Vol. XXVI No. 20 May 22, 2009
The pain and joy of learning Mandarin Chinese Courtesy of MTC, NTNU By Melody Chen While learning a foreign language is a long and strenuous process for most people, studying Mandarin Chinese is the most challenging, according to teachers and students at the Mandarin Training Center in Taipei. Established in 1956 as an extension of National Taiwan Normal University, the center has become the largest and best-known institution in the nation dedicated to the teaching of Chinese as a second language. For the year 2007-2008 alone, over 10,000 students from around the world registered to study Mandarin on the island, according to the Ministry of Education. Many people agree Chinese is one of the world's most difficult languages because of its unique tonal system and written characters. "Most idioms in the world are phonetic. You can pronounce the words when you read them. But Chinese is tonal, which means it uses tones to distinguish words from each other," Chou Chung-tien, MTC director, said. As every word uses different characters and since there is no link between the characters and their sounds, students have to memorize the pronunciation and meaning of each individual word. "At our center, we teach students to write the same way Taiwanese children are taught in elementary school. Teachers ask students to practice writing each word several times and they systematically correct mistakes in their homework," Chou explained. "It is important to practice at home, because there is no time for such drill in class." The director shared his vision to develop a curriculum to teach Chinese characters from the most simple to the most difficult ones, but admitted the task is more challenging than he thought. Chou, who is also a professor at NTNU's Department of English, said that while frequency is usually used to grade the difficulty level of English words--meaning that the more often a word is used, the easier it is and vice versa, Chinese characters cannot be as readily classified. "It is because we find it hard to decide whether we should determine the characters' difficulty by their frequency or by the number of strokes necessary to write them," Chou explained. It is true that in Chinese, some of the most common words have complicated characters, whereas others seldom used are easy to write. Ideally words that are frequently utilized and have few strokes should be grouped into the beginning lessons. However, Chinese characters seldom present these two characteristics together. "For example, the Mandarin word for 'welcome' is pronounced as huan-ying and foreign students usually learn it during their first lesson. However we can't decide where to place this expression in the teaching materials we want to design, because the Chinese character for 'huan' is made of over 20 strokes," the professor added. Chou also pointed out that it is easier for Taiwanese children to develop their ability to read and write because they live in a Chinese environment 24 hours a day, while foreign students do not have such exposure. "It takes a lot of time before reaching a certain proficiency in Mandarin. However, most students stay in Taiwan only for a few months, or a year at the most. When they return to their countries, it is hard for them to keep up their writing and reading abilities," he said. Chinese characters present a considerable challenge to young Taiwanese too because nowadays most of them use computers to write, and Prof. Chou believes this leads them to forget how to write certain characters. Michael Knopf, a 23-year-old American student from Michigan, started taking Mandarin lessons at MTC over two months ago. A history major, Knopf is learning the language because he plans to focus on Chinese history. Though he studied Japanese before and knows already some characters, he still considers writing as one of the most difficult aspects in learning Mandarin. "I can read almost everything in French and German, but it is not as easy to learn and remember Chinese words. Even though with Mandarin, the more characters one learn, the quicker it goes, there are still a lot I cannot read," Knopf said. "Characters are made of several combinations of strokes. When you learn to write one, you'll remember how to write it for others later on. I think that makes writing a lot easier," he added. Teachers at MTC agree with the American student, pointing out that schools in Taiwan teach traditional Chinese characters, whereas in mainland China they use a simplified version, which many students believe is easier to learn. However, teachers reckon that students who learn the traditional symbols improve faster and find memorizing the words easier after they reach the intermediate level. "This is because [traditional] Chinese characters are not made of irrelevant symbols. They have radicals and are formed according to specific rules. Some characters share similar elements," Chou explained. The radical is the part in a character that serves to classify it. The same radical can be shared by several different characters. For example the word for 'forget' [pronounced as wang] shares the same 'heart' radical [xin] as 'think' [xiang]. "So by learning a symbol and the rules by which it is structured, one can actually easily learn two or three associated words. A good teacher should teach students the connections between these words," the professor added. The problem with simplified Chinese characters is that they are so simplified that these associations are largely erased. "Many characters become individual units and students have to memorize every new symbol," Chou said. "In Taiwan, we insist on teaching classic Chinese because our experience proved that learning traditional characters produces better results in the long term." Apart from the writing, another difficulty students learning Chinese often struggle with is distinguishing and learning its different tones, which is very important since the language possesses many homophones. Sun Yih-fen, a Mandarin teacher at MTC who has taught the language for 20 years, said most beginners have no idea what tones are. She would use pictures and body gestures to teach students how to tell high tones from low ones. "Usually half of the students still find it difficult to differentiate the second tone from the third tone one or two weeks into the course. ... And I have also seen students who, after having learned Mandarin for a long time, still could not speak it correctly." Students with a musical background seem, however, to pick up the tones more quickly and accurately. "Perhaps this is because tones have something to do with music," Leonard Liu, another Mandarin teacher at the center, said. "A number of Westerners whom I taught before could pronounce Chinese beautifully, and all of them could play musical instruments or sing." Frank Kocian, a 26-year-old student at MTC who once learned Arabic and has been studying Mandarin intensively for the past two and a half years, is now able to read most Chinese newspapers and magazines but took a special pronunciation class to brush up his speaking and listening proficiency. "My tones are still not very good," Kocian said while sharing some tips on how to improve them. "It helps to read something aloud. Or when I listen to someone talk on the television or radio, I try to figure out the tones," he added. Persistent practice is key to improving pronunciation, Chou said. "There is no shortcut to speaking well but practice," the director continued, stressing that the 37-symbol Mandarin phonetic system used in Taiwan, commonly known as "bopomofo," is the best way for students to learn the correct pronunciation. Mainland China uses another system called "pinyin" which transcribes Chinese characters using the alphabet. While the center allows students to use both systems, Chou explained why he believes "bopomofo" is better than "pinyin." "In Taiwan, when students learn English at school, some of them cannot read the Kenyon and Knott phonetic symbols, so they use "bopomofo" to mark the sounds of English words," he said. "But English teachers often ask Taiwanese students to refrain from doing this." "Using 'pinyin' to learn Mandarin is the same as using 'bopomofo' to learn English. The phonetic system is specifically designed to mark the pronunciation of Mandarin. The symbols reproduce the sound of each word most accurately," the director added. "Foreigners such as Americans, French, Spaniards and Germans all read the letters of the alphabet differently, so when they use 'pinyin', they often bring sound elements from their mother tongues," Chou said. "It is unavoidable." On a more comforting note, the professor pointed out that Mandarin's flexible grammar makes it easier for foreigners to speak the language with fewer mistakes than Taiwanese students make when they speak English. Languages like English, French and German have strict grammatical rules concerning verb tenses, singular and plural nouns, gender, etc. "But foreigners don't have to worry about these things when speaking Mandarin," Chou remarked. "Some people say Chinese is an unscientific language because of its grammar, but I think this is its best element. When speaking, you can choose how many details you want to give. From this perspective, learning Mandarin does have its easy side," Chou said. Write to Taiwan Journal at tj@mail.gio.gov.tw Recommended Articles
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