Tag: chinese

塞翁失馬 The Lost Horse

I’ve just finished reading the really well written “The Many Meanings of Meilan” by Andrea Wang. Having spent 16 of the last 20 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and China it was a reminder of so much of my time there and the discoveries of the language, literature, poetry and idiom.

There’s a lot happening in this book, but what I enjoyed most is the idea of naming and meaning and the ambiguity of sound and meaning in the homonyms of the Chinese language. I loved how she wrapped herself in the different meanings of “Lan” depending on the character, so as to adjust herself to the interpretations of herself of others around her, while discovering who she really was and claiming herself.

It also reminded me of the first time I came across the 塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma) chengyu – enjoy.

From November 2009

Today a story. Here is the famous story which is commonly interpreted as saying that “every cloud has a silver lining” This is the version from YellowBridge. Certainly in my own life in the long run this parable has proven to be true. But as impulsive as I am emotionally I don’t always recognise it at the time!

“A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?” Their household was richer by a fine horse, which the son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”

A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.

塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma), the title of this story, is actually a commonly used Chinese idiom or chengyu . It literally translates as “Old Sai loses a horse”. Old Sai is the wise man in the fable. The expression is used to remind others to take life in stride because things aren’t really as good (or bad) as they seem. Certainly seems like a wise advice for a society that lives only for the present.”

Ed Young has written this into a children’s book.  We’ve got some compilations of Chinese stories, but kids somehow like having one story per book and to have that story lavishly illustrated.

Pretending to learn

One of the hidden advantages of learning Chinese is that I often catch myself pretending to learn and it gives me an acute insight and experience into the nature of real vs. faux learning. I’m doing a lot of “busy” work today on trying to get my document together for my ISTE certification (faux learning) so this will be brief.

Real learning literally makes your brain hurt. Sometimes I feel like my brain is creaking when I’m concentrating hard. It’s hard to keep up for very long and you tend to need physical breaks. Some of the things that I’d include in real learning is when you’re not just trying to remember characters but when you’re using them to make sentences – and incorporating previously learnt characters and sentence structure. That’s hard work. Memorising and reproducing a list of characters is easy. It’s also easy to use apps to go through lists of words and pick the right word / sound / character combination from 4 or 6 options. That’s my “pretend I’m learning Chinese in the taxi on the way to work” learning. Funnily enough if I do the same at home at my desk with a pen and paper, and look up the etymology of the words as I go along and write the sentence examples from my dictionary it’s coming closer to real learning. Similar actions but a twist that enhances.

Something similar happens when you’re practising music. Playing a piece through is great fun. But just focusing on one part that’s tricky and repeating that until it’s fluid, and even perhaps breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits – that’s real learning. Anton Nel in his DSS talk at WAB hinted at this. Others have also talked about it in the “10,000 hour debate” that morphs into the “deliberate practice” discussion.

Real learning takes place when you do the things that you like to avoid by doing other things – like fill in the blank sentences and worksheet versus reading an authentic text. I really do understand why so many students avoid reading a book. Because it’s hard work. Really really hard work. Especially in another language. You’re recognising characters, thinking about the meaning, flipping sentence around in mental gymnastics so it makes sense in your mother tongue grammatical structures. Looking words up. Looking pronunciation/pinyin up.

I’m reading “The List” with my group of early morning read-aloud students. It describes a dystopian world where one has only 500 words to use. When we started the book I joked with my crew that that was my Chinese language reality. I also recently finished “All Rights Reserved” where each spoken word and gesture is billed to you. Imagine how reality and potential is limited in these scenarios. Now have a look at this site – this is mind blowing and what a fabulous way of joining research, art, reality and literature by Dr Pip Thornton. Her piece NEWSPEAK shows the whole text of Orwell’s 1984 as a stock market ticker-tape, with the word prices fluctuating according to live data from Google Ads.

NEWSPEAK 2019 from Pip on Vimeo.

I’ve recently subscribed to “The Syllabus” of Evgeny Morozov – the best description of how this came about is in a Dutch podcast (with the worst cover art I’ve ever see outside a primary classroom). It is the epitome of going against the easy consumption of media and information through human and algorithmic curation of a weekly reading list within various fields. Which is how I stumbled on the whole art around the above discussion.

Keep those brains creaking everyone!

 

A little on learning Chinese

One of the fun things about the FOEN19 (Future of Education Now) was meeting up with two librarians who I greatly admire and in-between sessions geeking out with them. One of the great things (and possibly why I like them so much) is that they’re both keen students of Chinese, the three of us are all at various points of our Chinese journey.

