Rote Learning of Chinese vs Creativity

[msittig]

With Declining Opportunities at Home, Young Western Academics Head to China | TIME.com

http://world.time.com/2013/08/21/with-declining-opportunities-at-home-young-western-academics-head-to-china/print/

The article linked above has the following quote:

“Expat professors say creative and independent thinking among students is hard to come by — the consequence of a character-based language that requires years of diligent rote learning to master.”

On Facebook there was a little discussion/back-and-forth on whether the character system has anything to do with the lack of creativity. The con side is easiest to argue, as demonstrated by the extraordinary creativity shown by the advanced Chinese learners on these forums. The pro side argues that there is merit to the idea that it does take years of rote learning before children can become reasonably literate in mother tongue, which they already speak.

This argument resonated with me because I was talking with a teacher at my school on our faculty retreat last weekend who revealed to me that her daughter, a native born Chinese, prefers to write for herself and for her family in English instead of Chinese. Her daughter has been subscribed to a Scholastic learning center in our city where children can go to read/check out English books, take graded reader tests, write book reports, and discuss books orally with English teachers, all part of some point system but which her daughter obviously enjoys.

So I wonder, if the Chinese system is so bad at teaching Chinese, could it be improved? Could the introduction of frequency-list-based learning help kids get a faster start on literacy? Could removing the strangle-hold that the classics have textbook literature make kids more interested in writing their own language? Or does the nature of the Chinese language really require years of soul-crushing study before writing finally catches up with speaking? Does the world of CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learning have something to teach China about learning its own language?

What do you think?

[Ruben von Zwack]

I have another explanation to offer as to why this girl might like to write in English - it is not my idea, I read it in "Making Sense of Japanese" - and that is when you speak a foreign language, you are more free than in your own mother tongue. Reason being, you are not aware of all the connotations and social expectations that are subtly conveyed by language, and that you are well aware of when you speak your own mother tongue.

It is the same reason really why many people, Western and Asian alike, feel more "free" abroad in an "exotic" society than in their home country. (now this comparison is my genuine own thought).

[Demian]

Reason being, you are not aware of all the connotations and social expectations that are subtly conveyed by language, and that you are well aware of when you speak your own mother tongue.

It is the same reason really why many people, Western and Asian alike, feel more "free" abroad in an "exotic" society than in their home country. (now this comparison is my genuine own thought).

Agreed! I can say things in English that I cannot, or will never, say in Punjabi.

One more thought. What you are saying may have something to do with some African leaders banning their criticism in local languages, but allowing writers (native and foreign) to keep on with their attacks in English, French, and other colonial languages. I can think of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He is free to write in English, but he is threatened by the Kenyan government when he writers in Gikuyu.

[gato]

So I wonder, if the Chinese system is so bad at teaching Chinese, could it be improved? Could the introduction of frequency-list-based learning help kids get a faster start on literacy? Could removing the strangle-hold that the classics have textbook literature make kids more interested in writing their own language?

Aren't you confusing the Chinese language with the Chinese education system? The latter does tend to crush creativity, but the former is neutral in that respect.

As for your colleague's daughter, she could prefer English for all sorts of personal or family reasons (it could also be that she can't find Chinese books on topics she's interested in), without knowing more about her, it is difficult to speculate.

[hackinger]

Hi,

my guess is that in 20 years or so when China will have a very sizable portion of the worlds patents, people in the West will have stopped to bemoan an alleged lack of creativity in China. ;-)

I think Japan has already demonstrated that using Characters does not hinder creativity.

În the 1990s when the US was preoccupied with its trade deficit vs Japan, I read in a US magazine the amusing story of an American official in Japan who a few years after WW2 suggested (friendly) to Japanese partners that they should not even think to try to export their - supposedly inferior - products to the US.

Cheers

hackinger

[Touchstone57]

I don't think patents alone are enough to measure the 'creativity' of a nation, especially when many of them come from foreign educated experts and imported R & D centres from multi nationals. I don't think it is easy to generalise a whole nation into 'lacking creativity', but rather more informative to look at certain trends in the education system and working culture to see why outsiders my have those beliefs.

I don't think learning Chinese language alone is the cause of a lack of creativity, but the education system, which seems to crush the spirit and individuality out of people. An education system geared towards achieving results or marks on a piece of paper will indeed produce individuals who lack creativity or independent thinking. I know that is quite common to 'study' classical literature and poetry in school, and children should rote learn them and regurgitate these materials, so the whole point of learning them in the first place is lost.

