Job Discussion Forums

[Hod]

Learning Mandarin is B I G business now in the UK. Must be money there for someone. Might be worth marrying a few and bringing them over to teach. I'd be on the bandwagon too if all the Mandarin for Beginners courses weren't fully booked.

But anyone know about this place in London?

European Centre of Chinese Studies - it's in Holborn

At �12.50 an hour, it's pricey and there's no mention of class sizes on the website, or how long the school's been going. Saying that, have you ever tried learning a language at an evening school in the UK? I should keep my expectations low.

Or anyone know other places in the UK teaching Mandarin.

[Roger]

The Chinese have quietly managed to squeeze into the foreign languages scene recently. The government set up Confucius Institutes analogous to the Britsh Council and the Academie Francaise with a brief to promote Chinese language and culture throughout the world.

In SE countries Chinese is fast catching up with English and already has outdistanced Japanese which used to be a big favourite here a few years back.

In the U.S.A. Chinese has also been on a steep rise at public schools - ahead of French or Spanish!

Traditionally, Chinese was taught mainly in China and a few socialist nations such as the former SU and in Africa. NOw an increasing number of individuals throughout the world is coming to the realisation that Chinese is at least as vital in business as is English!

What next? Maybe Urdu or Hindi - because, after all, India is also on the fast lane now that it has shed its state-owned monopolies on the economy!

[vikdk]

with regard to the OP posting - I would be interested in finding out how many of the mandarin teachers in these out of china schools are native speakers, and who the students would consider most effective - native or non-native speaking teachers.
with regard to roger's post

[ghost]

[Hod]

Bit far to commute, but thanks.

So, no one studied Chinese in the UK?

[2 over lee]

Roger wrote>

[Clearcrystal]

In response to learning Chinese in any other country than China or another Chinese speaking country , seems to me , pointless and futile at the best.

If I was to use , as my best example , the case of Chinese students studying English from the age of 8(or younger in a lot of cases) up until the point of their graduation (say 18 and much older if they continue to University) then one can see that a great deal of effort is needed to break the bridge between Chinese and another non-asian language such as English. Now taking into consideration the average student's skill in their ability to use the language (which is for those of you who don't know ) very limited then one can't help to feel a little helpless.

Chinese is much harder than English in that they rely on tones ( which for most foreigners are quite difficult to get their heads around) and intonation to expand their vocabulary.

I would recommend that anyone who is serious about learning Chinese goes to China and learn ..... The experience is great !!!(If you're a student)

[Hod]

Two points based on your logic:

1. You're wasting your time teaching English to Asians because your students will never learn, unless of course they all up sticks and move to an English-speaking country.

2. No point in learning Chinese in England. I mean, it's not as if there's anyone to practice with.

Anyway, live in China? Too cold.

[Roger]

[mondrian]

[Clearcrystal]

[quote]And what exactly makes you claim Chinese is harder to learn than any other language or harder than English?

Roger....

TONES- (Those of which english do not have) A study was taken by a gentleman named Allard Jongman of Kansas University (he called it the study of identification of non-native segmental distinctions) where eight American learners of mandarin were trained in eight sessions during the course of two weeks to identify the four tones in natural words produced by native Mandarin talkers . The results were explained as a 21 percent improvement from their initial score before starting the study.

A test was then conducted with eight Chinese learners of English . The only thing he could test was Cross-language perception of speech(That is Vowel and consonant perception) with the same settings as were allowed with the Americans and an improvemet of 48 percent was recorded.

The result proved that training the ear to respond (recognise) to new stimuli-tones - takes prolonged exposure to them.

Chinese characters , without argument, are certainly more difficult than a logical roman script.

If you still think that Chinese is not harder than English ....

Before we continue this conversation please give me a quote of how many hours are suggested to be taken in the study of Chinese to the number of hours to that of English .-(my point will be proven)
Chinese is harder than English and all western languages .... BUDDY.
I suggest that it be done in China .... (I shouldn't be so blunt with sayint it is pointless to study Chinese in England but when you look at the prices to study over here ... then you can see how it would seem that way.)

