New Book, New Class, New Teacher

Chinese Conversation Book II

My New Class: Miss Yan, Melanie, Teacher, Beatrice, me (Susanna took the picture)

The Rest of the Class: Susanna (Venice, Italy); Melanie (Overseas Chinese from Madagascar); Teacher; Beatrice (France); me (USA); Miss Yan (Overseas Chinese from Thailand) took the picture.

Teacher Wen-Fang Chin (靳文芳老師) at my wedding

The office secretaries had instilled terror in my heart about Teacher Wen-Fang Chin. I was shaking a little when I entered her classroom that first day. I gave her my transfer slip and told her that I understood I was on probation for two weeks. She began quizzing me at random from the first book. I did not miss anything until she got to the last three lessons in the book. My old class was only two thirds of the way through the book, and I had not finished the last three lessons with my roommates. When Ms. Chin learned that I had not yet completed the first book, she tried to send me back to my old teacher. I begged and pleaded, and she reluctantly agreed to the probation.

Beginning that day and for the next three years, I was given a special grading scale of 100, 50, and 0. If everything was right, I got 100. If I missed one dot on a character, wrote one line out of order, or missed one tone, I got a 50 (which was failing). If I made two mistakes, no matter how minor, I got a zero. That first day, Ms. Chin told me that if I got a running total of three zeros during those first two weeks, I was out of her class. She didn’t think that the average American had the patience to pay attention to minute details, and details are vital to learning Chinese well. If I wanted to remain in her class, she would teach me better than any other teacher of basic Chinese in the school, but I had to play by her rules and work harder than I had ever worked in my life. I also had to finish those last three lessons in Book One on my own time before my two weeks’ probation was over, but I couldn’t use the extra work as an excuse for shirking on her homework.

Teacher Chin was a very old-school Chinese teacher. She was not in it for the money; she felt it was an insult to her integrity to even mention the monetary compensation because teaching was a “holy” profession devoted to molding the younger generation. Her grandfather had been an official in the Qing Dynasty, and her father had been a medical officer in the Kuomintang Army. Her parents had been put to death by the Communists hours before they were due to evacuate the mainland for Taiwan. Teacher Chin came to Taiwan alone with her aunt. She was born in the area around Peiping (Beijing), and her Mandarin was impeccable. She had learned Chinese the old way with a tutor, as her family had been quite wealthy and had had servants and farms around the city of Beijing. When she was nine, the family had to move south following her father and the Kuomintang Army. She was orphaned at age twelve. Some of her earliest memories were of the Japanese invasion of northern China. Ms. Chin was passionate in her teaching because she wanted to preserve the memories of what had been lost through the Japanese occupation of China and the Communist Cultural Revolution.

Teacher Chin was as tough on herself as she was on us. She worked very hard to be sure that we knew each book backwards and forwards so that we could hear, speak, read, and write every single word in each text. Ms. Chin said that a character wasn’t really “ours” until we could use it in our own sentences and write the sentences down. If anyone in the class didn’t understand something after the first explanation, Teacher Chin would re-teach it from several different angles until we all understood. The class I was joining had just spent nine months covering the book that I had covered in three. They really did know and could use every single character in the book. Because Teacher was so strict, lazy students with no real interest in becoming fluent in Chinese were scared off in about a week. I was in with the best of the best. I had a lot of catching up to do, but I also had a better learning environment than all of my classmates, so it did not take me long to overtake them.

Teacher Chin’s theory of pedagogy was quite interesting. She taught the first two conversation books in what she called “a line”. She did not stray from the text. She kept going over and over and over every single dialog and character until we could use all the words and idioms to make our own sentences orally and in writing. It took us an entire year to get through the second conversation book. After finishing that text book, we moved into the intermediate readers and Teacher began to teach on “a plane.” She gave us full background on every word or phrase that we learned, including stories from classical Chinese, proverbs, synonyms and secondary meanings of the words. She also began to teach us contextual clues and subtle shades of meaning, so we would know when someone was politely insulting us. She frequently told us that she had kept us to the line in the basic books because you can’t draw a plane until you have a line. If the foundation is weak, the whole house will tumble down. She prided herself on having students with consistently high test scores even though her classes did not move quickly through the text books. She always reminded us that when you “admire flowers from a galloping horse”, you cannot avoid picking a few with thorns. We carefully examined every “flower” of the Chinese language, and as a result, we all were able to avoid innumerable thorns.

School Days

Basic Conversation I Textbook

Vocabulary List from Lesson 9

My First ESL Student, Mrs. Wang

(She is giving a speech at my wedding, attesting to my good character and assuring Joshua's family that I will make an excellent Chinese daughter-in-law despite my white skin.)