I know that certain aspects of Chinese culture are not conducive to creativity either, particularly leadership and management styles within Chinese teams and organisations, which can tend to be very hierarchical. I have first hand experience working with Chinese graphic designers that cannot make the smallest change to work without the consent of their boss, and will often need exact guidance on everything before they undertake work. And if the boss is away, well you wait for them and twiddle your thumbs in the meantime.

To give another example, I see the same problems everyday in the compound I live in. Residents, both old and young will literally bounce of the front gates as they don't have a key tag. The electronic sensors where installed 6 months ago, and they all live here, yet they have never thought to try and ask the the staff for a key tag (which are free), instead preferring to wait until someone else can open the door, and trying to scrape their keys across the sensors just in case, which to me shows a massive lack of independent thinking. I only see this as I see literally everyday.

My anecdotal experiences may only be exceptions to the rule of course.

[gato]

To give another example, I see the same problems everyday in the compound I live in. Residents, both old and young will literally bounce of the front gates as they don't have a key tag.

What does "bouncing off" the front gates mean? And what is a "key tag"?

[Touchstone57]

I should have said 'eletronic key tag', that is the key tag that people swipe across the sensor to gain entry to the compound. When I say bouncing off the gates I meant people trying to force their way through when it is obviously locked.

[li3wei1]

Aren't you confusing the Chinese language with the Chinese education system? The latter does tend to crush creativity, but the former is neutral in that respect.

That's exactly what the OP was saying. He cited various people who blamed the language itself, but then offered the theory that it's the education system, not the language.

African leaders banning their criticism in local languages, but allowing writers (native and foreign) to keep on with their attacks in English, French, and other colonial languages.

I'm not familiar with this situation, but I can think of two alternative explanations. First, allowing criticism in foreign languages gives the appearance of press freedom to foreigners. Second, if you're worried about uprisings, you're worried about the masses of poor people who are less likely to understand the foreign languages. The educated elite who are reading and writing in French and English aren't about to take to the streets and smash windows.

[tysond]

Many Chinese colleagues I spoke to are either enormously unhappy about the school system but unable to do anything about it (for example, nine year olds with three hours of homework a night) or simply planning to leave China in order to give their children something better.

This is a far bigger concern to them than pollution, food safety, and other issues that get a lot of airtime.

[carlo]

Interesting thread. I agree with Gato that the language itself is neutral -- you could even make a case that learning such a complex writing system promotes more creativity rather than less. My four-year-old son sees shapes in abstract symbols (eg. fish 鱼) in ways that I probably couldn't at his age. And what about calligraphy? Memorisation and creativity are *not* opposites -- great jazz improvisers know the classics by heart.

The school system has a lot to do with the economic and social development of a country. During a phase of rapid industrialization, you need vast numbers of people who remember their formulas and can follow written instructions. China has crammed a century of industrial development in a couple of decades, and now it already needs to leapfrog all the way to becoming an "innovation economy". It's not easy.

As I see it, the demand for 'creativity' in education today is gigantic - rather, it's a supply-side problem. If (and it's a big if) the changes in the economy are accompanied by the development of a more open society, why not. Some of the methods we used to learn Chinese as adults could serve as a useful reference to update the ways it is taught to native children.

[gato]

Here's what I think is needed for so-called "creativity" roughly speaking:

1. Individual's innate ability to generate new ideas -- kind of like IQ.

2. Individual's fearlessness -- willingness to fail, not afraid to challenge convention and status quo (whereas 1 above is about idea generation, 2 is more about temperament; IQ vs EQ, if you will)

3. Social structure that tolerates and accepts challenges to convention and status quo

4. Individual's stamina and general ability to follow through and implement new ideas

In China and traditional cultures in general, 2 and 3 above are lacking.

[li3wei1]

Does the world of CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learning have something to teach China about learning its own language?

Maybe, but it's one thing teaching a language (speaking and writing) to people who are literate in another language, and another thing teaching people who can speak one language literacy in the same language.

I think there will be a lot of pressure for the Chinese education system to adapt to new technology. Think about the changes in CFL from when I started (1985-ish) to now, versus the changes in the Chinese education system from the days of the imperial exam system to now (not that much?). Throw in those articles about native speakers forgetting how to write characters because they don't have to anymore.

What sort of technology penetration is there in Chinese primary schools? How many screen/keyboards per student? How good is internet access? What percentage of students have their own phones, or computers at home? And how fast are these percentages changing? Are schools using anything like Skritter? or Anki?

[Guest realmayo]

Don't you think Chinese people tend to be far more creative than Westerners -- in some areas?

