Concerning the Chinese language

Something that has come up as a topic of discussion among us foreign students here in Taiwan recently is how Chinese is taught in foreign countries, and the fact that skill levels vary so widely even among people who have studied for similar amounts of time.

The thing to realize about Chinese, at least for those of us who use Western writing systems, is that learning Chinese isn't just about learning new vocabulary and maybe some new grammar structures. It requires you to more or less completely re-think how you conceptualize language as a whole. You have to re-learn how to make the simplest sounds before you can even think about learning words, and once you start writing, it's no longer spelling issues, but stroke order and radicals that are most important. A lot of us have been sharing experiences of previous abroad trips to study Chinese, and how, upon returning to the States, we found it hard to write or speak as fluently in English. I think a lot of people who haven't studied a language with a completely different script and/or a tonal system might not believe this, but the fact of the matter is, even after only 4 months in mainland China, when I went back to Los Angeles and started writing my senior thesis, I found writing complex sentences to be quite hard at first because everything had been so focused on Chinese.

I think a lot of us have come to the conclusion that the "right" way to teach Chinese hasn't really been found yet, though I would venture to say that whoever taught Michael, the German guy in my class at the language center, was probably on the right track. A lot of the students in the beginning classes at the center are getting frustrated, and I can totally understand their frustration, because their teachers are kind of starting them all over the place--characters, tones, pronunciation, etc. And at the same time, I can understand the teachers' dilemma as well, because well, where do you start? If you start with characters, no one knows how to read them. If you start with tones, you have no words to match the tones to.

I think it'll be interesting to see over the next few years whether a lot of people actually achieve fluency in Chinese to the point that they can do business/work in China and so on. There are some who will, for sure, but there are so many people studying Chinese right now, and if I was going to place any money, I would say that, proportionally, there will be less of us who achieve proficiency/fluency in Chinese than would do so in a language like French or Spanish. And it's not because we're not busting our butts trying to learn, it's just that Chinese is so different, at least for English/Spanish/French/German/etc. speakers, and the teaching method is still developing, that I think it'll be some time before Chinese language programs are cranking out fluent speakers like programs in more common languages.