After we completed our two weeks of phonics training, our life soon settled into a comfortable routine of school, homework, church activities, and work. Lynne had an early Chinese class and then spent most of the day in the air-conditioned (or heated) faculty lounge preparing for her English classes and doing her Chinese homework. She taught several English conversation classes in the afternoon and usually didn’t come back to the apartment until evening. She almost never did homework in our room because the apartment was too noisy for her to concentrate on studying.

I would go back to the apartment after breakfast and do two or three hours of homework. For the first three months, my Chinese class was from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, so I would go to class after lunch. I didn’t really like that first class because the other four students were not really interested in learning Chinese. They were in class to keep their student visas so they could teach English in private English schools where they made lots of money, which they spent enjoying the night life in downtown Taipei. We didn’t have much in common because their main focus was not Chinese.

Our teacher was Miss Hsieh (or Miss Thanks). She was barely out of college, 23 years old, and she enjoyed practicing her English with the Americans in the class. She was a nice woman, and she was a decent teacher, but she frequently let the class get away from Chinese into English. Because I was desperate to learn Chinese well enough to understand what was going on around me at home, this situation was extremely frustrating. I determined that at the end of the first three-month term, I would transfer to another class, preferably in the next book. To that end, I corralled a couple of my night-school roommates, who were studying German and French, and traded Chinese tutoring for Western language tutoring in the mornings. We all improved in our respective language studies after a few months of regular tutoring exchanges.

I began giving private ESL lessons to different people in the church. Three evenings a week, I taught English to an elderly couple, who were preparing to immigrate to America because all their children had US green cards. The husband was a famous architect in Taiwan who had designed the Sun Yat-sen Memorial in Taipei. He had spent some time in America where he was very uncomfortable about not being able to speak the language. I could sympathize with him, and the two of us hit it off really well. Eventually, he wanted to help me with Chinese, so I was paid three evenings per week to help him for 30 minutes with his English and to allow him to help me for an hour with my Chinese. I protested this in a discussion with his wife, but she assured me that they could afford it. She told me her husband was so lonely without his children at home that it was worth it to him to pay me to talk to him. Mr. Wang, my “student”, was the one who finally helped me break the code in learning Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are composed of different repeated parts like visual building blocks. Some parts show meaning and others show sound. If you memorize the characters by learning their parts, it is easier to remember them. Once you become familiar with the building blocks, you can even begin to figure out words that you don’t know.

As soon as I understood the logic of the characters, I went ahead of my class in the first book during my tutoring exchanges. I was confident that I could be totally fluent in Chinese by the end of nine months; in November I formally requested to transfer to a morning class in Lesson One of the second book. There was only one such class with an opening, but the office clerks were reluctant to allow me to transfer. They said the teacher did not really like Americans. She felt that we were lazy, superficial, and more interested in earning money teaching English than in truly learning Chinese. I begged and pleaded, and as there was no one else to take the seat, I was given two weeks probation in the class of Teacher Wen-Fang Chin. Ms. Chin had been teaching at the school for more than twenty years, and she was second only to a direct descendant of Confucius in her reputation for toughness and high standards. Ms. Confucius only taught classical Chinese, so I did not get into her class until 1985, but Ms. Chin was fully able to challenge me to the limits of my abilities in ways that I had never ever been challenged before.

Learning to Write Chinese

Writing Practice with Traditional & Simplified Characters



















A Copy Book to Practice Writing

As hard as it was to learn the tones in Chinese, I think that learning to read and write was even harder. Chinese characters are not phonetic. You have to memorize what they mean and how they sound. Some of them are easier because they are pictographs; if you squint, you can see what they represent, like the character for person: 人.The character has two legs like a person walking. But when you look at it, there are no clues to tell you that it is pronounced ren and that it is said with the second rising tone. You have to learn all those things by rote. And you also have to watch out for similar characters with different sounds and different meanings like: 入, which means to enter and is pronounced ru with the fourth, falling tone. All you can do is spend hours and hours practicing reading with flashcards. Then you have to spend an equal amount of time writing the characters over and over, while repeating them aloud to yourself, until you learn to write them from memory.

The two stroke characters like 人 and 入 are not so bad, but most of the characters are made up of many more strokes. You have to learn to write the strokes in the proper order. If you get the stroke order wrong, the character looks out of balance, and you might get it wrong on a quiz. We spent part of every class period writing characters in our copy books as our teacher wrote them on the white board. We would count the strokes together out loud to memorize them in the right order.

