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LongShiKong
Joined: 28 May 2007
Posts: 1082
Location: China
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 Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 4:47 pm Post subject: China vs Korea vs Japan - Best English? |
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| Teaching mixed classes back in Canada, I'd seen a clear supremacy of Central and South Americans and Europeans over their Asian counterparts. For those of you who've taught in other Asian countries, who's got the best English, and what do you attribute that to? |
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LongShiKong
Joined: 28 May 2007
Posts: 1082
Location: China
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| Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 4:24 am Post subject: |
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Having taught Japanese and Koreans in Canada, seems Chinese have the best pronunciation but what about fluency, vocabulary and accuracy?
I think the argument that Asians have a disadvantage over their Euro/American counterparts in that English is of the same language family is overstated. Indians, by far, have the best English. |
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foreignDevil
Joined: 23 Jun 2003
Posts: 580
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| Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 5:27 am Post subject: |
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I have never been to Korea, but I know many Koreans in my city here in China, and in my apartment garden I tutor a number of Korean students. I haven't observed any stark difference in overall language proficiency between them and Chinese people.
But, one big difference I have observed is in reading ability. My Korean students seem to much more quickly grasp new words they have never seen before, are able to pronounce them, and then remember them. I always assumed this was because their own writing system uses a phonemic alphabet. But I am no linguist. This was just my personal feeling.
We have all seen Chinese students just freeze when they come to an unfamiliar word. They seem to only see it as a shape, and not composed of individual phonemes. They may know the word "apple" and the word "snack". But if you removed the SN from snack and attached it to the front of apple, thereby spelling that famous American ice tea... they are stumped. They can't read it.
Again, I am no linguist.. this was just my personal observation. |
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Yes Sir I Can Bogey
Joined: 23 Mar 2009
Posts: 201
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| Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 10:07 am Post subject: |
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| foreignDevil wrote: |
We have all seen Chinese students just freeze when they come to an unfamiliar word. They seem to only see it as a shape, and not composed of individual phonemes. They may know the word "apple" and the word "snack". But if you removed the SN from snack and attached it to the front of apple, thereby spelling that famous American ice tea... they are stumped. They can't read it.
Again, I am no linguist.. this was just my personal observation. |
First, you can't 'see' phonemes in a written word, and you can't hear them in speech either as they are but (hotly contested) theoretical constructs. I think you may mean morphemes. Anyway, I am a linguist, and I have exactly the same observation as yourself. I think it is as the Chinese (try to) learn English lexical items in the same way they learn Chinese ideograms. That is, they try to project and indeed, impose, their writing system onto other, radically different, languages. When they see a (to them, new) word they do not see individual morphemes - either free or bound - or any inflectional morphology, tense, mood, number, aspect, or person markers. Rather, all they see is a wholly arbitrary collection of letters, or, as they more likely see them, strokes. They do not appreciate (or even seem to want to know about) the combinatorial, productive, generative nature of English. This is simply as they are, as a people, very set in their ways and refuse, point blank, to ever change. But of course, as we all know, learning entails change. Indeed, learning is change. 'Learning' means to change and/or to bring about a change, either in knowledge, ability, or behaviour. In China I even met students who 'wrote' 'English' with Chinese characters. Thus for the direct or indirect object first person form 'me' they would actually write the Chinese character for rice! And they wonder why they suffer from 'interference' from their L1......
Languages such as English make infinite use of finite means, but Chinese is limited to making finite use of finite means, and the students cannot comprehend this.
Another interesting thing about Chinese learners � also connected to their inability/unwillingness to change � is that oft-heard remark of 'But that's what we say in Chinese'. Even my post-graduate students in HK come out with this gem a lot. Many years ago I simply gave up 'informing' them that they were not speaking or writing Chinese but were speaking or writing English. I gave up saying this as they would again simply respond with 'Yes, but we say it in Chinese'. That's why they seem hell-bent on saying and writing oddities such as 'Because it was raining so the streets got wet'. If you naively try to point out that you can either say 'Because it was raining the streets got wet', 'The streets got wet because it was raining', or 'It was raining so the streets got wet', but not 'Because it was raining so the streets got wet' then they will invariably say 'Yes, but that's what we say in Chinese' as if that is the end of the story.
Again, this is all linked to their aversion to change. Learning to speak a foreign language � from a Skinnerian behaviourist point of view � entails a change in outward, physical behaviour, and, from a more Chomskyan psycholinguistic/generative view entails a change in cognitive behaviour. No matter what school of thought one belongs, how can we expect Chinese students to achieve competency in English when they simply refuse to change? |
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foreignDevil
Joined: 23 Jun 2003
Posts: 580
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| Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 10:39 am Post subject: |
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That reminds me of the old joke.. thank you written in Chinese = 三克肉 san ke rou. Three grams of meat.
But the cynic in me always thought of the dark underlying message... "this is how much your silly foreign language is worth, and not a gram more," the joke seems to be telling us.  |
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