ChinesewithGloria's first Youtube Lesson

[chinesewithgloria]

I am developing lessons for Chinese. My first lesson is here:

If there are specific lessons you would like me to create, please let me know!

Thanks!

Gloria

[jbradfor]

Where are the whips and chains?

Seriously, thanks for the video. The more learning material out there, the better.

Slightly off-topic, I'm still waiting for videos of a buff man giving Chinese lessons while topless. I think there is a big untapped market here for our female learners. I would do it, but (1) I'm not buff, (2) I don't look good with my shirt off, (3) my Chinese is very lacking, and (4) I'm not Chinese.

[roddy]

All the more reasons to do it now and grab market share while you can.

[Erbse]

Slightly off-topic, I'm still waiting for videos of a buff man giving Chinese lessons while topless. I think there is a big untapped market here for our female learners. I would do it, but (1) I'm not buff, (2) I don't look good with my shirt off, (3) my Chinese is very lacking, and (4) I'm not Chinese.

You could try to teach English to Chinese women.

[roddy]

Next lesson - go and interview a rubbish collector. I'm always curious about the economics of that. We'll need a transcript. And none of this elementary level stuff, there's a ton of that already.

[liuzhou]

I'm sticking with Xiaoli.

[Koxinga]

I posted a comment (on youtube) criticizing the video and it was deleted. How nice :rolleyes:

I said that this video is too complicated for beginners - it's too fast. A beginner needs a much slower approach with western logic used to learn. And someone who could grasp this video probably mastered it already.

In the beginning she talks about romanization and pinyin. An average beginner has no idea what those terms mean and what they are used for. Characters aren't even mentioned.

She doesn't explain why the letter M is pronounced like "mua", or why u + uo gives "wo". That just confuses the learner, because the learners would be much better off without the word parts.

She says "very good" to herself a lot. From the way this video is made, viewers are not expected to interact.

In conclusion, this video is useless. A complete beginner needs much better explanations and more encouragement to learn.

[skylee]

She doesn't explain why the letter M is pronounced like "mua", or why u + uo gives "wo". That just confuses the learner

I agree. I watched it up to this part and then decided to give up.

Xiaoli is at least more fun.

[renzhe]

Your effort is really commendable. It's nice that you're trying to help people learn Chinese.

But devising a beginner's course is quite hard, and you're not (I'm assuming) a trained language teacher. You touch on a lot of concepts, but don't explain many of them in detail (like pinyin). Some of the things you say are wrong. For example, most words in Chinese are not monosyllabic. 你 and 好 can both function as words on their own, but words like 大学 or 学生 express very specific concepts and consist of several characters.

Roddy is right -- there is SO much beginner material out there. A lot of it is really good. What is missing is intermediate and advanced level stuff. This is exactly the sort of thing a motivated native speaker can make, and make really well, because it doesn't require language teaching experience or a degree in linguistics. Conversations with annotations, discussion of tricky words and grammatical concepts. It's a bit more work than explaining the four tones yet again, but there is huge potential to reach learners and actually help them.

I don't want to be too negative -- it's better than many of the Chinese learning video blogs out there -- but I think that videos like this are more useful as supplementary material, and basic grammar concepts are usually explained better in class or a good textbook.

[Matty]

It's just a shame that it's on youtube, as I'll probably wont see until until the day China decides to unblock youtube.

[马盖云]

I haven't seen it discussed here at all, but another fun one, besides xiaoli :blink: is PeggyTeachesChinese. Search for her on Youtube. Again, maybe a bit easy for most people here, but she has some really fun episodes. Most have some sort of video skit, then discussion. The audio quality and annotation of the earlier lessons was a little shaky, but it has gotten better. Now has decent pinyin and trad/simp characters. Really cute, too! ;)

[LA Guy]

Yeah, PeggyTeachesChinese channel is very entertaining and educational.

I might add see does a lot of "flirting with the camera" and she has budding

theatrical talents on display.

She's got help with her video and music production and lots of experience now

and is basically a star on youtube these days.

Best to all, LA Guy

[chinesewithgloria]

Thank you for your comments. There are a few questions and comments in this post which may be helpful to discuss.

First, while it is strictly true that not all Chinese words from a linguistic standpoint are monosyllabic, Chinese characters, as you know, are morphosyllabic, and each character is a monosyllabic morpheme or syllable with its own basic meaning. There are very few teachers who would try to make the distinction or explain the morphosyllabic system to beginning students. The point here is that the pronunciation of Chinese morphemes represented by distinct characters are in fact monosyllabic, and this is a very useful point for beginning students to understand since it helps them pronounce Chinese more effectively. 大学 and 学生 are a very good example that you give: they consist of two separate monosyllabic Chinese morphemes. For example, in 大学, 大 means “big”, and 学 means “learning” or “study,” and each morpheme is monosyllabic. It seems that your level is more advanced than the target audience of this particular video, and I would recommend other resources such as Chinesepod, which I frequently utilize for my intermediate and advanced students.

If some of the readers of this post found my pronunciation practice to be confusing, I apologize. I have been teaching Mandarin for many years and all my students have superior pronunciation capabilities. After ten classes, they are able to spell out all Chinese words/morphemes on their own and they are able to handle tones perfectly. I developed this video for my beginner students’ review, and posted it as a free resource for others. I understand some of you are used to other teaching methods, and I encourage you to choose the system that works best for you.

If there is anything else I can help with your future Chinese learning, I would be happy to help with your other questions.

Good luck!

Gloria

[renzhe]

Gloria,

your explanation is perfectly correct, most characters are morphemes. I agree that throwing words like "morphosyllabic" at beginner students is unnecessary, but there are actually teachers out there who teach people that multisyllabic words don't exist in Chinese...

Keep in mind that most of us have only seen your video, and do not know the rest of your teaching methods. Based on your original post, I assumed that this was to be an internet-based video course, which is why I said that you touched on too many concepts without explaining them in detail. If you actually explain these things in your classes, and the video is mostly for review, then it's a different situation.

[roddy]

Second lesson is up if anyone's interested.

[CrassPip]

Sounds like someone needs to "empty their cup"..

Lots of good feedback falling on deaf ears.