China's new export...

[lmcjipo]

Interesting article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/inter ... china.html

Seems to be true (at least in the university that I attend where the courses are overbooked and there is a waiting list to enroll into the courses).

 

[mikelove]

Definitely true, which is why we're already planning a big new advertising initiative to try to sell PlecoDict to school districts, universities, etc. (we'll probably have a booth at next year's ACTFL, too, which immediately gives us an incentive to get 2.0 out by November) Chinese hasn't yet attained the popularity in the US that it has in Korea and Vietnam, but within a few years we think it'll be right up there with French and Spanish in American classrooms.

 

[lmcjipo]

I was amazed by the amount of interest in Chinese (Mandarin) when I took my Mandarin level 1 course at university. With a registration limit of 24 students in the class, there is a waiting list in each level (level 1, level 2, and level 3).

In my level 1 course last semester, approximately 20% of students were Asian descent. 70% of the class were Caucasian and 10% of the class were Eurasian. The majority of the Asian students were Chinese (but a different dialect) but there were some Korean students and some Vietnamese students.

In my level 2 course this semester, the ratio remains roughly the same. There are 2 Eurasian students (1 Chinese/Caucasian & 1 Vietnamese/Caucasian), 6 Asian students (1 Vietnamese & 5 Chinese), 7 Caucasian students, and 1 Black student.

So, it isn't only the students of Chinese descent who either don't speak any dialect of Chinese or speak a Chinese dialect other than Mandarin that are trying to learn Mandarin.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting. Definitely a shift away from the mostly-Asian classes I remember from a few years ago. Which is a good sign of the broadening interest in learning Chinese among the general public. Though the waiting list hints at a growing problem, the lack of experienced Chinese teachers - for Chinese classes to really become popular we need a massive increase in the number of qualified teachers. Which will likely mean a lot more non-native speakers teaching introductory classes - if you've just polished off your HSK Advanced and are looking for a good job, get yourself a teaching certificate and you'll be all set.

 

[lmcjipo]

For the university that I attend, I'm sure that they could find additional Mandarin teachers. A few of the people who tutored me while I was taking my level 1 course would be excellent teachers. I'm not sure why they don't do this.

Mike, in regards to your comment about non-natvie speakers teaching Mandarin, I'm not sure if this is politically correct and I might be in the minority but I wouldn't feel comfortable taking a Mandarin course given by someone who isn't a native speaker (i.e. or possibly who wasn't Chinese). The only way I would feel comfortable being taught Mandarin by someone who wasn't Chinese and a native Mandarin speaker is if that person spent the majority of their life in a Mandarin environment and native Mandarin speakers tell me that he/she speaks Mandarin very well. I would feel the same way about learning English or another language from someone that picked up (learnt) the language later in their lives for a few years.

In my level 2 class, there are a few students who lived in China for a little less than 1 year and even though they know more than the majority of the other students in the class, I would not feel comfortable learning Mandarin from them or getting "major" help from them with my Mandarin (even though they know more Mandarin than I do). When they speak Mandarin, they have a definite "foreigner" tone/accent and part of learning/mastering any language is to speak it like or as good as a native speaker.

 

[mikelove]

Well it's not an unreasonable position, but I tend to disagree - my first Chinese teacher was a Korean who'd learned it in college and it didn't hurt me. All other things being equal I agree a native speaker would be best, but given the choice between a 20-student class with a native speaker and a 10-student class with a fluent laowai, I think a lot of students would be better off with the latter. Likewise if the native speaker can't explain him/herself well in English and the class isn't advanced enough to be taught exclusively in Chinese - there's a big difference between tutoring one person and getting up in front of a class of 15. And remember this isn't just about teaching, it's about getting people to start studying Chinese and stick with it for more than a few months, and if dropping the native speaker requirement is the price we pay to get 100,000 US high schoolers studying Chinese then I think that's well worth it.

 

[lmcjipo]

I agree with you that it is important that the native speaker must also have a good grasp of the language of instruction and must be able to explain him/herself so that everyone in the class understands him/her. I saw this in my level 1 Mandarin class where one of the two native Mandarin speaking teaching assistants couldn't understand various students' questions. I'm also seeing this now in my level 2 class.

 

[Jim]

A very large percentage of Chinese people do not speak standard Mandarin. With the huge number of local dialects and completely different languages the range of accents is huge. In fact, native English speakers have a much easier time mastering a proper Mandarin accent than people from some regions of China. BLCU in Beijing has a special program just for Cantonese speakers because they have so much trouble with the accent. The program is not for people from Hong Kong but for people from Guang Dong who were taught in Mandarin all through school but still have a terrible accent because their teachers did also.

