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
Levantine said,
October 13, 2024 @ 2:44 pm
Not the point of the post, I know, but “a Chinese” sounds very weird to me. I suspect it’s an older usage.
Tobias said,
October 13, 2024 @ 3:13 pm
> 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.
Mounting a webcam so that it views a notepad from above works quite well. A more advanced solution would be a lightboard which shows both teacher and writing and can be self-made or bought in varying degrees of fanciness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXJu6-4u7UY
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2024 @ 3:03 am
"A Chinese" didn't feel odd to me, Levantine, and "a Chinese from Vietnam" is far less prolix than (say) "ethnically Chinese but born and living in Vietnam", would you not agree ?
Victor Mair said,
October 14, 2024 @ 5:50 am
And Philip Taylor, whose wife is Chinese from Vietnam, knows whereof he speaks.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 14, 2024 @ 7:57 am
Confusion abounds when it comes to referring to people of other nations.
S1: "I saw an Italian at the Columbus Day Parade, but I didn't see a French".
S2: "A French… what?"
S1: "Sorry, 'a Frenchman'. But I didn't see the Chinaman you'd been telling me about…"
S2: "Hey! You can't say that!"
S1: "Beg pardon; I didn't see the Chinese person, even though I did see the Arabic person…"
S2: "'Arab'".
S1: "Hmm? Oh, 'Arab', right. I did see the Arab who told me about his trip to Israel with the Jews from the Lubavitch Center…"
S2: "YOU CAN'T SAY 'THE JEWS'; it's "Jewish people".
S1: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…"
Levantine said,
October 14, 2024 @ 10:39 am
“And Philip Taylor, whose wife is Chinese from Vietnam, knows whereof he speaks.”
This suggests I raised an issue with a right or wrong answer, which is not the case at all. I simply pointed out that your phrasing sounds very unidiomatic in my variety of English. The ethnicity of Philip Taylor’s wife is irrelevant to that.
“A Chinese woman” is what I would have written. No prolixity required. And to be clear, I’m not correcting anyone or claiming my phrasing is better.
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2024 @ 12:24 pm
If Anh Yeo were to have written about something to which her sex was potentially germane (e.g., childbirth) then "a Chinese woman" would, I would agree, have been the obvious form, but as she was writing about something as gender-neutral as teaching Mandarin to south-east Asians I personally find Victor's wording completely unexceptionable. YMMV.
Levantine said,
October 14, 2024 @ 12:56 pm
Perhaps we’re speaking at cross purposes, Philip Taylor. It’s nothing to do with the information being conveyed, but with the phrasing itself. I’m sure you have encountered locutions that, while perfectly standard for other speakers, sound unidiomatic to you. “A Chinese” (along with “a Japanese” and “a Portuguese”) is almost as strange to me as “a British” would be. Google tells me I’m not alone in feeling this way, though the usage seems to have been much more common in the past. Again, just an observation, not a criticism.
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2024 @ 2:36 pm
Well, for me, "a Chinese", "a Japanese" and "a Portuguese" are all equally unexceptionable, whilst "a French", "a Spanish" and "a Polish" are all unquestionably wrong
Julian said,
October 14, 2024 @ 4:50 pm
This is one of those logic-defying features of English that would make an English learner tear their hairs out, as Steven Pinker would say.
[Reference to an amusing paragraph in one of his books that I couldn't be bothered finding again now]
Philip Taylor said,
October 15, 2024 @ 2:43 am
I agree that there are some aspects that defy logic, but it seems to me (Levantine would, I think, disagree) that any nationality that ends in -ese can also be used to refer to a person of that nationality without any risk of causing offence.
Lane said,
October 15, 2024 @ 6:59 am
Is it me or is the uptake of Mandarin/Chinese learning, whether spoken or written, surprisingly slow in China's neighborhood despite China's huge and growing power? I've been puzzled by this (if true) for a while; for speakers of tonal languages spoken Mandarin should not be terribly hard; for countries that use/have used the characters (Japan, Korea, Vietnam) there's (a hugely varying amount of) residual knowledge to re-use.
But as far as I know people learn Chinese mostly only if their job direclty depends on it; it hasn't gained lingua-franca status, or even an emerging one, yet.
This is what I've heard from colleagues in SEA, anyway. Are they wrong? Is this changing?
David Marjanović said,
October 15, 2024 @ 9:18 am
In South Korea, people learn one foreign language in school; which one that is depends on current fashion. Sometimes, indeed, it is Mandarin.
But to the best of my knowledge that's all; Mandarin is not approaching lingua-franca status.
Apart from political misgivings, I do think the writing system is the biggest hurdle there.
Levantine said,
October 15, 2024 @ 9:54 am
Philip Taylor, please don't misrepresent my words. I have been very clear about the basis of my observations, which are to do entirely with matters of style and idiom. The question of offensiveness is one I never brought up; indeed, I introduced the example of "Portuguese" precisely to signal that I wasn't making some broader cultural or political point. You seem intent on spinning this into something it's not, and I'm not sure why.
Vampyricon said,
October 15, 2024 @ 1:58 pm
"A Chinese" definitely sounds like an older usage to me, like what I'd read in Sherlock Holmes rather than something someone my age would write. I think we're used to nationalities as adjectives rather than nouns: "Anh Yeo is a Chinese woman from Vietnam." "Anh Yeo is Chinese-Vietnamese." and such would be how I'd put it.
