Job Discussion Forums

[kimo]

According to the following article, Mandarin speakers must access more of their brain when using the language than do people do when speaking English. There is no mention of the quality of thought associated with that usage though.

MSNBC says

[bnix]

I hope that your title line"Those of Us in China Have Smarter Students", was merely facetious.Just out of curiosity,I checked out the article you indicated..It says Mandarin speakers use more areas of the brain to process Mandarin than English speakers use to process English.This does not necessarily make Mandarin speakers"smarter". Good Lord! Makes you wonder about some of the people "teaching" in China.

[kimo]

And that so many of the teachers outside of China are so d-a-m-n serious makes one wonder how dreary their classes are.

[leeroy]

Wow, it didn't take this thread long to descend into nastiness, did it?

"The left temporal lobe of the brain is active when English speakers hear the language but Mandarin speakers use the left and right lobe, which is normally used to process melody in music and speech.

Intonation is important in Mandarin because it gives different meanings to the same word. The word �ma� for example can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp, depending on the tone.

�We think Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken word,� Scott said in a statement."

So us primitive westerners only process the "words", while our superior Chinese counterparts process the "words" and "music" simultaneously, due to their heavier reliance on intonation.

I'm sure my Chinese students will be delighted to hear this, as I suspect it only confirms their suspicions about "smaller western brains" anway!

But seriously though, does this mean that Chinese students are better able to distinguish subtle nuances in music? Are they more sensitive to slight changes in intonation when speaking in English? And if this is true, then why is their pronunciation in general so fucking awful? (compared to, say, my Japanese or Korean students).

[bnix]

Kimo posted"...and that so many teachers outside of China are so d-a-m-n
serious".
Oh,really?Are you trying to say there are not many seriopus teachers in China?Some of your colleagues may not appreciate that! On the other hand,are you also trying to say most of the teachers outside China are too serious? That is hilarious.Maybe you should try teaching in another country besides China ,if you have not yet done that.

[PanamaTeacher]

Kimo (therapy?)

Now I'm probably not as smart as you since you have been able to spin this to show higher intelligence for our friends in China. If I understand the findings correctly, the Chinese have to use more of their brain to do the same thing English speakers do with only part of their brain. I would argue that since efficiency is defined as the ease with which a task is done, then English speakers communicate more efficiently than Chinese speakers. So, in terms of intelligence, I think the person that can do things with less mental effort must be the smarter one. Do you agree or is this too serious?

Your half-brained amigo in Panama

P.S. Now I understand why I get headaches at chinese restaurants, it's my tiny brain trying to say chowmein or whatever. Oww, there goes the pain again!

[kimo]

Kimo started this thread off:

[PanamaTeacher]

Kimo (sabe)
You said:

[Michael T. Richter]

[PanamaTeacher]

Read it for yourself:

[Michael T. Richter]

[Roger]

One aspect that may not have been mentioned in that report, a qualitative difference between how Westerners learn a language and how Chinese do the same.
If you consider how cumbersome the Chinese script is, and how much practice it needs for anyone to be steeped in it, then you can arrive at some guess as to how they acquire English: in one word, quantitative learning. As we all know, and never tire of complaining about, they learn by rote, and learning by rote is mind-numbing besides boring. It has, in fact, been decried many times over by the official media, but in twenty years of teaching English it has not changed significantly. Every student has to memorise X vocables per semester.
COmpare this to how Westerners learn any second or foreign language: as few new words per lesson as needed, but as intellectually challenging as possible. From an early beginning, students have to learn to analyse sentences and work on syntax and grammar. They become competent earlier and can interpret texts without recourse to a teacher. They learn to think in the target language(s) and thus do not need to spend much time force-feeding their memories on new and old words.
If you ask Chinese students what their greatest problems in learning English are, the problem of forgetting what they had learnt occupies a prominent place in their list of complaints!
The extra volume of brain they use in studying a foreign tongue probably is the extra storage for memory bytes.

[PanamaTeacher]

Michael--

Stop. Let's not get off-track. I never said I agreed with the results. I only said the results were reported by the press:

[PanamaTeacher]

Roger

I have no opinion about the debate contained in the article because

1. never been to china
2. never heard mandarin in my life (to my knowledge)
3. cannot comment on the chinese educational sytem
4. cannot comment on esl teaching in china
5. cannot comment on mandarin-learning by english speakers
6. none of the above topics has much relevance to my teaching

My original purpose in posting was that Kimo said that based on the article one can conclude that Chinese students are smarter. I thought he was wrong and said so. Kimo later said he was joking, so that killed the discussion.

I did enjoy reading your post as I enjoy reading everything you write because it is generally well-reasoned. Thanks for your time.
Tu amigo en Panama

[Kapt. Krunch]

Roger is right on most counts. The cumbersome nature of the language actually forms the peoples logic in daily life....it's a stunning occurence and a disheartening revelation to those who are under the illusion that they are doing something in China(in class) that their recorded voice could not.