If you were designing beginner Chinese language training...

[Cat Jones]

Just picking your brains as I know many of you have been learning Chinese for a very long time.

My question is about course design for beginners Chinese. I'm reviewing a program of training - they are Mandarin classes offered alongside a Master's course. Students currently only receive 3 hours a week.

Do you think it's a good suggestion to split out "heritage learners" and others into different learning groups at the beginner level? The point being to avoid those who have never been exposed to an Asian language before, being left behind by those with prior knowledge of Mandarin, or a closely relted language. E.g. overseas born Chinese - who have had exposure to the language growing up, and their listening is usually pretty good; and other nationalities who have similar characters - Japanese, Korean, whose reading is usually good. I think some of the international schools split their Mandarin classes like this, but I don't know if any language schools/universities do so also. If you know of any examples of a similar programme please let me know.

It was my experience when I was learning Mandarin that this was a problem. And I've had feedback from other Western students that it's a disheartening experience. Those with no prior exposure feel they are lagging behind.

Also, when you were studying at beginner level, were there topics you found not so useful? E.g. learning how to describe your entire family, yet not being taught how to order a take away coffee? Or countless hours on how to give complicated directions that you couldn't even manage in your home language? Most programmes seem to follow similar subjects.

Our beginners use characters and pinyin, but within a matter of weeks the pinyin is dropped, forcing students to focus more on reading. Their aim is speaking and listening only at this level, so do you think they need to learn characters?

Any feedback on how you would like to see beginner level teaching changed would be useful. Please bare in mind that these are not hardcore Chinese language students, they are Master's students trying to get to grasps with a basic level.

Many thanks in advance!

[大肚男]

couple of years ago, I started learning mandarin, and after couple of months of self study, I registered for a class offered at a community college.

after attending couple of session, I stopped going because the class was moving too slowly, with the progress beng aimed at the students with the lowest level.

this was my experience with Japanese classes, which made the whole experience a massive waste of time.

just my $0.02

[WestTexas]

Heritage Chinese learners have very different problems than other learners. An ABC whose parents speak some Chinese may have a strong accent, poor working vocab, and no reading ability, but they can watch a film in Chinese and understand 90% of it. This is pretty much the opposite of other Chinese learners, many of whom say listening is the most difficult part (myself included).

At my university, anyone with any knowledge of Chinese at all, especially ABCs like the one in the above example, was dumped into an accelerated class. The students with no Chinese experience stayed in the more slowly-paced class. I think this was a good idea.

A relevant example of why I think this was a good idea: I also took one semester of French, and they had no such weeding-out process. There was one girl in the class from Louisiana whose grandparents and parents were Cajun French speakers. At first she seemed about the same level as everyone else, but about halfway through the semester she just took off. This was the first semester French course, so the French teacher would ask her something like, "What did you do yesterday?" and she would just go off in French for like 5 minutes straight. Besides herself and the teacher, no one understood anything. Everyone else was giving 1-2 word, or at best, 1-2 sentence answers. It was really annoying, and I can see it being much moreso in Chinese, with half the class being like this and the other half not understanding any of it.

[OneEye]

but I don't know if any language schools/universities do so

I don't know about other schools in Taiwan, but the Mandarin Training Center at 國立台灣師範大學 in Taipei does. It isn't until after Practical Audio-Visual Chinese V (I believe, or at least book IV) that they take classes together. You're talking 5000-6000 words or so here, not including words picked up outside of class. Even at that point, it can still be very frustrating to have 華僑 in the class, but at least by then you should be able to understand what they're saying.

[Cat Jones]

Thank you all for your comments. Really useful. As well as ABC's I also experienced a lot of "false beginners" those who had self-studied for a number of months, or even years before starting. Again their spoken and listening skills were strong, but reading and writing not so much.

I think the main problem is that the placement exam is written, so ABC's and false beginners bomb on it and are placed in the lowest group. We need to take into consideration prior learning in speaking and listening also.

