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This is an article which will perhaps prove to be controversial.

Peter Zohrab

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 05:53:30 +1200 (NZST)
From: Peter Zohrab <peter.zohrab@actrix.gen.nz>
To: zohrab_p@actrix.gen.nz
Subject: Learning Chinese in Australasia

LEARNING CHINESE IN AUSTRALASIA

Peter Zohrab


0.   Introduction

This is a modified version of an article that was published in the New
Zealand Association of Language Teachers' Members' Newsletter, No.9, June
1996.  Some controversial aspects of my original draft were omitted in the
published version, so I am now posting the uncut version (with minor
amendments).


1.   The Problem

Andy Kirkpatrick's article "Learning Asian Languages in Australia" in the
April-June 1995 issue of Babel raised important issues, but it was
seriously misleading in crucial respects.  It is surprising that someone
can list such impressive credentials, yet reach such an unnecessary
conclusion.

I am a correspondence teacher of Modern Standard Chinese (and German).  My
credentials are much less impressive than Mr. Kirkpatrick's, as far as
travel to China and command of the written language are concerned -- but my
understanding of aspects of the Linguistics of Chinese is clearly much
greater.  And that is important, because Linguistics gives you the
theoretical background to analyse -- as opposed to "just" learn --
languages.

Mr. Kirkpatrick's main conclusion was that Modern Standard Chinese (MSC),
Japanese and Korean  should not be taught at primary or lower secondary
level in Autralia to people without prior background in these languages.
This is a radical proposal, and it deserves to be scrutinised carefully.
As a teacher of Modern Standard Chinese in New Zealand, I am of course
mindful of the fact that his views will have been noted in this country, as
well as in Australia.  I am also mindful of statistics I have seen, which
indicate that very few non-Chinese-background people are studying Chinese
in Australia.  This indicates, to me, that Australia has failed to make the
learning of Chinese attractive to non-background students.

His principle argument relates to the difficulties that these languages
present to English-speaking learners.  In the case of Modern Standard
Chinese (which is the language he discusses specifically), these
difficulties are:

a.   Its main script is neither an alphabet (as in English) nor a syllabry
     (as with the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana);
b.   It has few words that look/sound similar to the English equivalents;
c.   It is tonal.


2.   The Error

Unfortunately, he is not very analytical or precise on this issue of
difficulty.  Korean and Japanese are not tonal languages, so tonality can
hardly be a crucial issue for him.  The issue of vocabulary can hardly be
crucial, either, as Indonesian/Malay, which Kirkpatrick advocates as a
language that CAN be learned at the primary and lower-secondary levels,
does not have many vocabulary similarities with English, either.  Maybe its
vocabulary is more similar to English than the vocabulary of Chinese is,
but the similarities are quite slight in comparison with the similarities
that exist between the vocabularies of European languages.

So the main issue, as anyone knows, who has studied Chinese or Japanese, is
the script.  The problem with the script is not really that it is different
from the script used in English.  A script (as in Russian, for example) can
be different, yet present little real obstacles to the Native English
learner.  The issue here is that the Sino-Japanese characters are not an
alphabet or a syllabry.  The real problem -- for learners of Japanese, as
for learners of Chinese -- is caused by the memory-load imposed by the
thousands of characters, which represent an indefinite number of concepts,
rather than a limited set of sounds.

As is well known, there are almost as many Sino-Japanese characters as
there are words in the Chinese or Japanese languages.  Of course, you don't
have to learn all of these -- any more than you have to know every word in
the Oxford Dictionary to speak English -- but you have to learn a couple of
thousand in order to be functionally literate in daily life.

In addition, there is the other side of the ledger to consider.  Chinese
has very simple morphology (i.e. you don't have to learn endings for verbs,
adjectives, articles, or nouns), and its syntax is also fairly
straightforward.  So this counterbalances to some extent the difficulty
posed by the tones and the characters.

He has certainly highlighted an important problem, however.  I think the
solution to it is to adopt his fall-back position, which is to separate
Chinese-background learners from non-background learners into separate
streams.  Teachers of non-background learners should concentrate on
teaching oral/aural Chinese, using the Pinyin transcription, for the first
few years.  Once reasonable fluency has been achieved, motivated and able
students can go on to learn the characters as well.  I will expand on this
below.

Kirkpatrick argues against this solution by claiming that:

     "... even after adding the correct tone, the pinyin representation of
     the MSC sound is still frequently ambiguous."

This is a highly misleading statement for someone trained in the
Linguistics of Modern Standard Chinese (MSC) to make.  Pinyin, when used to
represent spoken Chinese (as opposed to transcribing writing in the terser
style associated with texts originally written in characters), is no more
ambiguous than written English -- in context.  In English, you can take a
written word, such as "lie", for example, out of context, and it then
appears ambiguous, but such words are seldom ambiguous in a real context.

Writing in characters is often terse, because the clear differentiations
between the large number of characters allow monosyllabic words to be
unambiguous.  In the spoken language, which is what teachers use Pinyin to
represent, monosyllabic words are much less frequent.  The counterparts of
monosyllabic written words are often disyllabic in spoken Chinese.


3.   A Solution

Now that we have demystified the problem a bit, we can start looking at the
possible solutions.  Kirkpatrick bases himself on his own experience.  He
mentions that he has spent several years studying Chinese, but he is
disappointed at the level of proficiency he has achieved in that time.  He
includes the three years he spent studying Chinese Linguistics, but that
should be subtracted from the total, as studying the Linguistics of a
language is of very little help in the process of actually learning the
language itself.

He seems to have achieved a higher relative proficiency in written Chinese
than in spoken Chinese, going by what he says about his own proficiency.
This may be the key to his somewhat off-beat views about teaching Chinese.
If you try to learn to read and write as much Chinese as you would have
learned after a similar amount of time reading and writing French, say,
then you're not going to have enough time left over to perfect the
oral/aural side of the language (or to have a social life).

