mr.stinky Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:28 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:28 AM So i'm in beginners chinese, and the instructors are nice, friendly, helpful....but..... many times their english is really, really bad. Not too much of a problem, at least for me. I've spent half my life in foreign countries (and some time in New Jersey), so i'm used to strange grammar and pronunciation. however, the class consists of 2 american, an italian, an israeli, two koreans, and two thais. instruction is in english, or chinese when feasible. i know others in the class are having a hard time, trying to learn chinese taught in a language other than their mother tongue. i'm comfortable giving the instructor some quiet, discreet suggestions that are accepted. my problem is that my instructors do not appear to be 'fluent' in pinyin. often the words are misspelled or the tones are incorrect. how should i handle this? if i try to ask about the spelling or tones, it's always "this is also correct." maybe, but it's not correct in the book, it's not correct on tests, and it's not correct in other classes. it's gotten to the point where i can't 'trust' anything on the blackboard. if i don't know a word, i look up in the dictionary i keep handy. this may not be a problem later, when pinyin is no longer needed, but it seems absolutely essential in the beginning to get this right. is this a common problem? if so, how have others handled it? Quote
atitarev Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:56 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:56 AM You don't have to take my advise but when I wasn't confident about my teacher's teaching skills I changed for a different class in the same school, in fact I went up 2 levels. I am a bit pedantic (reasonably) when I learn, so that I am sure about my progress and I am not happy with lots of approximations, doesn't mean that I am not flexible but I trust dictionaries too and other sources I use. There was no problem with English, though, in fact there was too much of it in the class, IMO. Another of my posts related to this, I explained some details: http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=66239&highlight=tones#post66239 Quote
roddy Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:59 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:59 AM There's no way anyone teaching Chinese to beginners should be making mistakes with pinyin. I'd query if anyone should be teaching Chinese at any level without a good grasp of pinyin, but at beginners level it's certainly important. Plus it makes me wonder about the level of preparation the teachers are putting in - if their pinyin isn't great, they should be at least looking up the relevant stuff before the class. And claiming something is acceptable when it isn't is bad practice - saying 'Ok, I'm not sure, I'll check it and get back to you' is fine. To be honest, I think you need to raise these concerns either with your teacher or the school. It's not a simple matter of improving their English (which I would do subtly, after the class) 1 Quote
geraldc Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:22 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:22 AM I think now more and more people have a better grip of pinyin due to the input system used on computers. You could try raising the point that you need the "standard" pinyin in order type effectively etc. Quote
Ncao Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:33 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:33 AM You must be attending a very bad school if the teachers do not know their pinyin. Quote
imitation Posted March 22, 2006 at 05:18 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 05:18 AM Wow your school sounds terrible, can you give an example of pinyin they are confusing, I mean for beginner stuff this should be a no brainer for the teacher but I know my gf who is hunanese sometimes mis-spells sh/s pinyin words if they are uncommon for example 石笋 - she told me was shi2 shun3 I think because when she pronounced it si2 sun3 I said are they really s or sh and she guessed she was wrong hahaha Or for example shui2 谁 is often given in pinyin as shei2 also i'm sure there are many other examples and these cases the teacher would be correct in saying either spelling is correct. As with the english side of it I would not bother to correct the english unless it effects your learning I have only one time made an issue of english when the teacher was teaching us 要。。。了,快要。。。了 and 就要。。。了 grammar she explained it as soon, sooner, soonest however ofcourse it doesn't really mean this because in english sooner and soonest require comparison to some other event where as in chinese these structures are just escalating degrees of soon. Quote
Ncao Posted March 22, 2006 at 06:00 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 06:00 AM Quote Wow your school sounds terrible, can you give an example of pinyin they are confusing, I mean for beginner stuff this should be a no brainer for the teacher but I know my gf who is hunanese sometimes mis-spells sh/s pinyin words if they are uncommon for example 石笋 - she told me was shi2 shun3 I think because when she pronounced it si2 sun3 I said are they really s or sh and she guessed she was wrong hahaha Or for example shui2 谁 is often given in pinyin as shei2 also i'm sure there are many other examples and these cases the teacher would be correct in saying either spelling is correct. I think those are southern pronouciations,but I think the teachers are suppose to teach using northern pronounciations. Quote
mr.stinky Posted March 22, 2006 at 08:23 AM Author Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 08:23 AM today's example "děng yíxiàr" was written "děn yíxià'ér" now this may be a legitimate alternate spelling, but how the hell would i know? i go by the half dozen textbooks i have, plus the dictionary. certainly doesn't appear to be standard. i didn't even bother to ask if this was correct. more common errors are incorrect tones, and missing "g's" at the end of words. Quote
Ncao Posted March 22, 2006 at 08:46 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 08:46 AM You live in Kunming,right? I think your teacher is teaching you the southern (local)pronounciations instead of the standard (northern) pronounciation. Quote
mr.stinky Posted March 22, 2006 at 09:11 AM Author Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 09:11 AM yes, kunming, and no, not southern dialect. kunming rarely uses the reflexive, something that we have discussed. if we were doing km dialect we convert u's to i's and sh's to s's. i'm convinced she's either untrained or a bit lazy. possibly a bit of both. Quote
liuzhou Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:16 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:16 AM Most people in the south and west of China have problems differentiating 's' and 'sh' or 'n'and 'ng'. It doesn't surprise me at all that your teachers are displaying this behaviour. Most teachers here in Guangxi regularly fail their putonghua examinations. Quote
imitation Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:19 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:19 AM Hey I think it sounds like she is just trying to show you a broader spelling of the pinyin to accustom you to some of the different accents you might here. Because I mean ehh even someone who didn't finish high school knows how to spell the pinyin for that. I think you should just mention to her that you are find it confusing using the different pinyin spellings because you are still getting used to the beginner stuff. Quote