Also, just as there are many native English speakers who didn't get high marks in English at school many Chinese actually make a lot of grammar mistakes. I had one teacher who made a point of asking a student who just made a mistake who taught them that and almost invariably it was a local Chinese language exchange partner.

The end result is that even in China not all teachers should be teachers. Outside of China the people hiring Chinese teachers usually have no way of knowing if the teacher's Chinese is very good or not.

Another factor to consider is that some people who do speak proper Mandarin may not know conciously or be able to explain the rules of grammar. A foreigner who has learned Chinese has learned rules of grammar from day one because he didn't learn to speak the language on his mother's knee. A foreigner is also likely to understand all the problems you will meet as he has already met them all.

A good Chinese teacher is better than a good foreign teacher but a good foreign teacher is better than a poor Chinese teacher. Especially for a beginner a good foregn teacher is a very practical option.

 

[lmcjipo]

My level 1 Mandarin teacher was very good and I can see why he is a teacher. My level 2 Mandarin teacher isn't as good (she isn't bad but she isn't as good as my level 1 teacher). Both are native Mandarin speakers (born in China) and both have roughly the same level of English which I would categorize is good/adequate.

The only problem that I see with my level 2 Mandarin teacher is that she can't explain the grammar. When students ask her grammatical questions based on the lesson or the exercises, she would say the correct answer but she can't explain why her answer is correct. She would then note it on a piece of paper and explain it the following class.

It is similar to asking a group of English speakers about the following 2 sentences: "My brother and I are learning Mandarin" & "My brother and me are learning Mandarin". Most English speakers can tell that the first sentence is correct while the second is not correct but not all English speakers can explain why the first is correct besides just saying "the first one is correct just because it is correct and the second one isn't correct because it isn't". My level 2 Mandarin teacher has the same problem with Mandarin whereas my level 1 Mandarin teacher did not.

If I had a choice between having my level 1 teacher teach me level 2 instead of my current level 2 teacher, I would obviously prefer my level 1 teacher. If I had to choose between my current level 2 teacher and a foreigner/westerner (or whatever the politically correct term is) who knows the grammar/pronounciation but still spoke was a "foreigner" teach me, I would probably still pick my level 2 teacher since she isn't bad (she just can't explain some things).

Just because someone is a native Mandarin speaker (and born in China) doesn't necessarily make him/her a good/excellent teacher.

 

[Piers]

to be honest i don't think anyone can really learn to speak good chinese without spending at least 6months in China. so whether it's a native speaker or not is not the most important question. if it's a good teacher you'll learn the words and the grammar and the basics of pronunciation, but you'll still have a hard time understanding a chinese conversation if you don't spend time in china.

 

[Anonymous]

frankly, most chinese are too nice to point out your tone

Don't know how i ended up here, but I read some posts here, to be honest, a lot of foreigners think they are native chinese speakers while they are not really, most chinese people are too nice to point out your foreign accent, they always tell you your speak really good chinese if you can understand you at all.

A very large percentage of Chinese people do not speak standard Mandarin. With the huge number of local dialects and completely different languages the range of accents is huge. In fact, native English speakers have a much easier time mastering a proper Mandarin accent than people from some regions of China. BLCU in Beijing has a special program just for Cantonese speakers because they have so much trouble with the accent. The program is not for people from Hong Kong but for people from Guang Dong who were taught in Mandarin all through school but still have a terrible accent because their teachers did also.

Also, just as there are many native English speakers who didn't get high marks in English at school many Chinese actually make a lot of grammar mistakes. I had one teacher who made a point of asking a student who just made a mistake who taught them that and almost invariably it was a local Chinese language exchange partner.

The end result is that even in China not all teachers should be teachers. Outside of China the people hiring Chinese teachers usually have no way of knowing if the teacher's Chinese is very good or not.

Another factor to consider is that some people who do speak proper Mandarin may not know conciously or be able to explain the rules of grammar. A foreigner who has learned Chinese has learned rules of grammar from day one because he didn't learn to speak the language on his mother's knee. A foreigner is also likely to understand all the problems you will meet as he has already met them all.

A good Chinese teacher is better than a good foreign teacher but a good foreign teacher is better than a poor Chinese teacher. Especially for a beginner a good foregn teacher is a very practical option.

 

[minnes]

Re: frankly, most chinese are too nice to point out your ton

Don't know how i ended up here, but I read some posts here, to be honest, a lot of foreigners think they are native chinese speakers while they are not really, most chinese people are too nice to point out your foreign accent, they always tell you your speak really good chinese if you can understand you at all.

