Transcript Learning Chinese at Lakeside School

学习中文基本咨询
Adam Ross
Which Chinese to Learn?
 Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua 普通话 or Guoyu 国语)
is the national language of both the People’s Republic
of China and Taiwan.
 Cantonese, though widely spoken in North America, is
rarely taught outside of South China
 There are other regional dialects of Chinese, such as
Taiwanese and Shanghainese, which are often spoken
in local regional communities.
 All of these dialects are mutually unintelligible when
spoken, but their written forms are generally the same.
The Bad News about Learning
Chinese
 Chinese is a TFL (“Truly Foreign Language”) and
takes up to four times as long for English speakers
to master than other European languages like
French or Spanish.
 Chinese is a tonal language, and students need to
have much drill and practice to master this aspect
of Chinese pronunciation.
 Chinese is a character-based language, and
students must eventually master 1000s of
characters
The four tones of Standard Chinese
Image from Chinesepod: http://chinesepod.com/images/pronu_tones.gif
In written “pinyin,” these tones are
represented with these diacritics:
mā (1st tone) má (2nd tone)
妈 “mother”
麻 “numb”
mă (3rd tone) mà (4th tone)
马 “horse”
骂 “to scold”
Now, the Good News!
 Chinese grammar is almost ridiculously easy – there
are no tenses, irregular verbs, conjugations,
declensions or other tricky parts of speech that
plague students in Western languages.
 Students can put together very comprehensible
speech pretty easily once they’ve mastered basic
pronunciation issues.
 Learning characters has a certain “cachet,” and
students are often drawn by the artistic element of
writing in characters.
Chinese Writing
 Chinese can be written in simplified characters (used in
mainland China) or traditional characters (used in Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Singapore and in overseas Chinese
communities)
 Most Chinese programs choose to teach one form or
another, but some opt to teach both
Various forms of Chinese characters
Image from http://www.orbitchinese.com/image/symbol.gif
Learning Chinese Sounds
 Chinese sounds can be represented by a variety of
systems. Most programs teach Hanyu Pinyin (or simply
Pinyin for short), which was developed in the PRC in the
1950s.
 Pinyin is the Romanization system used in virtually all
Western media to represent Chinese names and sounds.
 Other common system (often used by teachers from
Taiwan) include Tongyong Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao (BoPo-Mo-Fo)
Standards for Chinese Testing
 The Chinese SAT II as well as the AP Chinese Exam are
available in both simplified and traditional characters.
 The Chinese AP is administered on computers, and testees
input characters on their keyboard, selecting characters they
input via Hanyu Pinyin.
 STAMP and NOELLA are new proficiency tests administered
online. These tests were developed in a partnership between
Avant Assessment and the University of Oregon.
 For more advanced students, the HSK (汉语水平考试“Hanyu
Shuiping Kaoshi” or “Test of Chinese Language Proficiency”) is
offered annually at Seattle University.