Southeast Asians learning Mandarin
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Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam. Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University. To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online. In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:
I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!
What Anh said struck my fancy, and I wanted to learn more about her teaching experience, so I asked her these questions:
- Are your students supposed to learn characters?
- Do they try to learn characters? Just slow and difficult for them to do so?
- Is their oral proficiency in Mandarin pretty good?
- Do they do any reading and writing in Pinyin?
- What is their ultimate goal in learning Mandarin? To use it in their office work?
Anh replied:
1/ The students are supposed to learn characters. The textbook I use to teach them is from the Princeton Language Program (which I also learned from 10 years ago), so the curriculum does stress learning characters (for all skillsets — reading, writing, listening, speaking). I do teach them characters, but given that the classes are online, it is hard to handwrite the characters for them to see, so I mostly type the characters using Pinyin. I feel like the biggest bottleneck is the way I input the characters so the students can see what they look like. Because all my classes are online, I cannot handwrite, so the students cannot remember the order of the strokes and prefer using pinyin to input characters for homework.
2/ My beginner students are mostly office workers (21 yo – 40 yo): busy and hardly have the time to handwrite the characters after class to practice/memorise. All of them asked for "quick tips" but most of them cannot commit the time and effort. Progress is very slow since it takes ~30 minutes every lesson for students to get familiar with the characters from the previous lesson again. Because the textbook has pinyin, they would read the pinyin instead of characters, so after 3 months, most of them are familiar with the "sound" but not the character.
3/ Their oral proficiency in Mandarin is very good. Because they are familiar with the concept of tones in their mother tongue, they can differentiate tones very well (and the pinyin alphabet is also very similar with the Vietnamese alphabet, most students only need 2-3 lessons to be able to pronounce Pinyin and tones).
4/ I feel like they do all of their reading and writing in Pinyin. Because the slides used in class have pinyin, they will mostly read the pinyin instead of the characters. I have tried to not include pinyin, but got complaints that without pinyin, group classes waste too much time in reading because students cannot recognise characters just yet. The slides I teach from have pinyin above all the characters (rearranged by WordPress to be in parentheses following each character), thus:
A：我(wǒ)今天(jīntiān)没有(méiyǒu)课(kè)，不(bù)忙(máng)。你(nǐ)现在(xiànzài)有(yǒu)空(kōng)吗(ma)？我(wǒ)请(qǐng)你(nǐ)喝(hē)咖啡(kāfēi)。
B：我(wǒ)不(bù)喝(hē)咖啡(kāfēi)，只(zhī)喝(hē)茶(chá)。
A：我(wǒ)有(yǒu)中国(zhōngguó)绿(lǜ)茶(chá)，也(yě)有(yǒu)英国(yīngguó)红(hóng)茶(chá)，你(nǐ)喝(hē)什么(shénme)茶(chá)？
B：红(hóng)茶(chá)、绿(lǜ)茶(chá)，我(wǒ)都(dōu)喝(hē)。
English translation added by VHM:
I don't have any classes today. I'm not busy. Are you free now? I'll invite you to coffee.
I don't drink coffee, I only drink tea.
I have Chinese green tea, and I also have English black tea. Which would you like?
Green tea, black tea; I'll drink either.
Students cannot recognise any characters in this lesson when asked about them the next week. For homework, the students write characters on a word doc and send it to me so I feel like they would input using pinyin.
5/ Students are mostly young office workers so their goals are for job prospects and travel in China. In recent years, a lot of Chinese companies have entered Southeast Asia (e.g., Tiktok and Temu) and the management are mostly Chinese instead of locals. So office workers are motivated to learn Chinese. But because of the time constraint, they prioritise speaking and listening as it sees a quicker return (probably because they do not have to spend much effort in learning pinyin). Since grades do not matter, I cannot require much from them, and it mostly depends on how much effort (and time) they're willing to expend.
Next year I am planning to try teaching Chinese in offline centers (after I have graduated from Tsinghua) to see if it is a better alternative. But besides the "online restrictions", I feel like the student segment is also a big factor because office workers have too much on their plate (Also looking forward to approaching other student segments to test this hypothesis).
As I have repeatedly pointed out, students in Singapore (even those who are ethnic Chinese) are permitted to "write" their characters with computers and other digital devices. There's a world of difference between writing hanzi by hand and using electronic tools. The former is much, much harder — excruciatingly more difficult — than the latter.
If someone told you that you could become fully fluent in Mandarin without having to endure the agony of memorizing a single sinograph, much less to expend the months and years of toil required to master the Chinese writing system, would you do it?
P.S.: For typical human beings, there's no "quick tip" for learning to write Chinese characters. It's brute memorization the whole way. You have to spend time, lots and lots of it.
Selected readings
- "'They're not learning how to write characters!'" (11/5/21) — with a long bibliography learning how to read and write hanzi
- "Fluent bilingualism in Singapore" (5/28/19)
- "Characterless Sinitic" (9/1/21) — directly pertinent to this post; with a lengthy, helpful bibliography