Take a look at these Level 1 YCT Readers. It's a set of 15 books, based on 80 characters.
The Hanban folks are not saying that if you memorize these 80 characters and their singular meanings that then you will have mastered Level 1. No. You must master the meanings of these 80 characters as they are used in these 15 storybooks.
And sure, at this level, these are "See Spot Run" types of "stories." But that is also part of the point.
Nonetheless, 80 characters combine for far more meaning that must be comprehended than just memorizing the 80 characters by themselves.
Hey, linguists and Chinese language educators out there - your message is being twisted on the ground by parents who don't know any better. When you count characters like this, then people who don't know the language are putting the characters on placemats and throwing them in front of their kids to help them "memorize" these characters.
These same parents are not engaging their kids in stories and contextual situations wherein those little kid brains are engaging in whole language. Yeah, I bet you didn't see that one coming. But that is what is happening. So the kids cannot hold on. They cannot keep it together as they get older. And then everyone is disappointed when the kid is 10, 11, 12 years old and all he/she can do is spit out a few - very, very few - characters and short phrases, but not much complete, rich thought.
The counting leads to some kind of weird obsessive-compulsive disorder that does not translate into greater engagement. Only counting.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Mythbusting on "the Tones"
OMG, again and again with the tones!! I'm just flabbergasted over this issue - it really drives me nuts. Because I have yet to encounter a professional of some sort who will firmly and loudly distinguish between "tones" and "accents."
Here is what I mean. Take a look at James Fallows' recent article in The Atlantic. One of many (well-deserved) reactions to Mark Zuckerberg's amazing live interview exchange in Mandarin at Qinghua DaXue (Tsinghua, for the old school transliteration/pinyin), Fallows is not only commenting on the Zuck's performance, but mainly reacting to some guy named Isaac Stone Fish (who I guess is the Asia editor at Foreign Policy) criticizing MZ for "speaking like a 7-year-old."
Fallows makes the point, but he doesn't make it strongly or clearly enough:
Look, fear and self-consciousness is a real concern for parents in Mandarin Immersion programs. It is a concern for any parent of a young child in any type of educational institution - your child's emerging self-esteem is at stake and you are conditioned and obligated to protect and nurture that emerging and tender trait.
But getting all caught-up in "the tones" needs further and amplified clarification. The more important issue here for parents and ALL students of the Chinese language to be concerned with primarily is Vocabulary Acquisition. Not tones.
Parents of one of my kid's classmates said to me once that the only criticism they had received from our classroom Chinese teacher during parent-teacher conference time was that their kid needed to work harder on pronunciation and tones. I was flabbergasted, to say the least. These are 8 year old kids we were talking about, in a Mandarin Immersion program wherein half the day is taught in Mandarin. Half your school day is taught in a language that is not your home or native language, and you think that the only problem your kid is having is one of pronunciation? Are you telling me that you don't, for even one half of a second, wonder about your kid's comprehension abilities???!!!??? Let me point out, again, something that you seem to already know - the language of instruction for 50% of your child's school day is NOT a language your child actually knows, that is he/she doesn't come from this language and doesn't have any kind of organic home context for this language... How many ways can I say, this is a foreign language for your kid... foreign... i.e., he doesn't really know it... but even if he did, do you ever wonder that your kid adequately understands the material that is being taught...? Isn't it normal to wonder whether your 8-year-old child is adequately understanding anything at all at any given moment? Or do you have telepathic powers with your kid's brian? If so, then why are you talking to me or about this...?
Please pause and think about that. Across any country in any language in the urbanized more highly educated (formal institutional education) world, who would ever say that the "only problem" your kid has in school, if he had a problem at all, was all about pronunciation and only about pronunciation. You might as well say the word "enunciation" - and then what? What would you even be talking about? Does your child need a speech therapist? Or is this a show of a bigger language processing and delay issue? Surely, the reaction would be "Let's keep an eye on this and maybe invite a professional to take a look."
Your child is not Eliza Doolittle. Your child is (hopefully) trying to get a basic education at the elementary level and beyond.