If I want to pass an exam, I'll study hard. (And if my teacher rewards me for coming up with new ideas, I'll try to do that too).

In China you can study hard too. Or you can find creative alternatives.

For example, you can give your teacher a gift.

Or you can find someone who knows someone who knows the teacher and see where that gets you.

If you run a business in China I reckon you'd have to be far more creative in how you deal with regulations and rules than you would normally have to be in the west.

I don't know what it's like now but in the past you had to be very creative when it came to buying a train ticket before Spring Festival.

If a UK train company said they'd sold out of tickets, there's not much their customers can do. But the Chinese customer is going to be racking his brains trying to find a way of getting hold of one of the batch of tickets that the railway employees have held back for their own use.

I'm not just saying this to be contrary. I think it backs up the earlier posts that the accepted structures in society determine how creative people tend to be: in some instances creativity is rewarded. In others (student -> teacher, office worker -> boss) it isn't.

Because of this, even if studying Chinese characters was to dampen creativity, it's probably impossible to be sure, because you can't untangle the study of characters from the schooling system.

[Guest realmayo]

Could removing the strangle-hold that the classics have textbook literature make kids more interested in writing their own language?

Seems like there are two things in this question. First is the way of studying texts, i.e. rote-based learning for exams. The second is the choice of texts to study. On the second point, if you did aways with those snippets of classics then would that mean a whole load of chengyu and other sayings fail to get passed down to the next generations? And would it move contemporary written Chinese even closer to the spoken standard?

Way beyond my level but: is the difference between good spoken Chinese and good written Chinese much bigger than with, say, English? If so, does that explain why people might be less comfortable reading and writing Chinese?

[renzhe]

I'd agree with gato here.

I don't think that creativity is something you can switch on or off through good or bad education. It's more the case that some societies encourage it more, and others discourage it, so long-term habits form.

My primary education was very dry, rote-based and mind-numbing, and creativity was limited to wisecrack comments (for which the teachers typically punished us). History consisted of memorising dates and events. Natural sciences were best, but even there, we only solved exercises on paper, for which there was only one possible solution, and only one way to solve them. I don't think that it affected the creativity of the people I went to school with.

I did an exchange year in North America, and it was very different. History was about understanding the events, their significance, and why they happened. Physics was about conducting real experiments with real objects. It was more fun. But I didn't get the impression that everyone around me was more creative.

I think that this aspect is overrated. Classes should be interesting because that motivates kids to study. I don't think that they can make you more or less creative.

[anonymoose]

I think a lot is down to the education system in which examinations are the focus, and credit is given not for showing understanding beyond the textbook, but rather how faithful to the textbook the answers are. In other words, regurgitating by rote is rewarded, whereas showing any creativity is punished.

[Guest realmayo]

There's a view that rote-learning is good for the brain: according to Norman Doidge who wrote The Brain That Changes Itself:

Some teaching techniques abandoned in the sixties as too rigid may be worth bringing back.

Rote memorization probably strengthened visual and auditory memory (and hence thinking in language and pictures), just as an almost fanatical attention to handwriting probably helped to strengthen motor-symbol-sequencing capacities — and thus not only helped handwriting but also added speed, automaticity, and fluency to reading and speaking.

Timing is important. Neuroplasticity is at its maximum in children up to 11 years old, though fortunately teenagers and adults can still benefit after that age. Also to be considered is the emotional devastation caused by learning disorders, as they lead to a bottleneck in overall development.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I would go so far to say that this education situation isn't even Chinese or Asian, it is just "conservative" vs "modern". I mean modern not as in "advanced" or "good" but just in the sense that Bauhaus architecture is modern.

The German education system until about the 1920s was just like everything I hear about the Chinese. Daily lerning of poems, and in the arts, you would get pre-lined paper and be made to repeat given forms several hundred times, or fill in colours by numbers. The handwriting had to be spotless and they had to practice daily.

Then some art teachers, curiously enough often under the impression of some (needless to say, distorted) exposure to "Asian ideas", started talking about freeing the person and mind (I don't think they called it creative at that time), and, yeah, we know how it went from there...

That was an abbreviated picture, of course, and I was citing Germany and the arts as an example solely because that's where I am versed in. As far as I know it was a whole "Western" phenomenon and occurred pretty much in all fields of education.

[Minigin]

Many Chinese colleagues I spoke to are either enormously unhappy about the school system but unable to do anything about it (for example, nine year olds with three hours of homework a night) or simply planning to leave China in order to give their children something better.

This is a far bigger concern to them than pollution, food safety, and other issues that get a lot of airtime.

on the other hand... there are western children who would benefit from far more homework.