roddy Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:59 AM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:59 AM I'm assuming that was a joke. Even if there was a 'broader spelling of the pinyin' to be taught, it would need to be done alongside the 'narrower' version, with both clearly marked. Stinky, how is the teacher's pronunciation. If they have no n / ng problems, etc, in speech, then the pinyin issues could probably be fixed with a bit more attention paid. If they aren't accurate when speaking though, it's a more significant issue. Quote
imitation Posted March 22, 2006 at 02:32 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 02:32 PM Roddy i'm just trying to understand how it could possibly be taught differenty because anyone with like grade 9 or 10 in china knows pinyin perhaps even as low as just primary school....fwiw I think the teacher thinks they are doing the right thing and just has a different style to other teachers at the school I very very much doubt they don't know pinyin for 等一下. For example in my school some teachers think that doing some really really horribly stupid stuff in my opinion is good teaching. One example is a teacher who gets us to translate from English to Chinese when the English translations are very abstract and bad and I am the only native English speaker in the class so I only I understand what the Chinese translation is likely to be most of the time. But she continues to do it because she thinks it's an important part of her teaching style. Fwiw the other students actually don't mind it I don't think because they get to learn to languages for the price of one. Quote
malinuo Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:13 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:13 PM This sounds like a typical case of local dialect. It is certainly impossible to change the teacher's behaviour short term, but by continuing asking "is this right?" and "the book says..." you may make him/her pay more attention to it in the long run. To me there are two major strategies when choosing a Chinese university, and one should be aware of which one, one follows. Either you go to Beijing, hear only standard Mandarin and learn it easily. Once you get down South, you will be utterly perplexed, because no one speaks what you thought Chinese sounded like. Or you go outside Beijing and have a constant hazzle with the contradictions between what the books say and what people say on town, and the pronunciation of at least some of your teachers. It will take longer time to learn Chinese, but on the other hand you get a pretty good grasp on what variations there are. And when you get to a small little village, where they speak a dialect you never heard before, you can say to yourself, "ok, they change X to Y instead of Y to Z". In other words, you will more easily adapt to the flexibility of the language. Quote
hbuchtel Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:40 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 03:40 PM Sorry if this is has been talked about a lot, but I wanted to mention that a Beijing accent is not the same as standard putonghua as it is taught in other parts of the country. For example, 等一下 would be pronounced as 等一下儿 with a Beijing accent while many fluent speakers of Putonghua (esp. in the south) would say "deng3yi2xia4." However "den3" rather then "deng3" (等) is simply incorrect, though it might represent well a certain dialect. I always found it easier to understand a colleague from Hainan (whose putonghua was very standard) then his friend from Heilongjiang . . . Henry Quote
zhwj Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:32 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:32 PM imitation said: i'm just trying to understand how it could possibly be taught differenty because anyone with like grade 9 or 10 in china knows pinyin perhaps even as low as just primary schoolSure, the lower-grade students learn it, but then once the characters come in, it gets lost. Typing may help reinforce it for today's students, but even then there are huge numbers of people who don't go near computers, not to mention the generation of adults who learned pinyin once but find that it's now sunken in the ocean of time along with their Russian lessons. Second language instructors really ought to have it down, though. It's like an ESL teacher trying to fake some sort of ad-hoc English pronunciation system when the students are well-versed in IPA - not going to work well. Quote
Lu Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:36 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 04:36 PM 'Den3' does not even exist in Putonghua, this is a bad mistake. I agree with you that especially in the lower levels, the teacher's pinyin (and pronounciation, for that matter) should be perfect. How can you learn a language if you can't trust the teacher? Unfortunately, there is no correcting a Chinese teacher. It's a major diulian for her if you try, and she will never ever admit that she is wrong, that she has to be corrected by a student. Chinese teachers know it best, their students don't know it, that's why the teacher is a teacher and the student a student. Best thing to do is probably to change classes, if possible, and try to tell about this teacher's problem to someone in the school who is in charge of the teachers. Quote
malinuo Posted March 22, 2006 at 05:10 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 05:10 PM Quote How can you learn a language if you can't trust the teacher? How can you learn a language if you only accept a perfect teacher? Quote Unfortunately, there is no correcting a Chinese teacher. Ehm... As far as I know there are millions of Chinese teachers of millions different kinds, ages and mentalities. Some of them will appreciate criticism. Some won't. Just like in any other country in the world. You just have to feel it out with the one you are dealing with at the moment. You do describe a very likely scenario, and one to look out for, but it is by no means the only possible one. Quote
L-F-J Posted March 22, 2006 at 07:25 PM Report Posted March 22, 2006 at 07:25 PM Quote How can you learn a language if you only accept a perfect teacher? This is very true. You'll hear the language with many different accents so it's actually good to learn. Besides if it's an obvious mistake that you know such as "den yi xia'er" rather than "deng yixiar" then you know how to say it and you know how you might hear it as well. The important thing is that you learn the meaning. It's a bonus that you get to learn the standard and the way others may pronounce it. I'd take that as a learning experience. I personally would only change classes if their grammar or something was incorrect. They're still able to teach you new words and grammar that is correct. If you know your pinyin and pronunciation then it's no big deal. It's a bonus lesson. It comes down to what you want to learn. Perfect standard language and then be lost when you hear other accents, or take it easy and learn the different ways to pronounce something so you can understand more people effectively, while still knowing the standard pronunciation. I, for one, would choose the latter. Quote
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