Vocabulary is the problem. When learners of Chinese speak with poor pronunciation/enunciation, but they have sufficient vocabulary to express their thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the richness of their ideas, then we are really talking about speaking with an accent. This is not about tones.
I say this to people all the time - because we live in a major city in America and there are plenty of immigrants (not unlike my parents) who speak intelligently, but with light to heavy accents. They can be some of the most amazingly successful people in the world. They can come from all manners of accents, from Spanish to Italian, to French to Chinese, to Tagalog, to Albanian, and beyond. And they all find ways to be comprehensible in the English language, albeit speaking with an accent. But I continue to be amazed that I have to point this out at all, given that it is the Year 2014.
Is it possible to speak with an accent while speaking Mandarin Chinese? And still be understood? Damn those tones and all? Absolutely. There are lots and lots of "accents" for fluent Mandarin speakers, even native speakers. Sometimes those accents can color the pronunciation so that it takes a moment, even the need to demand clarity. That happens between native speakers of Mandarin, just like it happens between native speakers of English, like a Brit talking to an American Midwesterner, or someone from Tennessee.
But without sufficient vocabulary to express the richness of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and intentions, then, yes, your child will come across as younger and dumber than his/her age. Or, if you are an adult, then same thing.
What happens to many kids in early MI is that they are not acquiring enough vocabulary to keep up with their minds developing around all those ideas, feelings, thoughts, and intentions, whether from their own brain or from the world around them. So they come across as delayed.
Meanwhile, I hear parents in MI programs talking endlessly about tones, as if it has some bearing on anything at this stage. It doesn't - not really - and especially not in the face of the truly bigger crisis at hand - which is that your kid is not learning enough vocabulary all together.
And why is this the case? Because your kid is not reading, speaking, listening, or writing enough in the Mandarin Chinese language around a volume and diversity of topics as he/she could be in order to acquire that vocabulary. It is a simple as that.
Tones be damned. It has nothing to do with the fact that Chinese is a tonal language. All is learnable if you just learn the vocabulary. And that is what made Zuckerberg's performance so impressive. He learned the vocabulary to talk about his industry, his wife and her family, to make some jokes about their relationship, to express his desires to connect to China and Chinese people, and most importantly, he expressed the sincerity of his intentions by relentlessly trying to express himself, even with his limited vocabulary, albeit all in spite of his poor execution on pronunciation (and yes, his pronunciation of his "tones").
But it didn't matter. Because there was ENOUGH vocabulary in place for people to understand him at a much higher degree than they would have expected. With enough vocabulary in place, native speakers can understand you - it then just sounds like you speak with an accent.
Without much vocabulary in place, however, then sure, you leave native speakers guessing, especially if, on top of that limited vocabulary, your "tones" are executed poorly, thereby creating more confusion.
So parents in MI programs, stop thinking about the tones and start thinking about how to get your kids more vocabulary. Read more books, engage with more native speakers and better educated ones at that. That is the only way. But you can't keep going in circles from one Foreign Language Model textbook series to another, when all it does is repeat the same stuff, but maybe a slightly different order. There are only so many times your kid should be learning Chinese New Year vocabulary or features of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. Perfecting your tones around such limited topics doesn't make you a more sophisticated Mandarin speaker.
Here is what I mean. Take a look at James Fallows' recent article in The Atlantic. One of many (well-deserved) reactions to Mark Zuckerberg's amazing live interview exchange in Mandarin at Qinghua DaXue (Tsinghua, for the old school transliteration/pinyin), Fallows is not only commenting on the Zuck's performance, but mainly reacting to some guy named Isaac Stone Fish (who I guess is the Asia editor at Foreign Policy) criticizing MZ for "speaking like a 7-year-old."