There is of course the big “WHY” of learning a language – and besides a million other reasons it’s an excellent humbling experience that results in a lot of empathy for our EAL students.

The post below is almost literally taken from an email I’ve just composed on a few of the tools I’ve found useful in my journey.

1. Hacking chinese blog is definitely the best there is – they’ve got tons and tons in their archives and regularly do fun challenges. I’ve learnt so much from them about learning to learn etc.
2. Outlier Chinese – they’re newer on the scene. I did their Chinese Character Masterclass, It’s a tough one, I think it’s better to have a year or so of characters under your belt before you do it – or at least a couple of 100 characters, I think they say you should start with it. I found it hard to keep up with the course and then I’d binge on it and then lose momentum. In the end over the summer I put another thrust into finishing it. It’s good content but not very well presented and as a teacher (and design conscious person) I’d lay out things a lot differently.
Their supplement to the Pleco dictionary is definitely worth the extra $$ as it helps with the etymology and breaking down of components of complex characters.
3. Chinese Character books / Grammar books etc.
There are a variety of these, some I like more than others. Many have been supplanted by apps but they’re still good to use. As you can see from the photos, some are old and some are out of print, but if you’re working at a school are almost certainly still floating around the Chinese Department or text book store. I’m sure there are other new books, most of these are still around from when I first started learning 10 years ago. Happy to hear of better alternatives.
  • Easy way to learn Chinese Characters – possibly my favourite, but you’ll have to get it second hand as I don’t think it’s in print anymore.  It’s a workbook that builds things up very logically and possibly has been supplanted by other books since I used it – happy to hear about alternatives
  • Graded Chinese Reader – I’m on the 500 words one, I’m finding that that best way to read via the abridged short stories. I’ve tried other stuff including picture books, kids books, text books, but there’s nothing like authentic texts. There’s plenty of room for growth with 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 and 3000 words.
  • Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters an nice visual way of learning uses various memory techniques to remember the tone and the structure of the character – of course the outlier folks would argue you shouldn’t be relying on this type of memorisation and that etymology is a better way. Worth looking at in conjunction with Outlier, to see what best suits your style.
  • Chinese Characters – starts easy and gets very complicated. Similar build up to “Easy way to learn Chinese Characters”
  • Rapid Literacy – this one literally does what it says. Great for a kick start to reading. There’s a CD you can listen to, plus the work book and it has you reading the most common characters in context in I think 10 lessons. It’s also great for listening practice.
  • On Learning Chinese is a more academic tome. It’s for people like me who really wanted to understand Chinese from a top down 10,000 feet perspective as well as from the daily character grind.
  • Teaching and Learning Chinese as a foreign language  again for the nerds or the former language teachers. It’s really a worth while book because it gives you all the grammar you need plus all the stuff you need to know about interference of L1 (English in my case).
  • iMandarin is possibly my favourite Chinese language institute and this 900 Sentence book is an absolute gem. Just what it claims to be – the 900 most common sentences you need as a beginner. With a CD to keep listening and repeating. I think you need to be a student there to get the book.
  • Just for the LULZ – Chinese character fast finder – if you like dictionaries and browsing through books of words this is great. It’s a throwback to the days when you didn’t have electronic dictionaries and had to find words by counting strokes and knowing radicals; and Peng’s Chinese Radicals – available widely in Singapore – nice when you want to flip through and learn some stuff without trying too hard.
I spent 2 years full time study of chinese (2009-2010) and never got the tones. Then I found this recently and went through the drills and by the end I absolutely got it. Suddenly I could hear all the different tones…
Absolutely worth a couple of weeks work (it’s short and intensive but you need time between the paired drills)
Your school probably has a subscription to this via the Chinese Department – if not it’s pretty cheap and great for creating writing worksheets with stroke order, creating (manual) flashcards etc.
6. Apps
A lot of the books mentioned in (3) above have been supplanted by apps. But I still prefer books and writing by hand. But these are great for stolen moments in taxi’s or while waiting and because they’re smart and can do the spaced repetition thing for you.
  • Pleco – dictionary with lots of add ons – the flashcards and outlier dictionary are well worth it. The getting words into lists and importing and sharing lists can be a real pain, I have to go back to the instructions every time I change text books but once they’re set up you’re good to go for a while.
  • Memrise – good for spaced repetition. The Chinese 1 course is particularly good for colloquial Chinese but then it gets more grindy and by Chinese 3 it becomes long and boring (too many words before you go up a level). The first 500 character one also takes a LONG time. I wish creators of these apps would allow for smaller chunks and more levels – even adults like feeling like they’re accomplishing something. Some language institutes have made their own courses within Memrise – this can be a good and bad thing depending on the recordings and care they take (some are riddled with errors and loud / soft / irritating recordings).
  • Skritter – in two minds about this one. Works best on an iPad, it can be very picky about your writing and I actually prefer pen and paper so I’ve stopped using it as much as I used to. It’s also relatively expensive, and you sometimes need to do your lists on a laptop and then import them, but using a track pad on a laptop is clunky, so then and iPad is better, so I’m not getting what I need out of this app.

