[转帖]《华盛顿邮报》我是怎么学好中文的

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silkworm
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[转帖]《华盛顿邮报》我是怎么学好中文的

Post by silkworm » 2005-09-12 13:50

[转帖]《华盛顿邮报》我是怎么学好中文的

How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons  

  By Jay Mathews
  
  Washington Post Staff Writer
  Tuesday, August 9, 2005; 1:15 PM
  
  I spent several years, and some of your tax dollars, trying to learn Chinese, so I need to say something about a new campaign to get that language into U.S. schools and colleges.
  
  The Asia Society just put out a report (see the internationaled.org Web site ) on how more Americans can learn Chinese. There was a world conference on the subject last month in Beijing. Chinese language instruction is, obviously, a good idea. China is our biggest trading partner, after Canada and Mexico. The country reminds me in some ways of America in the 1870s. It is recovering from horrid domestic events, getting stronger, with the potential to be the most important nation in the world. Chinese, along with Arabic, should be among our top foreign language priorities.
  
     
  But let me -- just this once because I don't like recalling the pain -- tell you that learning Chinese is not going to be easy.
  
  Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization. It is so humane and so productive that I share few of the fears that the rise of Chinese economic and military power inspires in some Americans.
  
  But the Chinese, despite all their good points, have a very difficult and in some ways inefficient language. Those Americans ready to pursue the worthy goal of learning it should be ready for a long, hard march.
  
  Unkind people are saying at this point: Mathews may have been too dumb or too lazy to master Chinese, but the Chinese themselves seem to be handling their language fine. That is true. It is one more indication of the drive and ambition of those 1.3 billion people that most of them have become fluent and literate in a spoken language that includes four tones and a written language based on ideographs that give few clues to pronunciation and sometimes drive typists mad.
  
  But it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters instead of just the two dozen or so letters of the Western alphabet has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove. Chinese students and teachers have grown accustomed to relying on memorization, the way they learned to read. There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result, some scholars think.
  
  For more than a century the Chinese have been arguing among themselves over how to simplify the written language without cutting themselves off from one of the great literary mother lodes of the past 3,000 years. The invention of the digital computer and the Internet have eased the reproduction and transmission of written Chinese, but children in China, and non-Chinese high school and college students like I once was, have to pound the meaning of all those slants and dots and curves into their brains, and hope they stay there.
  
  Take one small example. When I lived with my family in Beijing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my six-year-old son got to be a pretty good reader. There wasn't much television to distract him, and as a budding baseball and football fan he loved to decipher the sports pages of the International Herald Tribune. When Chinese saw him reading the newspaper in the dining hall of the hotel where we lived, they were amazed, since their equally bright children needed much more time before they could handle a Chinese newspaper.
  
  You can imagine, then, what it was like for me at age 19 when I took my first Chinese lessons in college.
  
  Learning the spoken language was not so bad. It had few annoyances like gender and tense and verb changes based on rank. My first Chinese professor was Rulan Chao Pian, who used a system invented by her father, the legendary UC Berkeley linguist Yuen R. Chao (silkworm: 赵元任). She and her father shared a mischievous sense of humor, although I did not think it was so funny at first. One of her first exercises was a short story made of words that used only one Chinese sound, shi (sounds like 'sure'). It was totally incomprehensible -- just as the sentence "Sure sure sure sure, sure-sure, sure sure sure" would be in English -- unless you got all the tones right or could see the characters.(silkworm: 石室诗士施氏,嗜狮,誓食十狮。施氏时时适市视狮。十时,适十狮适市。是时,适施氏适市。氏视是十狮,恃矢势,使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸,适石室。石室湿,氏使侍拭石室。石室拭,氏始试食是十狮。食时,始识是十狮,实十石狮尸。试释是事。)
  
  Once I absorbed this sobering introduction to the maddening subtleties of Chinese expression, Pian handed me her father's textbook. He had a unique way of romanizing Chinese word sounds so we could learn how to pronounce them properly. Some Chinese language textbooks assigned the numbers one to four to each of the four tones, and you would pronounce the word based on which number was next to it. Some books used little marks going up, down or otherwise to indicate the high, rising, low and falling tones. Chao decided to give a different spelling of the same sound to indicate different tones.
  
  
  There is a common Chinese sound that most American newspapers spell "zhang" (pronounced sort of like "jong"), under the standard pinyin romanization system used in China. Chao spelled that sound four ways: jang if it were first tone, jarng if it were second tone, jaang for third tone and janq for fourth tone. Different words required different spelling changes. Good old "wu," thankfully spelled that way in nearly every system, was u for first tone, wu for second tone, wuu for third tone and wuh for fourth tone.
  
  Once I practiced it, it became second nature. By the time I got to the chapter where Chao, a huge Lewis Carroll fan, asked us to memorize his translation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in Chinese, I was admiring the professor's sense of the ridiculous.
   
