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.

 

The form she used might have been an outdated one since a category called "sex" is still in where its newer incarnations might already have replaced it with "gender".  In any case, what she got back in return: six of ten boys wrote "yes", 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".

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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.

 

The phonetic word for "listen" is "ting", which does not do my purpose any good just uttered or written in pinyin 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!

 

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. 

 

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.

 

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-ting", 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!

 

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?

 

 

We are hopeful at the confluence of words seen and words spoken.