There are a gajillion apps out there and I’ve tried a lot of them but those are the three left on my phone now.

7. Podcasts
I’m a bit back and forwards on this one. I used to listen to some and then I got a bit tired of them, and stopped listening because I could only really get benefit if I was sitting and taking note, and not if it was just background stuff going on. Again I’d love some good recommendations. The only one that I found consistently good was Melnyks Chinese. It’s free to listen but you pay for the lesson pdfs.

8. Videos
When I was lazy and wanted to pretend that I was learning but was actually just passive, I used to watch a fun set of YouTube videos in a sitcom like setting called “Happy Chinese”

9. Role models
There are some people who are doing fantastic things. Jeremy Howard is an example of someone I’m in total awe of. Well worth reading about his approach.

Jeremy Howard – Language Acquisition Performance from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.

 

 

 

 

Educational advice – from Facebook?

I subscribe to way too many Facebook groups. I need to stop it actually, they’ve become like women’s magazines. But worse. You keep seeing the same things come up over and over again, but instead of ignoring them you can actually have a say, which is giving yourself the delusion of helpfulness, but actually the smartest person in the room of Facebook groups is not the room itself, to misquote David Weinberger.

Some of the smartest people I know don’t do Facebook and when they do, they’re lurkers not participators. So I guess that’s making me stupid. I just can’t help myself because the fact that someone may actually genuinely want an accurate answer AND follow up is illusionary enough to put up with the ignorance of echo-chambers and the chance that you may learn something.

No where is worse than education groups, and within those groups nothing is worse than questions and answers about bilingualism and language. Except perhaps dinner parties between parents of children of roughly the same age that are excruciating examples of passive aggressive one-upmanship.  Right now the sum of my parenting advice can be summed up as:

  • It’s hard to kill a baby (i.e. CTFD)
  • Regularity, sleep and reading (and don’t be too poor)
  • Avoid dinner parties with other parents unless their children are at least 10 years older than yours
  • Pick two languages and give them all you’ve got

It’s the last point I’d like to write about today. On one of the groups the following was posted:

2yr old (born NOV 2015) who is trilingual (if you can even say this about a 2yr old). German mum, French dad, English spoken with nanny and language between parents. I’m looking for kindergarten options from around next summer … have no idea where to start.
No preference towards public/private or towards any language even though I’m wondering if adding mandarin might be a bit confusing given that there are already the other 3. What do you think? Focus is more on play/social activities rather than academics

This is a pretty typical question and the answers were also pretty typical – a combination of shouting out school names that have either French or German, alternating with saying that children can easily learn any amount of languages (the number 12 was even suggested), compared with humblebrags about how “fluent” their 5 year old was in any number of languages.

I must admit to entering the fray and suggesting that they chose the language of the school based on their future plans if known – i.e. go back to a French / German speaking environment or continue in the international sphere, and based on who would be at home to support the homework and reading. And to choose 2 languages and do them properly.  There are language experts who can help people on this. There are books and research papers written on this.  And don’t ask parents of young children – they know not what they say. Don’t even talk to educators in primary schools.  speak to parents with teenagers, preferably at the point where they have to choose their IB language. Talk to teenagers, and talk to teachers of IB languages.

Being bilingual is NOT just speaking a language. It is reading and writing. Being literate. And that takes formal lesson time, time spent reading and writing AT grade level. There are so many barriers to that. I’m now talking general international schools, of course there are exceptions / bilingual schools. If you’re lucky you’ll get 40 minutes a day in the language at school.  Probably in that language as a SECOND language, i.e. language learning may just be a combination of groundhog day (learning the same things year after year) and/or teaching to the lowest common denominator.  So you’re going to have to supplement at home. Either by classes in the afternoon / weekends, online or with a tutor. Besides having to read to and with your child in that language. And dedicate at least part of your holidays to immersion in that language environment.  As one expert who recently visited our school said “language is not buy one, get one free”. My personal statement is always “you don’t learn a language by breathing the same air as others who speak it”. Bottom line is it takes planning, time and money.

