Grad school, week 4; Chinese

After four weeks of creamy smooth grad school, things are now getting crunchy. There's a Statistics test on Tuesday, two case studies due on Thursday (Economics and Marketing), a looming big project in the background, and all the Chinese I can stomach in between.

Chinese is a big issue for me. There are three classes for the 14 CHEMBA students (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), though the top two have people with very different levels of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In my class, for example, we have:

• A local guy who studied Chinese in college for two years (and Japanese in high school)
• A Chinese-Malaysian Cantonese speaker
• A Chinese-Filippino Cantonese speaker
• A Korean girl who has lived in Japan for several years. She reads great but doesn't recognize tones well
• A local girl who lived in Shanghai for a year
• A Mainland girl who had lived in Beijing, but can't read or write, and
• Me, who just started studying Mandarin in July.

Comparison of strengths and weaknesses
The Cantonese speakers have a much easier time with tones, and quickly learn the pronunciations, but lack certain skills I find surprising, like knowing how to use a Chinese English dictionary.

The Korean girl, with her background in Korean hanja, has an easy time reading and can speak fairly well, but needs help with her tones.

The Mainland girl can speak and listen really well, but has a harder time with reading and is only now learning how to write characters. Until she does that, she also will have a hard time expanding her vocabulary with a dictionary.

The local girl has good listening and decent speaking skills, though her grammar needs to be tuned up. She seems to benefit from the class the most, since she's mostly interested in conversation and can easily learn aurally.

My biggest asset is a strong language learning foundation. I know what I need to do to learn something, and I have an idea of what I'll need to know once I'm in China. My biggest weakness is that I have a really hard time learning through listening. Either I don't know a spoken word, or I can't recognize it; then, unless it's written down, I won't remember it. When asked questinos, I have to double-check meaning a lot. ("You're asking me what I did last week?")

My class has two complaints: 1.) There's no real structure, and 2.) There's too little of the right stuff being taught. I have one more, and because my teacher's from China this will sound strange: she doesn't know Chinese as well as she should if she's going to teach it.

By "no real structure," I mean that we have no idea what we'll be tested on, when that will be, or whether it'll be oral or written. The three classes aren't integrated with each other, so there's no knowing which class with cover what. We'll spend hours on vocabulary tangeants that just seem interesting to the teacher, and ignore areas like basic survival phrases. This past Wednesday we didn't even open the book, but spent all three hours of class in conversation, without even having learned a new grammar structure.

The things we are being taught, while no doubt interesting, are pointless. We learned 115 vocabulary words on Wednesday, and about 100 more on Friday, but there's no way we can really learn them unless we spend a dozen hours or more a week practicing outside of class. (I'm not joking -- check out the lists from Wednesday and Friday) While we could take it upon ourselves to do that, why should we? There's no test on the words we learn, or even a review of the ones we do, so why bother?

Lastly, my Chinese teacher isn't very good teacher. Her Chinese is naturally flawless, but sometimes she gets a character's pinyin wrong (explaining the sound for 您 as "ning" instead of "nin"). I can't blame her too much, since that's not how Chinese people learn them, but it does make looking up a word in a dictionary harder.

Worse, though, is when she gets a character wrong. She grew up in Hong Kong, which uses "traditional" characters, but lived in Shanghai for some time, where "simplified" characters are used -- so sometimes she can't remember the proper writing for things.

Here's an example: in class she taught the colloquial term for "business" as
Since the 貝 part in traditional characters often corresponds to 贝 in simplified ones, it's easy to see how she got to that from 買賣. But it's not right -- 买卖 is the correct writing. Like "kar" instead of "car," it doesn't make a difference when spoken, but you can waste a lot of time looking for it in a dictionary.

I don't pretend to have been a great English teacher while I was in Korea -- most of what I did was because my school made me -- but I think that if folks are paying $30,000 in tuition for a year, they should be able to get a professionally run program that the one in place now.