Jonathan Dushoff said,
October 15, 2024 @ 2:22 pm
It was a memorable day for me when I realized that I didn't have to write Chinese characters by hand anymore.
People say, and I have no reason to doubt, that most people can only learn how to read Chinese characters if they learn the basics by learning to write. It is indeed painful and involves a lot of memorization.
But at some point, it suddenly occurred to me that I had learned the basics I needed, and could from that point on learn new characters by just learning to recognize them instead of learning to write them.
Maybe that could be a selling point for students, if an experienced teacher could tell them: you need to learn to write about X-hundred characters, and it will take you Y or Z months, and then you won't have to do it anymore, and will be able to read signs and enter things on your phone without making many mistakes.
Derek Lin said,
October 16, 2024 @ 9:58 am
"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."
They are, to reflect how Chinese input (or written communication in any language, really) is predominantly conducted these days; but they're also expected to be able to read without pinyin and write characters by hand.
Rodger C said,
October 16, 2024 @ 11:47 am
As when a Vultur on Imaus bred,
[etc. etc. etc.]
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light:
So on this windie Sea of Land, the Fiend
Walk'd up and down alone bent on his prey,
[etc. etc. etc.]
Philip Taylor said,
October 17, 2024 @ 9:13 am
Levantine, sorry, there was no wish in my part to misrepresent your words. For the last four days my web participation has been restricted to a mobile telephone, which I find an extremely unsatisfactory I/O mechanism (especially the "I" part), so what I wrote may well not have been a fair representation of what I sought to say. But if we leave temporal aspects to one side, are there any members of the set of {nationalities that ends in -ese} that you would feel cannot (or should not, or are not — feel free to supply your own verb(s)) be properly used to refer to a person (sex irrelevant) of that nationality ?
Chas Belov said,
October 17, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti
But I would accept:
or
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 18, 2024 @ 8:29 am
Chas,
Ah, but what if there had been _2_ Aliyot organized that year — one by the Lubavitchers, and one by Hillel, and S1 wanted specifically to refer to the former class? Wouldn't you need the determinative there?
Now that I think about it, the sentence is a little artificial (well, it should be, I artificed it). One could just as well say, "[…] with a GROUP from the Lubavitch Center"; the word "Jews" not adding any extra information absent from "Lubavitch[ers]".
I'm sure it's been asked before, but why does "the Jews" "feel" taboo, even where a determinative might otherwise be called for? Maybe when the ratio of instances of "The Jews" used pejoratively versus innocuously reaches a certain quantum, a speaker begins to feel that use of the term itself might lead one to associate the speaker with a bigot. So, nobody bats an eye at "The Icelanders" because nobody's had designs on wiping Icelanders off the map for the past 1100 years or so.
Philip Taylor said,
October 18, 2024 @ 10:22 am
Benjamin — why does "the Jews" "feel" taboo ? — I'm not convinced that it does, at least not in all contexts. If I were to want to discuss the group who formed the majority of those who died during the Holocaust, I would have no hesitation whatsoever in referring to the members of that group as "the Jews". But if I were asked to identify the group that form the majority of the population of London's Golders Green, I would hedge my bets and say "well, the majority are Jewish" (rather than "are Jews").
Milan said,
October 20, 2024 @ 4:31 pm
@Benjamin Orsatti,
Norms of politeness are abitrary and convoluted. In which contexts exactly is the equivalent of "Lady", "Lord" and when is "gentlemen"? What about "My lady", "milady" and "m'lady", "Ma'm Ma'am and Madam", etc. Presumably that is part of the point. Besides signalling that you are "in the know", i.e have access to knowledge about these norms, by using the forms correctly, you signal that you have made the effort to internalise these norms. Thus, you signal that you really care about not (being seen as) causing offense to the target. Presumably all of these factors are also at play with new norms of politeness concerning talking about ethnic groups. A certain degree of ironic distance may be sensible. But wholesale dismissing these norms comes close to dismissing the demand for respect and dignity expressed in them
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 21, 2024 @ 7:52 am
Milan,
Who's dismissing norms of politeness — wholesale or retail? Not me; my point was only that these particular norms are _entirely_ culturally-dependent, and don't follow any discernable rules of "grammar" that I've been able to find. That's different from saying that they may safely be dispensed with.
…which is why this next bit of yours is dangerous:
Let's back up that syllogism a little here. What if you're _not_ "in the know" or otherwise do not have access to knowledge about these norms"? Or what if "using the forms correctly" is simply something you're not able to do? Are you still signaling that you have not "made the effort" and that you do not "really care about not (being seen as) causing offense to the target"?
That sort of thing sounds too uncomfortably like the "cool kids" jagging around the kid who didn't watch the TV show everyone else did that weekend because he didn't "get" some in-joke, and then nobody passes him the ball at recess that day.
Philip Taylor said,
October 21, 2024 @ 1:34 pm
That sort of thing sounds too uncomfortably like the "cool kids" jagging around the kid who didn't watch the TV show everyone else did that weekend because he didn't "get" some in-joke, and then nobody passes him the ball at recess that day — just short of 70 years ago, that was me : nine years old, no television at home, and no idea what most of the playground banter was about. But I survived.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 22, 2024 @ 7:28 am
Philip,
Ut in mundo vivendum, ne vivendum mundi.