As I write (Saturday afternoon) my husband is in my son’s room reading in Dutch with him. He’s 14. He has in-school after hours Dutch classes for 3 hours a week plus out-of-school additional tutoring for about 2 hours a week / fortnight depending on his needs. According to his Dutch teacher there are many students who cannot enter the program as the level of their “literate” Dutch is too low.  And many of the students in the program are doing Dutch at a much lower level than their chronological age.  We took action when he was 9 and started intensive work on his Dutch after he was failing at Chinese. It’s been expensive and time-consuming but he’s on track for a bilingual diploma plus he can communicate with his Dutch family and if necessary could student there in Dutch at university level.

My daughter thrived in the bilingual English-Chinese environment in Hong Kong, hated the only alternative of Chinese second language at her primary school, Had me nagging her to continue reading and writing chinese in her spare time with a tutor until middle school, got into the native stream for middle school / iGCSE where she’s the only caucasian / non-Chinese-heritage child left in a class of about 8 students only.  This is only because she’s an exceptionally diligent child and kept up her reading and writing. She bemoans the low expectations and standards at school. Most of the students in her class are only doing Chinese on the insistence of their parents. She may do first language IB and has been recommended for it, but has lost motivation.

All of my French friends who have had children come up the system internationally have, to their regret, children doing French second language.

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, I’ve read, thought and written reams about it. 

 

 

MLA8 and Chinese …

A fellow librarian in Shanghai and I have been working on creating some new MLA8 posters in Chinese for her bilingual school / library.  It’s been an interesting process to put it mildly.

We started off with the MLA posters I created with Katie Day about 2 years ago, and which she updated recently to reflect the MLA8 changes. Now translation is as much an art as a science, and, with the help of a Chinese library assistant we made some rather silly mistakes along the way which in retrospect are obvious. Each round was accompanied by the refrain of my Chinese speaking daughter of “but they just don’t have that /do that in Chinese”

Round 1 – we just translated the English posters into Chinese – well duh, why on earth would you take an English book / video etc. and cite it in Chinese?

Round 2 – finding suitable Chinese originated materials in each basic format and creating citations for them. It may sound easy, but it’s actually harder than you’d think. I worked on the newspaper one with my daughter, and it took a whole evening! Then there was a great NatGeo chinese video, but it was way too complicated as it was a documentary with a director quoting from an interviewee – yes a nice challenge for advanced citations but not suitable for a beginner “basic” poster to get the main ideas across.

Round 3 – punctuation. I’m not entirely sure we’ve nailed this one completely. We ended up making an executive decision on making the in-text punctuation follow the Chinese punctuation – particularly for the full-stop / period “。” and the English punctuation in the “works cited” section. What we didn’t do, and my daughter insists we should have done, is to put the titles of the book in the chinese brackets instead of the inverted commas, i.e. 《。。。  》instead of “…”

Round 4 – italics. MLA8 asks for italics, and initially I spent a lot of time trying to italicise in IOS10, which an afternoon of searching will tell you is not possible.  Along the way I found out some truly fascinating things about Chinese fonts and typography, which you’re welcome to read up on – it really is very interesting. I learnt a new word – glyphs, and the fact that you need around 20,000 of them for a Chinese font! (I also coincidently found out how to add phonetic marks above characters in Pages – never know when you’ll need that!)

Two things cinched it, a comment on a CJK font forum (Chinese, Japanese Korean) ”

“I’m not solving your problem, but to remind you that this kind of “programmatic italic font” has really bad readability.
For CJK text, the right way to express emphasize (or quote) is to use another font (usually serif font). Especially for Simplified Chinese, use Songti, Fangsong, or Kaiti instead of italic font if your text font is Heiti (iOS default). I know it’s a little bit complicated, but this is really how we do italic.”

and secondly from the MLA itself (which is where I really should have started, but sometimes you go off on a tangent without really thinking properly).

Q: Do I italicize Cyrillic book titles in the list of works cited?

In the past, titles and terms in the Cyrillic alphabet were not italicized, partly because it is based on the Greek alphabet, which traditionally is not italicized (on this point, see Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., sec. 11.131). Letterspacing instead of italics was traditionally used to emphasize a word or phrase.

Today, Cyrillic cursive (the term italics is usually not used in this context) for titles and for emphasis seems to be used often in publications, including scholarly publications, perhaps because of progress in digital typesetting or because of a global trend toward standardization.

