Studying Chinese
Abbotsford, British Columbia - Friday, January 7, 2011 by: Mario deSantis

My wife Sharon and I moved to Abbotsford, British Columbia, in the summer of 2008 from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We were retiring and felt it was time to move to a warmer and diverse geographical province.

As we settled in Abbotsford we needed to find some ways to feel intelligently occupied. I came across a community educational brochure advertising a beginning course in the Chinese language and we decided to take it. This decision was also qualified by the fact that our son James was living in Beijing, China, and it was our intention to visit that country later in 2009, and in addition I could exercise my perceived failing memory. We felt that as a community non credit course, our beginning Chinese course would not take excessive work. However, when I first mentioned our enrolment in the class to James, he jokingly remarked ‘but dad you are tone deaf.’ I had no specific clue as to what he was saying but as I attended the first lecture, I found out what he meant: the Chinese language is a tone language and as my son said, I am tone deaf, but I am improving.  I also found out that our course was an introductory Chinese university class, and that our student status was to attend classes, do homework, but not write exams.

Our first lecture, along with all the subsequent ones, was a surprising discovery. Chinese is a different language and in order to learn it we have to learn the Chinese characters along with the corresponding phonetic Romanized syllables (Pin Yin). The Chinese words are very different from English words, their sounds are different, and the writing is different. It took weeks before I could properly pronounce the word ‘I ‘ in Chinese, that is the Chinese character “我” (phonetic Pin Yin ‘wǒ’)  and only last semester when taking an intermediate Chinese course, was I able to memorize a brief story that I had composed and present it to my classmates.

Learning Chinese has reinforced my contextual understanding of learning. My two sons, Eric and James, had difficulties in their education as they had to change schools as we kept moving from one town to the next. In particular, Eric was told by his teacher he did not know phonetics, and James was told he was behind all other classmates. My sons’ teachers did not comprehend that phonetics was not important for Eric, as his vocabulary was healthy and broad, and they did not take into consideration that James was behind all other classmates since he had changed from a French school system to an English one. Today, I am learning Chinese as a second language and phonetics, memorization and culture are of paramount importance. Phonetics is important, as we have to learn over 2,000 Chinese characters before we can have a grasp of the language, memorization is important, as we cannot understand the grammar unless we know Chinese words, and culture is important, as a language comes alive only within its culture.

In my Chinese courses we have been using the book ‘Integrated Chinese’ and I must say that this textbook and related supporting material are excellent. I have been in a state of confusion in most classes, but I never gave up and luckily enough, neither has my instructor. The Integrated Chinese course ware was not enough for me since I would become bored by using the same study material over and over again. I knew I had to spend more time studying or being exposed to Chinese. Therefore, I learned very early in writing Chinese, by the use of the computer and began to use word processing to copy the Chinese textbook bit by bit. Later, I explored the Internet and I came across worthwhile sites and software tools. We are all different and we all learn differently. Today, within the framework of Integrated Chinese, as delivered by our instructor, Huifang Qiao, at the University of the Fraser Valley, I use the following sites and software:

• http://chinesepod.com/dashboard Last month I got the subscription to ChinesePod and I find it to be an excellent and interactive web site program to learn Chinese.
• http://mandarinspot.com/annotate I use this site to paste Chinese text and have a bird’s view of the related Pin Yin annotation and English translation.
• http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=translate I use the site mostly for machine translations, English to Chinese and vice versa.
• http://www.xiaoma.info/ I use this site as a dictionary. I can enter information in English, Pin Yin, and Chinese.
• Perapera-kun An add-on module to the Mozilla Firefox browser. It translates Chinese characters (word by word) to Pin Yin and English.
• http://www.nciku.com/ and the related Tooltip dictionary. I convert a Word Chinese document to a Web Page document, I open the latter file with my Mozilla Firefox browser, then I select a small meaningful sentence and I have the translation into English, Pin Yin along with text to speech.
• Loqu8 iCE A module which allows the translation of Chinese characters while I use Microsoft Word.
• Clavis Sinica A software I use for building flashcards. It is very easy to use and there is a voice to every Chinese word. There are other modules besides the Flashcards, but such modules are very slow. The publisher has mentioned that he is working to offset this problem.