On Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

The words ‘learning a foreign language’ usually conjure up images of endless memorization and repetition in an effort to try to speak in that language. Add the word ‘Chinese’ to the above statement and watch people begin to say how impossible that would be.

Fortunately there are many strategies to teach Mandarin effectively, even to those who have never tried learning a foreign language. While it is impossible to say which strategy is the better one, a method that consistently produces good results is discussed below.

Theoretical Basis

As far back as the 1960’s, linguistic theories have stated that when a child learns language, she does so by listening to the people around her converse in that language. Eventually, through trial and error, she learns how to arrange words properly in that language, and eventually create her own sentences. (It also follows that if she only learned through memorizing what other people said, then she wouldn’t be able to say anything she’s never heard before, like ‘I ate a dragon today.’)

The same theories also state that the value of explicit learning (school, and the like) is in reinforcing the rules that one already knows subconsciously; i.e. one enters school already knowing how to use the words ‘big’ or ‘small’, but it is in school where one learns that they are called ‘adjectives’.

One of the reasons, therefore, why people have difficulty in learning a foreign language is that they are learning a new set of rules to ‘replace’ the rules one already knows. In other words, they are learning new ways to arrange words and conjugate verbs (among others) in a new language, which more often than not is different from their first language. And, to reinforce these new rules, they then wade through volumes of texts in the second language, then remember the material.

One possible methodology, then, that addresses this difficulty is one that teaches the ‘word-arranging’ and ‘word-forming’ rules at the very beginning: the linguistic approach.

The Linguistic Approach

As stated above, as a child learns language, she learns it by ‘picking up’ how her language goes- that is, what words go where, how to conjugate verbs, and the like. She doesn’t simply learn it by just listening to everything said around her, for if she did, that would mean she could only say things she’s heard before, and couldn’t ‘create’ her own sentences.

If one takes into account the dizzying variety of verb forms, irregularities, gender, tense and whatnot that can be found in languages the world over, then it’s really amazing how anyone learns language at all. It should be noted, however, that even people who never had formal education can still speak—meaning, that formal training helps, but is not the whole story.

Vocabulary is actually the reason why traditional approaches prescribe wading through texts and sample dialogues to learn a language. As one reads, one remembers the words, and along the way one ‘picks up’ how to properly arrange the parts of a sentence. If the approach is reversed, however—that is, learn grammar first then vocabulary—then a student would not only know what to say, but also have the advantage of knowing that what they say makes sense.

Grammar also explains why some people learning languages the traditional way have trouble saying things on their own (i.e. things not found in the book). Since their orientation is towards the rules in their first language, they unconsciously order words according to the rules of the first language, saying things that are grammatically incorrect in the second language.

What this means, is that if someone teaches a student all the ‘word-arranging’ and ‘word-forming’ rules at the very beginning, rather than as she progresses through her studies, learning becomes a whole lot easier. Once grammar is done, the student just ‘inserts’ vocabulary in the right places and she’s good to go!

Sample lesson: On making Sentences in Chinese
The following lesson illustrates this methodology:

Basic Chinese Sentence patter: S-V-O
[Subject]-[Verb]-[Object] (if needed)

wo mai yi fu
‘I-buy-clothes’ ‘I bought clothes’
[S-V-O]

ni chi man guo
‘you-eat-mango’ ‘You ate a mango’
[S-V-O]

ta ming bai
‘he/she-understand’ ‘She understands’
[S-V]

Once a student is made to understand the sentence pattern, she is then given a list of lexicon to work with:

Subjects
wo ‘I’
ni ‘you’
ta ‘he/she’

Verbs
chi ‘eat’
he ‘drink’
mai ‘buy’
kan ‘read/watch’
yao ‘want to’
(used before the verb)

Objects
fan ‘food’
shui ‘water’
yi fu ‘clothes’
shu ‘book’
dian ying ‘movie

From this, the student can now create sentences on her own:

wo kan dian ying
‘I-watch-movie’ ‘I watched a movie’
[S+V+O]

ta mai yi fu
‘he/she-buy-clothes’ ‘She bought clothes’
[S+V+O]

ta yao he shui
‘he/she-want to-drink-water’ ‘He wants to drink water’
[S+V+O]

Mandarin Chinese particularly lends itself to this approach, as Chinese has no tenses or verb conjugations; i.e. the word ‘eat’ is [chi]; the word ‘ate’ is still [chi]; the word ‘have eaten’ still makes use of verb [chi]. How does it differentiate tenses and aspect then? Chinese makes use of modifiers placed before or after the verb, like the word [yao] ‘want to’ above; students are taught how the word is used, and can then immediately use them in relation to the sentence pattern.

Advantages of the Linguistic Approach

The greatest advantage of this approach is that students can immediately begin to create sentences on their own. They merely have to ask what a particular object or concept is called, and can then use it in a sentence. This way, they merely memorize words, not entire sentences; they then arrange these words to say what they want to say in Mandarin Chinese.

For more advanced sentences, they are taught more grammatical patterns that allow them to arrange words in more complex ways. They merely have to remember the pattern (sort of like a mathematical formula) in order to say what they want to say, even if they have never encountered that particular sentence in a book before.

This approach also endows students with more confidence when they begin to use Chinese in outside situations. They know that if they remember the pattern, then they can simply ‘insert’ the words they want to use when speaking in a real-life situation; they do not have to remember ‘set’ constructions (like what to say in a restaurant, how to ask for discounts and the like). As such, students do not have to remember all the possible sentences applicable in any given situation—they merely have to know what words they want or need to use, filter them through the right grammatical pattern, and then proceed to speak and converse.

Postscript

This approach is not for everyone, as it relies on direct conversations with students to improve and gauge their language proficiency. It also is most effective with smaller groups of students, as it is physically taxing to carry on separate conversations with 40 or more students. If one manages it however, one will find that using this methodology will allow the students to learn a second language in the shortest possible time, and will give the instructor the satisfaction of a job well done.