Fallows makes the point, but he doesn't make it strongly or clearly enough:
But tones in English mainly affect the shape and meaning of an entire sentence. In Chinese they signal the meaning of every single word. It's hard for English-speakers to grasp how confusing it must be for Chinese speakers to hear their language rendered without attention to tones, which is essentially what Zuckerberg did... A seven-year-old native speaker of Chinese would get all the tones right. That's what native speakers do, and that is what was wrong with the "like a seven-year-old" headline. The real point was closer to, "He speaks it like some cab driver from [name your bad-accent country] you can barely understand."Fallows turns the floor over to some dude named Kevin Slaten to, again, lamely make the distinction, but gets carried away on the mockery/fear issue when you're trying to (sincerely) speak a language that is not your own and you are merely a novice at doing so.
Look, fear and self-consciousness is a real concern for parents in Mandarin Immersion programs. It is a concern for any parent of a young child in any type of educational institution - your child's emerging self-esteem is at stake and you are conditioned and obligated to protect and nurture that emerging and tender trait.
But getting all caught-up in "the tones" needs further and amplified clarification. The more important issue here for parents and ALL students of the Chinese language to be concerned with primarily is Vocabulary Acquisition. Not tones.
Parents of one of my kid's classmates said to me once that the only criticism they had received from our classroom Chinese teacher during parent-teacher conference time was that their kid needed to work harder on pronunciation and tones. I was flabbergasted, to say the least. These are 8 year old kids we were talking about, in a Mandarin Immersion program wherein half the day is taught in Mandarin. Half your school day is taught in a language that is not your home or native language, and you think that the only problem your kid is having is one of pronunciation? Are you telling me that you don't, for even one half of a second, wonder about your kid's comprehension abilities???!!!??? Let me point out, again, something that you seem to already know - the language of instruction for 50% of your child's school day is NOT a language your child actually knows, that is he/she doesn't come from this language and doesn't have any kind of organic home context for this language... How many ways can I say, this is a foreign language for your kid... foreign... i.e., he doesn't really know it... but even if he did, do you ever wonder that your kid adequately understands the material that is being taught...? Isn't it normal to wonder whether your 8-year-old child is adequately understanding anything at all at any given moment? Or do you have telepathic powers with your kid's brian? If so, then why are you talking to me or about this...?
Please pause and think about that. Across any country in any language in the urbanized more highly educated (formal institutional education) world, who would ever say that the "only problem" your kid has in school, if he had a problem at all, was all about pronunciation and only about pronunciation. You might as well say the word "enunciation" - and then what? What would you even be talking about? Does your child need a speech therapist? Or is this a show of a bigger language processing and delay issue? Surely, the reaction would be "Let's keep an eye on this and maybe invite a professional to take a look."
Your child is not Eliza Doolittle. Your child is (hopefully) trying to get a basic education at the elementary level and beyond.
Vocabulary is the problem. When learners of Chinese speak with poor pronunciation/enunciation, but they have sufficient vocabulary to express their thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the richness of their ideas, then we are really talking about speaking with an accent. This is not about tones.
I say this to people all the time - because we live in a major city in America and there are plenty of immigrants (not unlike my parents) who speak intelligently, but with light to heavy accents. They can be some of the most amazingly successful people in the world. They can come from all manners of accents, from Spanish to Italian, to French to Chinese, to Tagalog, to Albanian, and beyond. And they all find ways to be comprehensible in the English language, albeit speaking with an accent. But I continue to be amazed that I have to point this out at all, given that it is the Year 2014.
Is it possible to speak with an accent while speaking Mandarin Chinese? And still be understood? Damn those tones and all? Absolutely. There are lots and lots of "accents" for fluent Mandarin speakers, even native speakers. Sometimes those accents can color the pronunciation so that it takes a moment, even the need to demand clarity. That happens between native speakers of Mandarin, just like it happens between native speakers of English, like a Brit talking to an American Midwesterner, or someone from Tennessee.
But without sufficient vocabulary to express the richness of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and intentions, then, yes, your child will come across as younger and dumber than his/her age. Or, if you are an adult, then same thing.
What happens to many kids in early MI is that they are not acquiring enough vocabulary to keep up with their minds developing around all those ideas, feelings, thoughts, and intentions, whether from their own brain or from the world around them. So they come across as delayed.