This will also ensure Japanese and Korean students aren't placed too high as their written skills are good, but their speaking/listening might suck.

OneEye - thank you for the heads up about the Taipei based course - I'll be sure to check it out.

[Alyssum]

University of British Columbia and University of Washington both split out their Chinese classes into heritage and non-heritage streams. I think you would find several North American universities do this. Whether it's a good idea or not...well, I think teachers saw the students' needs were very different and just came up with a practical response. As a learner who went through the non-heritage stream, I know I felt a little jealous that the heritage students seemed farther ahead. However at the fourth year level in the UW, the heritage / non-heritage distinction was lost yet I was still not fluent. ;-)

Our program followed the Integrated Chinese series textbook which included the scenarios you mention (giving complicated directions, extended family members). Yes, at times it did seem dry. However it was also supplemented with intensive in-class conversation practice, student-generated skits, and in-depth pronunciation / grammer study. Those were indispensable to making the books work well. Nevertheless, I was quite surprised to go to Beijing afterwards and find that my listening comprehension was nearly non-existent due to dialectal differences. Of course I also struggled with my everyday activities like renting a dorm room or buying airplane tickets. Was it the fault of the books? Doesn't seem fair to say that. Yes, the books I used in Beijing focused a lot of the "foreigner in China experiences" and were generally highly relevant. But if you're studying first-year Chinese in North America then a lesson on "how to pay for your dorm" in Chinese would seem a bit odd. Yet knowing how to talk about family members could give you something to talk about with a language exchange partner.

The key in my view is that serious beginners who are not in a Chinese-speaking environment need to get more exposure to authentic Chinese. That means helping learners have opportunities for language exchanges, slow-movie watching, online tools like FluentU, popup dictionary screen readers, etc. I also believe that learners should not be discouraged from being exposed to dialects and regional variants like 兒化、四川話、等等. Some early exposure, in moderation, is good to help learner's appreciate the diversity of the language. Particularly good if they are planning to study abroad in a certain region.

Regarding pinyin, one the most important things for me was to thoroughly learn pinyin in the first two weeks. Lots of pronunciation drills until I could reliably distinguish tones and sounds like zh,ch,sh. After I had a grasp of pinyin, there was never a word I couldn't pronunce, as once I saw the pinyin I could speak it. That early effort in pronunciation definitely paid off because afterwards I never developed any serious pronunciation problems like tone-deafness.

As for the characters, this is a tough one. I put in a lot, a lot of time practicing my writing because tests were written and we used traditional characters. Now more than 10 years later, my writing is miserable. There are few characters I can still remember how to write, but of course I can recognize them. Indeed, I can still read news articles and books! Even with a long break of Chinese study, the recognition skills are relatively long-lived while the production skills go down the drain fast. Was all the time spent on writing worth it? Especially now that we have computers and I can use IMEs to write all the Chinese I want? It wasn't a total waste because I am sure that the act of writing helped my recognition skills. And knowing the fundamental strokes and stroke order means that I can still write characters when needed (albeit with a dictionary's help). It also helped me appreciate the inner structure of characters like the radical meaning and pronunciation components. But all in all, I would lean towards saying that writing characters is not such an important skill. Still, recognizing characters is indispensable!

For your particular situation I would suggest considering how to get the learners more exposure than 3 hours a week. If nothing else, spreading the three hours across multiple days since language learning needs frequent review. Encourage learners to supplement with independent learning as much as possible. Also figure out what the goals of the students are. If this is just for personal enrichment, then casual and "fun" conversation is probably as far as it will ever go. If this is the beginning of a serious lifelong study of Chinese, then a strong base of some of that boring grammar / pronunciation is needed. And even then, what will they use the Chinese for: historical research? business negotiations? everyday living? Get them going on the track that meets their goals early so they have the motivation to keep going through the tough times (which there certainly will be!).