With Regards and respect

[tofuman]

A recent article in the New York times offered the following:

Chinese is the fourth most difficult language in the world for an English L1 to learn.

The average English L1 can learn Spanish or Italian to a certain level in about 450 hours. To attain the same level in Chinese requires about 1300 hours.

Www. Pleco. com offers a fantastic Palm program with handwriting recognition to assist in Chinese vocabulary studies. What could take several minutes before--finding the meaning of a Chinese character--can now be done in less than a minute.

[Hod]

If Chinese (Mandarin) is the fourth difficult, what are the others? Based on Clearcrystal's argument, any language with tones is well hard, and as Thai, Lao, Cambodian and the Chinese dialects have five or more tones (compared to Mandarin's mere four, easy or what?) they must be way more difficult. And presumably that includes the compulsory relocation to those countries to study.

Also, who cares about reading and writing Chinese when we've got Pinyin.

[Roger]

Yeah, you read some sociological stuff and come away thinking you read the most fundamentally insightful theory on Earth! Eureka!

I deny that "Chinese is the most (or the fourth most) difficult language in the world". Full Stop!

And here is my reasoning:
How difficult a foreign language is to you depends on how DIFFERENT that language is to your first tongue!

Then, you have to define the DIFFERENCES.

Now we get a clearer picture:
Mandarin (let's not start discussing Cantonese, Fukienese, Hakkanese or any other funny dialect) differs from an Indo-European language in that it absolutely needs TONES to differentiate its hundreds of homophonous syllables.
It is wrong to say English has no TONES; English has - but they are not semantically operative! They convey emotions and emphasis. It is quite difficult to treach proper English intonation to Chinese! Very difficult, indeed - in spite of their tonal lingo!

Yes, Chinese tones are a major problem area for native speakers of non-tonal languages. But there is some compensation: the scarcity of phonetic bodies, syllables! You only have to deal with roughly 420 of them; thus the need to acquire a perfect mastery of tones so that identical phonetic bodies sound differently enough to native Mandarin speakers! That is "difficult' - we have to train our ears to acquaint ourselves with a phenomenon that's naturl for Chinese.

It takes a long time, and many give up - mostly because the training to achieve functionality in Mandarin is repetitive and thus boring!

But Indo-European languages pose an entirely new set of challenges to native speakers of tonal languages: first thing: pronunciation! There are more phonemes in English than there are in Mandarin. There are long and short vowels while Mandarin has no such differentiation.
Then there is the constantly changing grammar structure of English sentences which takes some time to internalise too; the native speaker doesn't need to memorise the rules but he studies the rules in order to understand the logic; Chinese and other foreign students of English have to study grammar formally in order to use English with native speakers - and most will never make it, by 'most' I mean something considerabvly more than 75 percent - judging by what China achieves in its English teaching programmes with ten years and more per student!
What's to blame for that?
Different hinking, a deeper-lying logic structure of English that remains alien to Chinese due to their inuredness to thinking in Chinese.

This is mainly because learning how to write Chinese is basically a rote-learning practice.

But see how much less mentally blocked non-native speakers of Mandarin are in learning CHinese AND an Indo-European language: just interact with Uygurs in Mandarin and ENglish, and you will have to see that Chinese isn't that hell of a difficult lingo; there are millions of Tibetans and other non-Han people that can't write Chinese but have a near-perfect command of the spoken variety.

And I have only been talking about ENGLISh as one of the various Indo-European languages; ever tried to master Russian? I am convinced you can achieve a higher oral fluency in Mandarin in 3 years of Mandarin courses than Russian fluency in 3 years of Russian courses. This despite the fact that the differences between Russian and English are in the grammar and pronunciation departments, and to a minor extent, the writing.

[tofuman]

Roger,
Still struggling with English reading. What a pity. I hear that they have classes to help people sharpen their reading skills. You should try one before you enter into discussions.

If you deny that Chinese is the fourth most difficult language for a native English speaker, then your quarrel is not with me but with professionals who write for the New York Times.

Hod,
Pinyin is hardly an excuse for not learning Chinese characters. It is a recent development in China. If you plan to do any serious communication or study that utilizes Chinese, pinyin is not going to suffice.

But some people like to eat with their fingers.