Meanwhile, I hear parents in MI programs talking endlessly about tones, as if it has some bearing on anything at this stage. It doesn't - not really - and especially not in the face of the truly bigger crisis at hand - which is that your kid is not learning enough vocabulary all together.
And why is this the case? Because your kid is not reading, speaking, listening, or writing enough in the Mandarin Chinese language around a volume and diversity of topics as he/she could be in order to acquire that vocabulary. It is a simple as that.
Tones be damned. It has nothing to do with the fact that Chinese is a tonal language. All is learnable if you just learn the vocabulary. And that is what made Zuckerberg's performance so impressive. He learned the vocabulary to talk about his industry, his wife and her family, to make some jokes about their relationship, to express his desires to connect to China and Chinese people, and most importantly, he expressed the sincerity of his intentions by relentlessly trying to express himself, even with his limited vocabulary, albeit all in spite of his poor execution on pronunciation (and yes, his pronunciation of his "tones").
But it didn't matter. Because there was ENOUGH vocabulary in place for people to understand him at a much higher degree than they would have expected. With enough vocabulary in place, native speakers can understand you - it then just sounds like you speak with an accent.
Without much vocabulary in place, however, then sure, you leave native speakers guessing, especially if, on top of that limited vocabulary, your "tones" are executed poorly, thereby creating more confusion.
So parents in MI programs, stop thinking about the tones and start thinking about how to get your kids more vocabulary. Read more books, engage with more native speakers and better educated ones at that. That is the only way. But you can't keep going in circles from one Foreign Language Model textbook series to another, when all it does is repeat the same stuff, but maybe a slightly different order. There are only so many times your kid should be learning Chinese New Year vocabulary or features of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. Perfecting your tones around such limited topics doesn't make you a more sophisticated Mandarin speaker.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Amanda Ripley's The Smartest Kids in the World
While I know, I am trying to establish a blog about being in a Mandarin Immersion program and progressing to the 3B ideal while growing up in America, I have to pause and recommend this book on education and parenting.
Amanda Ripley takes a deep dive into education from several countries, including the United States, and also lays out the premises of the international PISA test. Along the way, she cites many studies, including those on parenting styles.
Mandarin Immersion has, sadly, fallen victim to faulty trends in American culture, and the false juxtaposition of negatively connoted "Asian" "Tiger Mom" parenting styles as an impediment to successful bilingualism. If you listen to the playground chatter too much, the end result is that many Asian American parents - moms, especially - are being led to feel embarrassed by the parenting they received, and therefore handicapped that they don't know what is truly right from wrong.
Ripley has a small section in her book that summarizes this well, and, as it turns out, the professionals can show that Asian American parenting, by and large, actually plays out quite well, even in a superior fashion when you look at the broader numbers. Forget the extreme stories of the Amy Chua's of the world, this is about the larger subset. It isn't even about being Asian American, but that there are plenty of parents around the world who leverage a style of parenting that is termed "authoritative."
"Authoritative" is different from "authoritarian." I will defer to her passage to explain:
So what does this have to do with Mandarin Immersion? Something that many non-Chinese parent peers in MI programs seem not to understand - That when your kid is young, i.e., in elementary school, then you the parent need to be very hands-on when it comes to getting them through all the hard work to acquire the skills that become their foundation for middle and high school, and beyond. If you really want your kid to become bilingual and bi-literate, then you have to be an authoritative parent who says that the hard work is non-negotiable.
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg achieved a lot by studying hard as an adult for a few years. But he will never have the level of mastery that your kid could have if you start early, before the brain has fully closed and formed. The Zuck will always speak Mandarin like he has marbles in his mouth - and I don't doubt that he will remain totally illiterate at Chinese. Your kid can do better.
But your greatest chances of success are in being tougher when they are young. So yes, copying characters is a chore, but it is also a valuable skill. Singing songs in a language you don't know may seem weird to do endlessly, but after a while, that forced habit can become part of your life's joy. And what magic when your kid meets up with scores of other kids who already know that song? It's bound to happen some day, if you just keep going.
