Courses that DON'T include teaching Hanzi.

[GreyMatter]

I'm currently enrolled at BLCU and, like many students in my class, am finding that there is an extremely large focus on learning characters. While I understand that some students are robots and enjoy memorizing lines and squiggles for hours upon hours, I am really only interested in learning to speak fluently.

I really enjoy the university-style atmosphere of BLCU and even like (2 out of 3) of my teachers but there's no way I will enroll in another course where the majority of study time is spent focusing on learning characters that I will rarely use in the future (besides common things like food and road signs) while conversation and speaking is neglected to a certain extent.

I guess what I am really looking for is a University style atmosphere with classes that only teach listening/speaking/conversation/grammar and leave out the characters completely.

Does anyone know of any such schools or have any recommendations? I'm open to study anywhere in China.

Thanks!

Grey

[889]

Perhaps there are such places in China, I don't know.

But I do know that teaching students to read -- whether they're Chinese or foreigners -- is the foundation-stone of education in China, just as it is in the West.

You may speak clear and fluent Chinese, but if you can't read then you're going to be regarded as illiterate.

And illiterates just don't get no respect.

Teaching Chinese without teaching characters isn't really teaching Chinese, I suspect many schools think.

Thus Chinese language teaching quite naturally incorporates reading and writing.

It's a cultural issue as much as an educational one: you can never underestimate the importance of hanzi in Chinese culture and the education system reflects this importance.

So even if you find a school willing to teach you just kouyu, a good Chinese teacher will nonetheless urge you to learn to dushu.

[csit]

Grey, I have the same thought at you. I tried going to a class at a university and one at a training school. The students were predominately Korean and Japanese, and I found their needs in learning the language were very different than mine as a native English speaker.

There are textbooks available in China that separate listening/speaking from reading/writing, and I think that is the way to go. I don't know if they are used anywhere or not.

Personally I'm not opposed to learning characters, but I don't want to use class time for it. I can memorize on my own time. As I imagine, the benefit of being in a class is to focus on speaking/listening, which are what I can't do on my own.

Besides the familiarity of characters to speakers of Japanese and Korean, their learning objective is different than mine. I have no reason to take the HSK. And also they are more comfortable with the Chinese teaching methodology.

[GreyMatter]

The point is, I have no use to learn to read. Besides learning the most common characters, such as road sides and food items, I simply will rarely use it, and I think most people are the same. Knowing characters isn't even a requirement for typing and reading Chinese characters on the computer/internet (with automatic pin yin converters and such). Not to sound argumentitive, but I can't imagine anyone but the most elitist Chinese snobs thinking lowly of a foreigner who can speak fluently but may not be able to write or read all that well.

I can surely understand and don't deny the historical importance and why they are taught to young Chinese students, but as a foreigner, I want to spend my time perfecting pronunciation and learning vocabulary.

As csit said, learning Hanzi can be done on your own, with a good children's book or character guide. I see no reason to waste valuable class time on it. Its something I'll come back to in 3 years or so.

[gato]

Why don't you try the private schools or one-on-one tutorials? They're likely to be more accomodating.

http://chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=3343

[Yuedan]

Your focus is the exact opposite of mine, actually. But to answer your question I do know that the University of Hawai'i at Manoa offers course solely on conversational Chinese, up to the fourth year advanced level. Don't know how helpful that is but I would guess that other colleges with a heavy focus on Asian Studies would offer similar classes.

[trevelyan]

Try diqiucun up by the wudaokou subway station if you haven't already. their oral classes are text-based (you need to be able to read), but they don't waste class time explaining characters or chengyu. More effort on dialogue repetition and memorization. Not a lot of room for creative language use, but at least it gets you speaking instead of the teacher.

I think its a mistake to ignore reading and writing, but I agree that the institutional pedagogy used by most Chinese universities is flawed. Classtime should be reserved for things students cannot do on their own. I was very disappointed with BCLU.

[Angelskates]

There are plenty of conversational classes (listening and speaking only) offered in Beijng, Belitz, Frontiers etc all offer them (and the diplomats commonly use them too). They are a bit pricey but probably what you are looking for.

You could also get a tutor easily, they rarely teach reading or writing and just talk!

[csit]

I've seen two sets of books in Beijing that follow a less Hanzi-centered approach.

The first is _New Approaches to Learning Chinese_ by Zhang Pengpeng 张朋朋 published by Sinolingua.

It comes in three volumes

1. Intensive Spoken Chinese (ISBN 7-80052-577-5)

2. The Most Common Chinese Radicals (ISBN 7-80052-576-7)

3. Rapid Literacy in Chinese (ISBN 7-80052-695-X)

The basic premise follows what I think is a good idea to learn hanzi, but separate it from listening and speaking. So the latter two books are on learning characters.

The other set is _An Easy Approach to Chinese_ 汉语人门 Volumes I and I by Guo Huichun 郭辉春 also published by Sinolingua. ISBN ?? and 7-80052-856-1

[csit]

Following up on trevelyan's comment, what would you say are the range of teaching methodologies for teaching Chinese as a foreign language? Doing a quick search on the Internet, one can find various methodologies that have been created for teaching foreign languages in general: audiolingual apprach, grammar translation method, communicative approaches, etc.

My wife got a master's degree in teaching English from a Chinese university. (She's Chinese.) Her program emphasized the importance of communicative, student-centered approaches to teaching--as opposed to teacher-centered, rote approaches. When she was doing her master's thesis in the area of learner autonomy, I read some of the relevant literature. It seems within the English-teaching community, even within China, there there is awareness of modern approaches to teaching foreign languages. What I've seen in my limited experience in the classroom for learning Mandarin and what I've heard from many friends, is that none of the programs follow a communicative approach. (It seems more like the audiolingual method.)

What is the range of teaching methodologies for Chinese and a foreign language? Do anyone have experience with unusual or different methods? And how much has Chinese teaching been affected by theories of second language acquisition?

[artichoke]

Do the teachers use much English in any of the classes? Or is all instruction in Mandarin? How are the classes broken up? I thought at the beginner's level at least that they were divided into 'spoken' 'written' 'grammar' etc etc. I am planning on doing the intensive, so any info on that specifically would be good, but if you only know about your 4hr/day classes, that info is good enough!

Thanks!! :-)

[onebir]

There are plenty of conversational classes (listening and speaking only) offered in Beijng' date=' Belitz, Frontiers etc all offer them (and the diplomats commonly use them too). They are a bit pricey but probably what you are looking for.

You could also get a tutor easily, they rarely teach reading or writing and just talk![/quote']

They are expensive, but if the characters are holding you back (and I think at some stages they do) then they might be worth it. Private tutors could be effective, but if they have no language teaching experience they might "just talk" - which might not be particularly helpful. (I think I'll start a thread on this.)

I spent a four 12 hour weeks doing 1-to-1 classes at the Beijing branch of Taipei Language Institute (www.tli.com.tw) and it was enought to get me broadly fluent (after 2 1/2 years of evening classes in the UK). Their teachers are well trained, and their proprietary materials are aimed at developing oral fluency and are good. It's about $12 an hour, but if you PM me I might be able to hook you up some of with my ex-teachers for considerably less.

I think there's also been some favourable comment on this site & others on the Bridge School (www.bridgeschoolchina.com). They're cheaper, but couldn't arrange inexpensive accommodation, which is why I went with TLI - although knowing what I know now their $16 a night offering wasn't so cheap!