Most teachers and learners of Chinese take an implicit cost/benefit
approach to the language, realising that you can get further faster by
spending x hours studying spoken Chinese than by spending that amount of
time studying the characters.  Kirkpatrick's difficulties with the spoken
language probably result from his not adopting this common-sense approach.

Learning Chinese involves visual memory (for the characters) and pitch
discrimination (for the tones), in addition to the language skills involved
in learning non-tonal European languages.  No two learners have all these
skills in exactly the same proportions, and it is possible for someone who
has a very good visual memory to study Chinese, despite not having a "good
ear" for the tones and sounds of Chinese.  Maybe that is Mr. Kirkpatrick's
profile.


4.   Communicative Language Teaching

Here the theory of Communicative language teaching comes into focus.
Communicative language teaching is the ruling orthodoxy in New Zealand
language-teaching circles, but this theory has not yet come to grips with
Chinese characters.  We are supposed to be teaching students to
communicate, but it is unrealistic to expect them ever to be able to
routinely communicate at length (i.e. at more than the length of e.g.
street signs) by reading/writing Chinese characters, unless they go and
live in a Chinese-speaking country and/or use Chinese in their daily
routine (e.g. as a teacher of Chinese).  This is because it takes too much
time to learn and retain Chinese characters.

So, if we adopt a Communicative approach to teaching Chinese, we should
restrict ourselves to spoken Chinese and Pinyin for the first few years.
The alternative is to ditch the Communicative approach, and to look at
learning the characters as an enjoyable discipline to be carried out for
its own sake.  This approach would also have the benefit of acknowledging
the reality (which the Communicative approach ignores) that the student is
quite likely not going to have much chance to actually communicate in the
target language in the short term, anyway.

An approach based on  grammar-plus-translation-plus-characters might be
more realistic.  It would allow students to build up their vocabulary, and
practise it with written materials -- leaving oral fluency as icing on the
cake, which would develop of its own accord once the students visited a
Chinese-speaking country.  There seems little sense in training for a
fluency which will rapidly disintegrate after the end of the course --
unless the Internet comes to the rescue and provides voice-links to Chinese
native-speakers.


5.   Political and Organisational Issues

There is a political aspect to this solution, which touches on the question
of whether MSC is to be treated as a Foreign Language or as a Community
Language (or both) in Australasia.  Emphasising the Pinyin alphabetical
script at the expense of characters is unlikely to please many ethnic
Chinese teachers of Modern Standard Chinese -- especially if their native
language is some other dialect of Chinese.  This is because many of them
are not very familiar with Pinyin, and also because of the cultural and
political importance of the characters.  In fact, some Chinese people go so
far as to refer to Pinyin as "English".

The characters are a symbol of what it is to be Chinese.  They also
function as a sort of political "glue".  They link together the various,
mutually incomprehensible "dialects" into one "language".  This linking
together of the dialects effectively also links together the various groups
that speak these dialects into one "Han" nationality.

The term "Han" is only partially a racial classification.  The Hui minority
in China differ from the Han by their religion (Islam), rather than by
their racial characteristics.  Similarly, there are many other minority
nationalities which an outsider can distinguish from the Han people only
when they are wearing traditional costumes or speaking their own language.
Conversely, the differences in physical appearance between the various
regional groups of "Han" people are just as great as those between some of
the minorities and the Han themselves.

If the dialects were written purely or mainly in an alphabetic system, it
would be immediately clear to all and sundry that these dialects are not at
present much more similar to each other than they are to other languages,
such as Thai, Lao, and the languages of some ethnic minorities in China
(irrespective of the presumed historical relationships between these
various "languages" and "dialects").  This would have political
implications, in that it would accentuate regional loyalties at the expense
of national loyalty.

To give the reader a quick overview of this issue, here is a more or less
random comparison of a handful of expressions in Modern Standard Chinese,
Hakka, and Thai.  The Hakka data come from the book 'The Hakka Dialect", by
Mantaro Hashimoto (1973), C.U.P..


ENGLISH             THAI                MSC            HAKKA

the sun             phra'athit          taiyang        ngitteu
the moon            phracan             yueliang       ngiatgvong
it rains            fon tok             xia yu         lok ji
it snows            hima tok            xia xue        lok siet
cold water          naam yen            liang shui     lang se
hot water           naam roon           re shui        ngiat se

The transcriptions are not consistent, and this is a very small sample.
The intention is only to show that, to a layperson, "dialects" such as
Hakka are not superficially or obviously part of the same "language" as
Modern Standard Chinese.  This is a separate issue from the possibility of
establishing historical sound-correspondences.  You could also, for
example, carry out a similar exercise with Dutch, Standard German, and one
of the North German dialects and probably get similar results.  

The general point is that the terms "language" and "dialect" are defined, in the first instance, on political grounds.  Linguists may come along later and define genetic relationships, but they do not have the political power to make the North German dialects part of the same "language" as Dutch, for example -- even if they were to prove that they are more similar to each other than either is to Standard German.

The Chinese-teaching problem is compounded by the professional organisation of teachers of Chinese in New Zealand, which takes the shape of the New Zealand Chinese Language Association.  Unlike the other organisations that represent teachers at conferences of the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers, this organisation is open to all sorts of non-teachers, including business-people and ethnic Chinese organisation representatives.  These people and organisations all have their own agendas, which are potentially, at times, in conflict with the best interests of the teachers and students of Chinese.  Given the political and economic importance of China, some of these people seem to represent the viewpoint that the teaching of Chinese should be subservient to political and economic goals of various sorts.