And for those of you who have been working hard, then you know, because you can see it right before your eyes as your child gets older, that they do, in fact, become more independent - especially at sticking with the Chinese - so that it gets a lot easier.
Amanda Ripley takes a deep dive into education from several countries, including the United States, and also lays out the premises of the international PISA test. Along the way, she cites many studies, including those on parenting styles.
Mandarin Immersion has, sadly, fallen victim to faulty trends in American culture, and the false juxtaposition of negatively connoted "Asian" "Tiger Mom" parenting styles as an impediment to successful bilingualism. If you listen to the playground chatter too much, the end result is that many Asian American parents - moms, especially - are being led to feel embarrassed by the parenting they received, and therefore handicapped that they don't know what is truly right from wrong.
Ripley has a small section in her book that summarizes this well, and, as it turns out, the professionals can show that Asian American parenting, by and large, actually plays out quite well, even in a superior fashion when you look at the broader numbers. Forget the extreme stories of the Amy Chua's of the world, this is about the larger subset. It isn't even about being Asian American, but that there are plenty of parents around the world who leverage a style of parenting that is termed "authoritative."
"Authoritative" is different from "authoritarian." I will defer to her passage to explain:
Around the world, people who studied parenting usually divided the various styles into four basic categories: Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians, the "because I said so" parents. Permissive parents tended to be indulgent and averse to conflict. They acted more like friends than parents. In some studies, permissive parents tended to be wealthier and more educated than other parents. Neglectful parents were just how they sounded: emotionally distend and often absent. They were also more likely to live in poverty.
Then there was the fourth option: Authoritative. The word was like a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabited the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive, and close to their kids, but, as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids' upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear, bright limits, rules they did not negotiate...
When researcher Jelani Mandara at Northwestern University studied 4,754 U.S. teenagers and their parents, he found that kids with authoritative parents had higher academic achievement levels, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors. Other studies have found similar benefits. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient, and it seemed to work.
It is perilous to make sweeping generalizations about people based on their ethnic heritage, but the research does suggest patterns. In the United States, European-American parents are more likely to exhibit authoritative styles than Hispanic or African-American parents, who trend toward authoritarian styles of parenting. (Although all ethnicities include all four kinds of parents.) However, the Asian-American parenting style may be the most consistently authoritative.
For example, studies have shown that Chinese-American parents are more hands-on with their children when they are young, training them in the ways of reading, writing, and math, but then they give their kids significantly more autonomy as they get older (a model that sounds eerily similar to the stereotype of the Finnish parent). "In high school, Asian immigrant parents really have a more hands-off approach," says Ruth Chao, who has studied parenting styles for over two decades. "They're not doing direct instruction. They're not managing the child's schoolwork anymore. They feel that if they are still having to do that, then there's really a problem."
So what does this have to do with Mandarin Immersion? Something that many non-Chinese parent peers in MI programs seem not to understand - That when your kid is young, i.e., in elementary school, then you the parent need to be very hands-on when it comes to getting them through all the hard work to acquire the skills that become their foundation for middle and high school, and beyond. If you really want your kid to become bilingual and bi-literate, then you have to be an authoritative parent who says that the hard work is non-negotiable.
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg achieved a lot by studying hard as an adult for a few years. But he will never have the level of mastery that your kid could have if you start early, before the brain has fully closed and formed. The Zuck will always speak Mandarin like he has marbles in his mouth - and I don't doubt that he will remain totally illiterate at Chinese. Your kid can do better.
But your greatest chances of success are in being tougher when they are young. So yes, copying characters is a chore, but it is also a valuable skill. Singing songs in a language you don't know may seem weird to do endlessly, but after a while, that forced habit can become part of your life's joy. And what magic when your kid meets up with scores of other kids who already know that song? It's bound to happen some day, if you just keep going.
And for those of you who have been working hard, then you know, because you can see it right before your eyes as your child gets older, that they do, in fact, become more independent - especially at sticking with the Chinese - so that it gets a lot easier.
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