<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><font size="2">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.</font><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"><b>In other words</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">An English teacher colleague relates the story of how she
tried to teach students how to fill up an English application form, so she took
an entrance admission sheet from one of the institutions of higher learning in
Kansas, and administered it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The form she used might have been an outdated one since a
category called "sex" is still in where its newer incarnations might
already have replaced <font size="2">it </font>with "gender". In any case, what she got
back in return: six of ten boys wrote "yes"<font size="2">,</font> and four wrote
"no"; of the girls, five out of ten wrote "secret", and the
other five, evidently riled boldly asserted: "It's none of your
business".</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Were the form in Chinese, I am sure the gender
identification would have been unmistakable, but English in its written conceptual
form always needs grounding. It is not
always the case in Chinese because its written words are pictographs and
ideograms, an amalgamation of separate characters to form an abstracted meaning.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">One of the words I put on early on the board in my class is
the word "listen", since I wish for the students to focus on training
their ears to get familiar with sounds, a requisite skill in learning a
phonetic language as contrasted to the Zhongwen which, when recognized as written,
already carries nuances and meaning. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Though I kept writing the word in bigger and bolder letters,
I did not get the desired behavior. As
students enter the classroom, I played either a recorded English song they are
familiar with, or play a speech from a famous person (Hillary Clinton at the UN
Women's Conference in Beijing in '96, or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have
a dream", or, John F. Kennedy's explanation of "why we go to the
moon", or, most recently, Barack Obama's Grant Park speech when he won the
2008 presidential election) hoping they would get the hint and settle down. The din of the place resembled the haggling
at a public market.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">The phonetic word for "listen" is <i>"ting",</i> which does not do my
purpose any good just uttered or written in <i>pinyin
</i>on the board, so I learned to write the Chinese character, monosyllabic in
sound and squared in its written form, but comprising a mixture of independent symbols
denoting varied descriptions. The
character for "listen" is led with a picture of the "ear" with
a 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 visual
attention while intensely hearing".
The final symbol at the bottom right quadrant is the heart, so the full
meaning of the character for "ting" to this English teacher is
"hearing intensely while visually paying attention with an open
heart". When I wrote the character
on the board, I received the silence I asked for!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Shifting from one language to another is not just a matter
of translating words from one spoken word to another, particularly from a form
that moves from describing sense experiences to expressing the intensity of
emotions before articulating a concept, to an ideogrammatic construct that has
all of the above in one character and syllable.
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Chinese students in U.S. universities are known to do well
in 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 characters
in order to make it to the University, students have brains trained to
recognize abstracted pictures and images.
Thus, it does not come as a surprise that their attempt at English comes
highly abstracted. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">To the question, "what did you eat for lunch?" the
reply is most likely to be: "I had delicious food!" Written in Chinese, that is no problem since
the characters are most likely, similar to "listen-<i>ting</i>", to be more than just the spoken syllable. Clarity in English requires grounding, so we
ask further: "Did you have vegetable, meat, or a dumpling dish?"
"Was it boiled or fried?" "Was it served warm or cold?" At
which point, an exasperated Chinese might give you a look that says, "I
already told you, I had a delicious meal?"
And that would be the end of the conversation!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">Commercialized Chinese language learning promises fast food
service satisfaction. One gets a box of
CDs and a debit of $399 off one's account.
When we trained Peace Corps Volunteers in the 80s, we immersed learners
on 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 they
learned. Volunteers confessed that after
their tour is over in two years, they actually began to get comfortable in the
language they learned. Both English and
their new language were phonetic based.
Think what a challenge it is if the language is character-based?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Zhongwen is simplifying its characters and unifying
phonetics with <i>Putunghua. </i>They are learning to listen. English speaking countries are embarrassed by
the state of its literacy (recognizing and pronouncing written words), so it is
encouraging reading with writing to start at the basic sense rather than
conceptual level. </span><font size="2">They are learning to read.</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 13px;">We are hopeful at the confluence of words seen and words
spoken.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 13px; clear: both;">Jaime Vergara<br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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