[Oe List ...] For Nov. 11 from Jaime

[wangzhimu2031 at aol.com]

For November and December, I shall be posting to the listserv some reflections tailored for the Saipan Tribune, in case some folks have time to read.




In other words
 
An English teacher colleague relates the story of how shetried to teach students how to fill up an English application form, so she tookan entrance admission sheet from one of the institutions of higher learning inKansas, and administered it.
 
The form she used might have been an outdated one since acategory called "sex" is still in where its newer incarnations mightalready have replaced it with "gender".  In any case, what she gotback in return: six of ten boys wrote "yes", and four wrote"no"; of the girls, five out of ten wrote "secret", and theother five, evidently riled boldly asserted: "It's none of yourbusiness".
 
Were the form in Chinese, I am sure the genderidentification would have been unmistakable, but English in its written conceptualform always needs grounding.  It is notalways the case in Chinese because its written words are pictographs andideograms, an amalgamation of separate characters to form an abstracted meaning.
 
One of the words I put on early on the board in my class isthe word "listen", since I wish for the students to focus on trainingtheir ears to get familiar with sounds, a requisite skill in learning aphonetic language as contrasted to the Zhongwen which, when recognized as written,already carries nuances and meaning.  
 
Though I kept writing the word in bigger and bolder letters,I did not get the desired behavior.  Asstudents enter the classroom, I played either a recorded English song they arefamiliar with, or play a speech from a famous person (Hillary Clinton at the UNWomen's Conference in Beijing in '96, or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I havea dream", or, John F. Kennedy's explanation of "why we go to themoon", or, most recently, Barack Obama's Grant Park speech when he won the2008 presidential election) hoping they would get the hint and settle down.  The din of the place resembled the hagglingat a public market.
 
The phonetic word for "listen" is "ting", which does not do mypurpose any good just uttered or written in pinyinon the board, so I learned to write the Chinese character, monosyllabic insound and squared in its written form, but comprising a mixture of independent symbolsdenoting varied descriptions.  Thecharacter for "listen" is led with a picture of the "ear" witha qualifying symbol underneath for "grand or great", thus,"intense hearing"; added to two symbols, those of an "eye"and the other, "attention", it then means "paying visualattention while intensely hearing". The final symbol at the bottom right quadrant is the heart, so the fullmeaning of the character for "ting" to this English teacher is"hearing intensely while visually paying attention with an openheart".  When I wrote the characteron the board, I received the silence I asked for!
 
Shifting from one language to another is not just a matterof translating words from one spoken word to another, particularly from a formthat moves from describing sense experiences to expressing the intensity ofemotions before articulating a concept, to an ideogrammatic construct that hasall of the above in one character and syllable. 
 
Chinese students in U.S. universities are known to do wellin accurately repeating a teacher's vocabulary during written tests.   As long as they can see a figure written,the memory does not fail the countless drills in vocabulary.  Having to recognize at least 4,000 charactersin order to make it to the University, students have brains trained torecognize abstracted pictures and images. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that their attempt at English comeshighly abstracted. 
 
To the question, "what did you eat for lunch?" thereply is most likely to be: "I had delicious food!"  Written in Chinese, that is no problem sincethe characters are most likely, similar to "listen-ting", to be more than just the spoken syllable.  Clarity in English requires grounding, so weask further: "Did you have vegetable, meat, or a dumpling dish?""Was it boiled or fried?" "Was it served warm or cold?" Atwhich point, an exasperated Chinese might give you a look that says, "Ialready told you, I had a delicious meal?" And that would be the end of the conversation!
 
Commercialized Chinese language learning promises fast foodservice satisfaction.  One gets a box ofCDs and a debit of $399 off one's account. When we trained Peace Corps Volunteers in the 80s, we immersed learnerson their target language 8-hours 5-days a week for a whole month with a tutor,and another 2 weeks on site with instructions to actually use what theylearned.  Volunteers confessed that aftertheir tour is over in two years, they actually began to get comfortable in thelanguage they learned.   Both English andtheir new language were phonetic based. Think what a challenge it is if the language is character-based?
 
Zhongwen is simplifying its characters and unifyingphonetics with Putunghua.  They are learning to listen.  English speaking countries are embarrassed bythe state of its literacy (recognizing and pronouncing written words), so it isencouraging reading with writing to start at the basic sense rather thanconceptual level. They are learning to read.
 
We are hopeful at the confluence of words seen and wordsspoken.
 
 


Jaime Vergara
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!

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