Note that there are many languages in the world that do not have an italic font—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Armenian, for example. Arabic sometimes uses a typeface that slants to the left instead of to the right.

Given the complexity and specificity of historical, cultural, linguistic, and printing practices throughout the world, a writer should not use italics when a book title is in a foreign language that is not written in the Latin alphabet. If a work is being prepared for publication, let the author pass that buck to the publisher.

Round 5 – checking and checking actually we just finished this now – with adding the last missing closing bracket – and voila, the posters may see the light of day.

mla8-referencing-image-ib-version-chinese mla8-referencing-image-chinese mla8-referencing-article-journal-chinese mla8-referencing-video-chinese mla8-referencing-newspaper-chinese mla8-referencing-book-chinese mla8-referencing-website-chinese

And now, I nervously exhibit them for comment and criticism and correction by my peers! All posters are creative commons with attribution please. My next post will be what I refer to as “MLA8 Lite” – the posters I’ve made for my G6 PYP exhibition students. Just the works cited, without the in-text citation, with explanations in the form of the MLA8 Elements.

 

Assessment Item 6: Digital Storytelling Topic Proposal

“Knowledge, then, is experiences and stories, and intelligence is the apt use of experience, and the creation and telling of stories. Memory is memory for stories, and the major processes of memory are the creation, storage, and retrieval of stories.”(Schank & Abelson, 1995, p. 8)

red dragon

Red Dragon Wallpaper Download. (2011)

Proposal Topic:

“追龍 – Chasing the Dragon*
a family’s story of language and identity”

From 2006 to 2011 our family was engaged in learning Chinese in one form or another including language classes, attending a bilingual immersion school and following a university degree – with nearly devastating consequences for one child. This digital story weaves together extracts from blog entries written at the time, digital photos and videos, images of school books and writing and interviews as each child and the family grappled and came to terms with who they were and how language shaped that identity.

Proposed digital tools and/or spaces to be used:

iMovie, Blogger, twitter, facebook, digital photos and videos, memorabilia

Rationale for topic focus

In Asia, particularly Hong Kong, where parenting is a competitive sport, giving your children the opportunity to learn Chinese has become the holy grail of expatriate parenting. Children are enrolled in language programs and immersion schools without much understanding or consideration of the possible consequences.

Research is scant and evidence, mainly anecdotal, focuses on the positive success stories.  A climate of shame, and fear of it reflecting badly on the parent, prevents openness when children do not succeed.

Our family’s story of “chasing the dragon” is one of success, failure and ultimate triumph. In this project, I hope to use storytelling as a way of making sense of events and experiences and communicating this (Botturi, Bramani, & Corbino, 2012) to others in a similar situation.

The affordance of digital storytelling is to incorporate multi semiotic systems that ‘allow for the linking and integration of cognitive, tacit, affective, cultural, personal, graphic and photographic ways of exploring, articulating, expressing and representing sense-making about learning and identity’ (Williams, 2009, cited in Walker, Jameson, & Ryan, 2010, p. 219). It is a warning story and also a story of hope.

Finally, I am considering putting in a proposal to present at a conference on language next year. I would like to use this story as the basis of adding context to academic theory on mother-tongue, language learning and identity so that educators and parents alike not only have an intellectual understanding of the theories but an emotional response through this story to the platitude that “every child is unique”.

 

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* “chasing the dragon” is a Hong Kong slang term referring to inhaling opium vapour – the metaphorical meaning includes the elusive pursuit of an ultimate high.  For the purposes of this story it’s the elusive pursuit of mastering the Chinese language.

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References:

Botturi, L., Bramani, C., & Corbino, S. (2012). Finding Your Voice Through Digital Storytelling. TechTrends, 56(3), 10–11. doi:10.1007/s11528-012-0569-1

Red Dragon Wallpaper Download. (2011). Retrieved September 14, 2014, from http://www.wallpaperhere.com/Red_Dragon_81049/download_1920x1440

Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1995). Knowledge and Memory:  The Real Story. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story (Vol. VIII, pp. 1–85). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/636/1/KnowledgeMemory_SchankAbelson_d.html

Walker, S., Jameson, J., & Ryan, M. (2010). Skills and strategies for e-learning in a participatory culture (Ch. 15). In R. Sharpe, H. Beetham, & S. Freitas (Eds.), Rethinking learning for a digital age: How learners are shaping their own experiences (pp. 212–224). New York, NY: Routledge.