  
  But Chao and Pian had no happy way to learn the written characters. We just had to sit down and do it. My girlfriend began to tell our friends I was bringing my Chinese flashcards on dates. This was malicious slander, but she continues to spread this myth 38 years into our marriage, and I am not allowed to forget this most difficult part of my education.
  
  The Asia Society report says it takes "an educated English speaker 1,300 hours to achieve the native-proficiency of an educated native speaker of Chinese, while it would only take about 480 hours to achieve the same level in French or Spanish." In Sunday's edition of The Washington Post Magazine , my Post colleague Elizabeth Chang quotes another source saying that it actually takes 2,200 class hours to achieve full proficiency.
  
  Chang's magazine article was not really about learning Chinese. It was about learning Arabic. She visited a class at the International Language Institute in Northwest Washington and watched several people working with teacher Mustafa Alhashimi. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean each takes 2,200 class hours -- or about four years even if you attended a very tough school that had you in language class three hours a day every weekday for nine months a year.
  
  That helps explain why, according to the Asia Society, a 1998 survey of college language instruction showed 656,590 students taking Spanish, but only 28,456 taking Chinese and 5,505 taking Arabic. In that survey, Spanish was in first place, followed by French (199,064), German (89,020), Italian (49,287) and Japanese (43,141). Chinese was in sixth place, followed by Russian, Arabic and Korean in that order.
  
  The number of students taking Chinese and Arabic has increased substantially since, but we don't know how well they are doing in those classes, and even great strides forward are going to seem very modest. The Asia Society report asks this question: "What would it take to have 5 percent of high school students learning Chinese by 2015?" It estimates about 24,000 students in Chinese classes in K-12 schools, plus 150,000 in what it calls heritage schools -- private after-school or Saturday programs that my ethnic Chinese friends remember their parents forcing them to attend. Even if we counted all those 175,000 students, that would be only about 1 percent of American high school students.
  
  The Asia Society suggests many ways to increase these numbers: encourage the new Advanced Placement Chinese program, promote a new Chinese-designed online game and teaching program called CHENGO, give qualified Chinese teachers shortcuts to jobs in our schools, help the 2,400 high schools who have indicated they would like to add Chinese, improve teaching materials and look for federal money, like the National Defense Education Act that funded language instruction in the 1960s and 1970s, including some of my graduate school study.
  
  I applaud the Asia Society's plan. I have seen how Chinese culture blossoms in free societies. I want to bring the United States and China closer. Since the Chinese are spending so much time and effort learning our language, we should try to return the compliment. Chang said neither she nor her husband speak Chinese, but they are happy their sixth grade daughter will be starting a class in that language this fall at Hoover Middle School in Montgomery County.
  
  The mental exercise is good, and China is going to be an increasingly vital part of our world. Our Chinese may never be perfect. Mine certainly never was, but I am glad I tried.

Jun
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Post by Jun » 2005-09-12 13:59

I have heard about this theory that the ability to learn foreign languages declines precipitously after the age of 12. I wish I had learned more languages before 12.

DeBeers
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Post by DeBeers » 2005-09-12 14:15

hah, Shuangshuang now speaks Chinese at home, and English and Spanish at daycare :lol:
钻石恒久远

tiffany
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Post by tiffany » 2005-09-12 14:19

12岁以前,可以说话象native-speaker,之后就不行了。
据说在那之前,母语和非母语在脑子里面语言区占同一片地方;之后学的语言是分开的一片地方。这个语言不一定指英语德语等实际语言,还包括工作语言。最明显的一个例子是某个医学院教授中风,恢复之后想不起来手杖叫什么,但是扔给他一个特长的医学词,他马上就扔回来一个特对的解释。
乡音无改鬓毛衰

helenClaire
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Post by helenClaire » 2005-09-12 14:22

想起以前我的美国室友让我教她认一点中文。我先教“一、二、三”,心想赶快打住,不然要闹古代笑话了。于是正经和她讲汉字是象形文字,举例“山、川、人、田”等。她好象一下子领会了,让我停下,自己拿中文报纸去实践。我这室友,曾经告诉我她智商一百五十多,真能举一反三也是可能的。果然过了一会儿来找我,指着报纸标题上的“片”字问:“Waiter?" 你别说,还真象,可惜不是。 :uhh: 她从此放下了学中文的念头。

洛洛
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Post by 洛洛 » 2005-09-12 14:28

:lol: :lol: :lol:
混坛上另一颗新星
luoluo11.ycool.com

豪情
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Post by 豪情 » 2005-09-12 15:09

我不太明白美国K-12系统怎么教外语. 我们这里个别小学有特别的西班牙语项目, 其他没听说人人学外语. 中学里有所谓的国际学校, 7年中学, 英语之外每人必须学法语或德语,在我看来太晚语言选择也太有限了. 这些学校还不是想进就可以进, 要抽签. 不知道大城市里面是不是多些.
当然好的私立学校就不同了.

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