip]

I would argue that language learning is, or should be, the priority of any language learning textbook or course, especially at the beginning. 

 

It depends what your purpose is for learning the language.  Some people start learning a language not with the intention to master it but rather to simply survive in it.  (Chinese 101 vs. Survival Chinese) 

 

I started learning Chinese because in just three months I was going to be working in China and wanted as much Survival Chinese as I could learn in that short time period.  My learning method worked.  When I got to China I could order a taxi and say where I wanted to go.  I could carry on a basic "where are you from?  are you married?" etc. conversation on a train.  But I knew nothing - absolutely nothing - about grammar or sentence patterns and I couldn't read a thing.

 

This is one reason why there will always be a need for different approaches to language learning.

[realmayo]

On 7/17/2022 at 6:56 PM, Moshen said:

I would argue that language learning is, or should be, the priority of any language learning textbook or course, especially at the beginning. 

 

Indeed: it's bizarre that this even needs arguing!

 

Also: the relative difficulties of learning the Chinese for an English speaker versus learning e.g. French or Spanish mean that time is at more of a premium for those learning Chinese, so it's even more important to avoid these wasteful detours.

 

However from a Chinese perspective, when schoolchildren study language they're also studying culture at the same time: those 语文 textbooks are full of references to festivals, poems, stories, history etc. That's probably where the impulse to ram this stuff down foreign learners' throats so early on comes from.

[sanchuan]

On 7/17/2022 at 7:56 PM, Moshen said:

This is one reason why there will always be a need for different approaches to language learning.

Maybe so, yes. But perhaps more true at or past intermediate rather than beginner levels.  

 

It sounds like your first three months of survival Chinese involved becoming capable of asking people about themselves, navigating transport and directions, and answering basic questions about yourself. That's achieved by learning words that are relevant to you and internalising how basic sentences are formed (whether through play or study), not by practising characters or reading and re-reading 100-character graded readers on paper-cutting. No wonder your method worked.  

 

My opinion is that that level of initial confidence and facility with the bare bones of the language would be advantageous to all beginners, whether they need survival skills in the short term or all-round mastery of language & culture in the longer term. It looks to me like this is also the main thrust of the original post we resurrected here. 

 

On 7/18/2022 at 10:42 AM, realmayo said:

when schoolchildren study language they're also studying culture at the same time

I agree that may be part of it - good point. And of course we are right to find it problematic that language learning should in any way imitate those practices. The purpose of schooling the citizenry is different to that of teaching the language to non-native speakers (whether foreigners or national minorities). Confusion on this very point, especially in a place like this forum, is quite depressing. It means fewer and fewer people will even notice, let alone be bothered, by the fact that the higher levels of the new HSK (3.0) seem to require knowledge and competences usually reserved for citizenship/naturalisation tests. To insist that mastery of cultural and national stereotypes be necessarily baked into language learning risks condoning far more than you may be aware of. 

[Moshen]

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It sounds like your first three months of survival Chinese involved becoming capable of asking people about themselves, navigating transport and directions, and answering basic questions about yourself. That's achieved by learning words that are relevant to you and internalising how basic sentences are formed

 

I would disagree a bit with the part in bold.  I didn't learn words.  I learned from dialogues - questions and conversational sentences.  I had a textbook of dialogues and a native-Chinese tutor two afternoons a week.  I don't think we ever discussed grammar.  In fact it wasn't until many years later that I realized that Chinese even had grammar, because compared to Latin, French, Spanish, German and Hebrew, all of which I'd previously studied, there didn't seem to be any verb forms, noun declensions or such to learn.

 

I memorized nothing.  I just reviewed the previous lessons and went on.  Things stuck pretty well because the materials were so practical and I was so excited about going to China.  I knew I would have to take a taxi, get a haircut, maybe go see a doctor and so on.

[imron]

On 7/15/2022 at 5:27 PM, Jan Finster said:

I will bump his thread to see if he is still around and what he thinks today. Would be interesting

Although it's been a year or two since we last caught up, I knew self-taught-mba quite well and would consider him a friend.  Back in the day, we would meet up semi-regularly in Beijing and discuss thoughts on learning Chinese.  He was the first person I talked to about Chinese Text Analyser, back when it was just an idea in my mind.

 

He did end up opening a school, but it didn't work out, although not for want of trying or lack of effort.  In some ways I think he was too far ahead of his time, probably by several years, and in fact the school he ran pioneered many learning methods that are almost taken for granted today.

 

How many people were talking about flashcards before Anki was invented?  Not too many, but in that revived post of his (which pre-dates Anki by a year or two - or longer if you count when it became popular) he's talking about using flashcard software to improve learning of characters.

 

Likewise he was an early proponent of electronic dictionaries in a world before iPhones and AppStores, and where if you wanted Pleco you paid several hundred dollars for a separate device (Palm Pilot), on top of $100+ for Pleco - and he was introducing all of that as key components of his school's learning strategy, which was focused on efficiency of process and efficiency of tools.

 

He was also the person who introduced me to the concept of "don't break the chain", which you've probably seen me talk about quite a bit on the forums.

 

Anyway, I can't speak for him, but I know he wasn't against learning about culture or other things, but he was passionate and focused on helping people acquire usable and practical language skills in the shortest time possible, which is then the gateway to all other aspects of Chinese language and culture.

 

I'll drop him a line and see if he wants to come and provide his thoughts on looking back on that post.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 12:30 PM, Moshen said:

I didn't learn words.  I learned from dialogues - questions and conversational sentences.

Based on how he ran his school, it sounds like you would have really liked the style of teaching he provided.

[sanchuan]

On 7/18/2022 at 2:30 PM, Moshen said:

 

I memorized nothing

We don't disagree there.  I never implied learning and internalisation need be deliberate. But if your brain was able to produce words and/or sentences as needed, than memorise it did - whether by play, necessity or deliberate effort. 

 

Anyway, mba's original post remains a brilliant resource to reflect on what's changed and what hasn't in Chinese language pedagogy. And, as imron kindly clarified for us, it needs to be contextualised historically to be fully appreciated.

 

Now that's certainly one way of feeling old. 

[malazann]

when stumbling across old posts on this forum (circa 2005-2010), i always wonder how their chinese journey is going. Especially for the prolific posters who were so scientific and methodological. This dude's insane independent 3 months in Taiwan 2014 is something I often think back on. I've daydreamed about doing the same and taking 3 months off

 

[Jan Finster]

@Imron, thanks for your post. Much appreciated.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 2:38 PM, imron said:

How many people were talking about flashcards before Anki was invented? 

 

I guess flashcards were around forever. When my father died, I found self-written paper flashcards he wrote in the 1960s... Steve Kaufmann describes that he bought a set of Chinese character flashcards when he studied Chinese in HK in the 60s....

 

 

On 7/18/2022 at 3:01 PM, malazann said:

This dude's insane independent 3 months in Taiwan 2014

Why do you think he was a dude??? I always assumed it is a woman..

 

Yeah, would love to have her/him come back and give us an update.

[imron]

On 7/18/2022 at 1:02 PM, Jan Finster said:

I guess flashcards were around forever.

Not software based flashcards with spaced repetition.

[889]

In the '80s, Foreign Languages Press was selling that beautiful set of flashcards in the orange box. Very useful as it was, no computer or phone needed.

[Moshen]

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In the '80s, Foreign Languages Press was selling that beautiful set of flashcards in the orange box.

 

Yes, but its vocabulary was geared to Communist Party language of the 1970's: commune, peasant, cadre, comrade, etc.