So says my Chinese instructor, anyway. He is teaching 8 adult students, there are two in their twenties, and two in their fifties and the rest of us are somewhere in between. The class is two hours long on Sunday afternoons. Mid-way through the class we take a ten minute break and do tai-chi. Because Chinese is a tonal language, and tai-chi has the same discipline of movement as ballet, I call it my singing and dancing class.
To say it is hard is an understatement. I feel ridiculous, knowing my Chinese is virtually incomprehensible to a native speaker. My writing is like a pre-schooler's. But the teacher, Mr. Li, is endlessly encouraging to all of us, and tells us that people in China will be pleased that we can say anything at all. Which is probably true, but I wish . . . well, some things are best done by the next generation. I went to school with plenty of kids whose parents had accents.
I have been so impressed with Mr. Li as a teacher that I have resolved to try to be as good a teacher of English as he is of Chinese. He comes to class carefully prepared, he has spoken with a friend who teaches Chinese at Georgia Tech and uses some materials from him, some materials he's gathered himself and a children's text book. He encourages us, corrects us sincerely, and is enthusiastic about our efforts.
This week we have homework of copying out a dialogue and studying the coming lesson. We also have to prepare to take dictation for body parts. In English, they pretend that you have phonetic rules for spelling, which are mostly notable for exceptions. In Chinese, they don't even waste time with that, and just tell you to memorize the pictogram for each word. So all I have to do is memorize 2000-3000 words and I can read a newspaper.
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3 comments:
Ha! Just found you in blogland, and I've only responded to one other blog in my life. I concur with your estimation of lao Li and encourage you to write more about the class. Your classmate, Larry.
Hi Lisa, It's your Chinese school classmate Scott, again.
I just saw this post and have some discouraging news...you wrote, "So all I have to do is memorize 2000-3000 words and I can read a newspaper."
That's 2000-3000 CHARACTERS...words are most often made up of more than one character (and it doesn't often help if you know the component characters on their own, since the composite words often have a completely different meaning).
Of course, learning the 2000-3000 characters would be a good start ;o)
Good post.
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