You may have heard the interview with Alysoun Mahoney in the Saturday Show. She represents the New York Confucius Institute at the China Institute. I talked with Alysoun in some depth and she offered important insights into her work as well as into growing popularity of Mandarin as a second language in the US. Unfortunately we couldn’t fit most of that into the podcast. It would be nice to do a much longer podcast interview with her - perhaps we can arrange that.
Forbes also has a revealing article this week about the Confucius Institutes.
Ken Carroll
I just got around to listening to the Saturday Show and Alysoun Mahoney’s interview excerpt. I think it’s interesting that everyone is throwing around this “native speaker” or “near-native speaker” criteria for Chinese language teachers in the public school system. Was my high school French teacher a native speaker? No. Was she “near-native”? I doubt it. And nobody required her to be. But still she was a great teacher. Ken, I agree with you that the “near-native” speaker of Chinese is a nearly impossible goal to achieve. I believe that is what you have stated elsewhere. Why do you think this is being applied to Chinese? Or do you think “near-native” is just a term people throw around here in America for “people who can really communicate”? My first Chinese teacher was a native Texan from Amarillo, a graduate student teaching assistant. He was a really good teacher as well. But at that time, I also doubt he was “near-native” fluency. I guess what I’m saying is A) it’s not clear what people mean by “near-native” fluency and B) I don’t get the double standard.
Andrea,
You’ve posed is a huge question. It seems to me that we all apply different standards when it comes to Mandarin. I studied French, Latin, and Gaelic in school and we never even laid eyes on a native speaker of any of those.
Part of this is the Chinese attitude. They find it really difficult to beleive that a non-Chinese could or should teach the language. There is perhaps a degree of chauvinism in this attitude.
But so many of the people who want to learn Mandarin are complicit. Take the idea of absolutely insisting that Mandarin teachers speak the ‘flawless’ dialect of a professor at Beijing University. You get a lot of this. Imagine, by contrast, people going to the UK to learn English and insisting that they would accept only the perfect version of the BBC received pronunciation. We’d think they were flawlessly insane!
This is a huge topic that I hope to delve into in the coming weeks.
Ken Carroll
I agree that a lot of this is Chinese attitude, or cultural bias (China IS the middle kingdom, afterall). I think it’s been discussed here in the past, but if a non-chinese person gets fluent in mandarin, he or she is going to get a lot of the “honey - look, a talking dog” syndrome when interacting with Chinese people in China. It is what it is.
I do hope you get a chance to air more of the interview with Alison M - I’d like to hear more about the Confucius Institutes. Admittedly, I know little about them, but I sort of have a problem with top-down, standardized, centralized approaches to anything, including mandarin instruction, which is what they seem to be all about. Sort of a “we know what’s best for you” approach. Seems diametrically opposed to ChinesePods mantra - learn Chinese on your terms.
What has also stuck me as somewhat odd is how traditional chinese language courses and schools (I’ve been involved with a bunch in Beijing) seem to insist that students learn a lot of culture. When I was a student at a school called Lutuo, they were throwing ancient chinese poetry at me within the first week. I’m a businessman - I don’t want to know about a dynasty 800 years ago, poems about pipas and wine, or Peking opera. Almost every one of the private schools in Beijing - including the most popular and well regarded - have classes on tying chinese knots, paper cutting, and chinese zither playing. If I take a course in html or C++ programming, I don’t expect nor want to learn the history of the computer through the ages - I want to learn html or C++ programming. If I enroll in a course on time management skills, I don’t want to learn about the history of time, or how ancient Inca indians told time by shadows on temple walls. I want to learn time management skills.
That’s why I enjoy CPod so much - I can learn what I want, and not learn what I don’t want.
Ma Ding, to follow up on what you just wrote, I had just commented in “burning questions” earlier today how much trouble I’ve had trying to learn modern mass communications Chinese. Besides studying Chinese at the university level in the States, I’ve also studied at private schools in Taiwan, and it seems all they want to teach there is traditional fairy tales, “moral tales” that they teach to children, classical literature, history of China, culture, and chengyu’s, chengyu’s, chengyu’s (four character set phrases).
And you will appreciate this: at the private school in Taipei (Taibei), a classmate and I had to get “special permission” to get a teacher to teach us practical, everyday, useful vocubulary and dialogues from a book, expressions such as “tie my shoes”, “miss the bus”, “late for work”, “clean the house”, etc. The registrar in charge was highly suspicious that this topic was suitable for study. She really had rather that we study “Chinese Moral Tales I and II”, the good ole’ main course of their curriculum.
I’m dismayed to hear the situation is not much better in Beijing. I wonder if Chinese people think that when we’re beginners, we’re at the same level as children and should study the same content? Okay fine, but we grow up fast. Teach us how to become functioning adults in the business world, in the grown-up world, in the real world. I wonder if people think we’re getting these real-world speaking and listening skills on our own somehow, or through osmosis.
These are marvelous insights.I love that ‘fairy tale Chinese’ description. I’ve compared it to the travel shows on CCTV, where you get endless visitis to remote villages. The natives are all dressed up in the colors, and they’re always dancing. The host visits a local hut and eats the local food. Then he leaves. The guy must be bored out of his tree.
The cultural input you’re talking very much what is taught to local children and it is analagous to how TCSL is conducted - as a first language!
Ma Ding’s comments are also priceless: “If I enroll in a course on time management skills, I don’t want to learn about the history of time, or how ancient Inca indians told time by shadows on temple walls. I want to learn time management skills.” With your permission,
Ma Ding, I’d like to use this quote in my presentations. Would that be OK?
Ken Carroll
I’m convinced that THE BEST way to learn is with two teachers together, one native Chinese speaker, and someone very much like the learner who has been learning Chinese for longer and knows how to teach you. The best, but not the essential.
You can get pretty close to that with one enthusiastic good teacher of our own culture who has limited Chinese, using more “proper” recordings of the dialogues to be learned, to add some checks and balances.
But with just one culturally Chinese teacher, I can’t imagine how it could be made to work, unless it was for a fairly advanced conversation lesson. It’s about the learning, and having shared experience of the learning, more than it’s about the purity of the Chinese.
I don’t much care for the “master class” style, where you watch (hear) a Chinese teacher instruct an English speaker. The Chinese teacher is still there teaching Chinese Chinese way. You get some insights from witnessing what the student is going through, but the English speaking student brings more sympathy than enlightenment. I find myself wanting to interrupt and ask the student to explain it his own way.
Ken, go for it. When you make your first million and write your biography, make sure to reference me….
this whole topic of language and chinese culture is perfect for pub discussions over beers, imo. Too bad we’re all over the planet
Ma Ding - I’m also struggling to develop a decent “business vocabulary”. The texts I’m using are aimed at younger students, providing fascinating insights into the travails of campus life. The business dialog is at the “有意思的工作” level. Have you found anything more interesting, that would work at an intermediate level?