Job Discussion Forums

[Ger]

http://www.sznews.com/szdaily/20040917/ca1164053.htm

Could foreigners teach the Chinese language in China better than some local Chinese teachers teach English in China?

If I could find a Chinese person to teach me the Chinese language well enough I would be quite happy. I have had a few "tutors" (some even Chinese language majors) who must have cheated throughout their school exams because they don't seem to be able to teach a foreigner Chinese grammar - and I'm no expert of Chinese.

[Roger]

Frankly speaking, I have yet to meet a Chinese instructor who is up to his or her job! Westerners who teach you a lingo such as Chinese at least know what they are discoursing on - they can point out the differences between tones, whereas a Chinese person inevitably repeats the same word without clarifying what mistake you made.

Also, a Westerner is more likely to do as you please - speaking Chinese instead of using Chinglish in translation!

[nolefan]

I agree with Roger on this one (Roger, do you have a cheerleading squad I can join ) I would think that a foreigner who spent years learning Chinese would be able to do a better job teaching the langage to another foreigner. The main reason would be that they had already been through the process and they can sympathise and even understand the difficulties we go through.

That said, I am fairly pleased with my Chinese teacher but she is not your standard local. She has had more exposure to langages than most folks as she is also an English teacher ( a decent one) and she can somewhat speak French and Spanish.

[David Bowles]

Hey, don't knock Chinglish! Proper Chinglish (as opposed to simply bad English) is a really useful learning aid when you're learning Chinese. Translating Chinese phrases into normal English is tricky because word order etc. changes- so it's often better to translate into Chinglish, because that way you understand what each part of the Chinese phrase does. My campaign to have Chinglish recognised as an international language goes on. But anyway...
I think most Chinese people learn their own language much like English speakers learn English- basically picking it up. They seem to think about the grammar and logic of it even less than English speakers do- so ideally you'd want an actual Chinese language teacher- a specialist.

[struelle]

No doubt fellow Western speakers of Mandarin are excellent at teaching the rigors, and would greatly help get a new speaker started. At some point though, it's necessary to switch to a native speaker. But learning directly from a Chinese at the beginning, I feel, is very difficult. Like swimming in the deep end. I like this kind of challenge, but we all learn differently.

The assumption here is that most Westerners are starting from total scratch, in other words, are true beginners. So concepts like tones, pinyin, new phonemes, and word order are very new, let alone characters.

On the other hand, most Chinese who "begin" to learn English are in fact false beginners. They have likely already learned the alphabet, spelling of words, and phonemes (with help through the phonetic chart). They've memorized lots of vocab and grammar rules too.

So a native English speaker can, through some decent training, be able to teach a 'beginning' Chinese student fairly well.

Unfortunately the reverse doesn't work. For example, the native Chinese speaker may figure tones come naturally, but in fact, they are utterly foreign to us. We haven't learned them before, so they have to go all the way to first principles. They may get exasperated and say, "Geez, I spent 1 hour teaching tones. That's all the laowai learned today."

To get an idea of the situation, suppose we taught true beginners in English. How might we teach someone who doesn't know the ABCs and has no knowledge of basic sounds? Certainly patience would be needed, and progress would start slowly.

Steve

[Galum82]

And so, may I STRESS the importance of BILINGUAL education...which doesn't mean one native chinese teacher in the classroom trying to translate the native english teacher during class, which many Chinese schools believe to be so. It means having a teacher that can speak fluently BOTH english AND chinese who has a full understanding of BOTH cultures as well...therefore Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Britains, Chinese-Canadians, etc... overseas Chinese. However, they usually don't get hired in China because they do not "look foreign". O wellz...but back to the topic, if you wanna learn Chinese it would be ideal if you can get an overseas Chinese teacher...

well, thats just my opinion....