My experience has been that when I first started out, all the chinese I would talk to would tell me how great it was, and the better I get at it, the more they are likly to correct me or point out mistakes. Which is a good thing, as I still have a ways to go before I have mastered chinese. But I have been mistaken once or twice for a native speaker over the phone.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: frankly, most chinese are too nice to point out your ton

Don't know how i ended up here, but I read some posts here, to be honest, a lot of foreigners think they are native chinese speakers while they are not really, most chinese people are too nice to point out your foreign accent, they always tell you your speak really good chinese if you can understand you at all.

You are definitely correct. Chinese people are definitely polite in this regard and almost without exception willing to help any foreigner with their Chinese. I also understand that compliments are almost always relative and that often people are actually saying "Wow, your Chinese is really good (compared to all the Westerners who don't speak it at all)."

Trust me, this was no criticism of Chinese people, merely some help for a person looking for a good teacher. English is at least as bad as Chinese in this regard. As well as having their own native accents including numerous local dialects all English speaking countries have a lot of immigration which brings even more accents. And as I mentioned in my earlier post, even native English speakers are often not well educated in their own language.

Unfortunately, this leads to Chinese people having the same problem when looking for English teachers. Many Westerners in China teach English and a high percentage of them have heavy accents and/or terrible grammar.

 

[noof]

The rush to learn Chinese

I'm a former freelance translator of technical Japanese who like thousands of others is fervently studying Mandarin for simple economic reasons.

I also help to market a new adult evening program at a local university for Mandarin. Our first semester was attended by numerous employees of global companies like Schneider Logistics, Screiber Foods and Paper Converting Machine Company at their employers' expense.

I've been using Oxford on a Palm M515 with great satisfaction and have made a point to show the other students its superb handwriting recognition as well as its general user friendliness.

Michael Love has impressed me from his first support e-mail onward as a singularly clear headed and gifted software developer. May he score bigtime from being an early and exemplary provider to the enormous wave of Mandarin learning that's just begun to swell here in the States.

If I dared make one suggestion to Mike, it would be to remember the working professionals who could greatly benefit from his product and to consider advertising directly to their employers (if he isn't already).

These folks are being pressured right now to develop business level fluency in putonghua.

 

[mikelove]

noof - thanks! We're certainly thinking about the working professionals; the main problem is how exactly to reach them, traditional advertising media don't exactly work for a specialized product like this. We've got one idea we should be launching soon that may help with this, and once we have a desktop version of PlecoDict available, that will allow us to mail out demo versions on CD to corporate offices, IT departments, etc, which should also help our case. In general, though, I tend to think we'll have better luck pushing this through schools - with those, the people responsible for purchasing IT gear might actually know something about language training, and thus would be better able to appreciate the potential of a product like PlecoDict than a corporate IT type whose expertise is mainly in enterprise and networking software.

 

[dustpuppy]

What is the timeline for the desktop version of pleco ?

 

[mikelove]

We're waiting a bit to see what happens with this fall's big wave of Windows / Android-powered tablets; if Windows manages to grab a significant portion of the tablet market then we'd likely build a lot of the design of our desktop product around those. (the iPad has done very well for us) We're also curious about how Android on x86 will turn out - if one can easily run an Android app on a desktop Windows system through some sort of Cygwin-based shell, that would eliminate most of the arguments for a standalone desktop version - and about whether Windows Phone 7 can easily be hacked to run older Windows Mobile apps, since we're also weighing whether to fork the desktop version and develop it separately from Windows Mobile (which would mean cleaner code / quicker development but would also effectively be putting a death sentence on our Windows Mobile product).

Basically, the relationship between mobile devices and desktops is as uncertain and fluctuating as it's ever been, and we're trying to make sure we do something for desktops that will have a decent amount of longevity.

 

[badchinesemajor]

The aforementioned institute is definitely a fantastic place to study Chinese language and culture, but I'm wondering how much dedication Americans will be able to commit to teaching their Children mandarin. One thing that will be highly beneficial for Americans that wish their child to receive Mandarin instruction is the huge Chinese population itself meaning that if there is truly national demand for Chinese teachers, it will be far easier to recruit native speakers than say when Japanese was all the rage. On the flip side, Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, so I don't foresee a new generation of bilingual children. The cynical side of me believes that Mandarin has a large chance to become the new language that everybody took in high school, but nobody remembers anything but the basics. The other side of me is more worried that a sudden influx of Mandarin speakers is going to lower my salary.

 

[feng]

Don't know how i ended up here, but I read some posts here, to be honest, a lot of foreigners think they are native chinese speakers while they are not really, most chinese people are too nice to point out your foreign accent, they always tell you your speak really good chinese if you can understand you at all.

http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%C0%CF%CD%E2