There were a lot of other picky rules about how to have good handwriting in Chinese. You have to sit square to the table with good posture and both feet flat on the floor. You cannot tilt your paper; it has to be straight in front of you. The characters need to be aligned in little boxes, and they can’t be slanted. More than 15 years of writing cursive English script with my paper at an angle gave me very bad Chinese handwriting. My roommates kept telling me that if I didn’t practice my writing until it was beautiful then people would think I was of poor character, and I would never be trusted in life. My friends took me to the stationery store and bought me piles of copy books with square boxes so I could practice my handwriting. And I wasn’t even learning artistic calligraphy with a brush!!! I was just learning ordinary penmanship.

My roommates told me that they had spent hours and hours practicing their writing when they were in elementary school and junior high. Most elementary school students had to write several pages of characters per day so they would firmly fix the characters in their memory. Beside each character they had to write the bo, po, mo, fo phonetic symbols with the tonal markings and read the character aloud. My friends insisted that I use this same method to learn all my vocabulary words. At first, I resisted doing what we Americans consider “busy work”, but eventually, I was having so much trouble learning the language that I decided to try it their way. It worked; I learned to read and write better than most of my Western classmates, but my Chinese writing still has its English cursive slant and at best can only be considered “legible.”

Basic Chinese Class

Explanation and Practice with Tones 2 and 3 in Mandarin Chinese

Phonics Text Book Cover

All first-time students at the Mandarin Training Center had to take two weeks of Mandarin Phonetics during their first month in the program. We also started our regular conversation classes later the same day. The phonetic classes went from 8 to 10 every morning. Lynne then went straight into her conversation class from 10 to 12, but I had to wait until 2 in the afternoon. Lynne taught English for most of the afternoon.

The phonetics class taught us the Mandarin phonetic symbols, better known as bo, po, mo, fo. They are something like the Japanese hiragana and katakana alphabets. The first few days weren’t too hard because we were just learning the symbols and how to pronounce the sounds. The only difficult sounds are the four retroflex syllables that you have to say with a curled tongue. Then the teacher brought in the tones. Mandarin has four tones, a high even tone, a rising tone, a tone that falls and rise, and a falling tone (see the picture of textbook page). There is also a short, light tone that is rarely used. The theory was not hard to grasp, but try as we might we couldn’t hear the tones, much less say them. I was not used to failing quizzes, but when they started adding tones to the mix, I failed every single quiz. It was so frustrating.

The conversation class was a little bit better. For the first week, the conversation teacher reviewed the phonics lessons and made sure we could write the symbols of the bo, po, mo, fo alphabet. During the second week, we began regular conversational instruction. The Mandarin Training Center also started us right out with Chinese characters. Each lesson consisted of a short dialog, a list of vocabulary, and a set of sentence pattern practices. We had to memorize each dialog until we could recite it and write it from memory. Then we had to learn to read and write the characters and use the sentence patterns orally and on paper. The conversation teachers were more lax with the tonal pronunciation than the phonetic instructor was, and they let us use our hands to remind ourselves which tone we were speaking. When we memorized a vocabulary word, we would memorize the phonetic symbols, tones, and characters associated with it. As we began to speak, we would draw tone symbols in the air with our hands to help our listeners figure out which tone we were trying to produce. Since our minds were not yet differentiating the tones in the language that we were hearing, I guess that during our first few

months we were like deaf people learning to speak, and we used the crutch of sign language to facilitate communication. Our roommates, too, began to draw tones in the air when they had trouble communicating with us.

Here are some examples to show you our dilemma:

The syllable “ma” alone can have five different meanings depending on which tone is associated with it. First tone ma means mother, second tone ma means hemp, third tone ma means horse, and fourth tone ma means scold. When ma is used with the short, light tone, it is a question marker that has no independent meaning. There are thirty of the bo, po, mo fo syllables that can all be used singly as words, then they can make a seemingly infinite variety of combination single-syllable words, and each syllable changes its meaning with a new tone.

Most words in modern Chinese are of two syllables, and each syllable has its own tone. If you get the tones on one or both syllables wrong, you’ve got the wrong word. Hsi (3rd tone) le (4th tone) is joy. Hsi (3rd tone, different character) le (light tone) means washed. And if you throw poor enunciation into the mix, it‘s even harder to understand: ma (3rd tone) shang (4th tone) means immediately, but ma (2nd tone) sheng (3rd tone) means hemp rope. It took me almost six months before I could begin to correctly pick out words in the conversations going on around me. I had never been in a foreign country with no clues to my surroundings for that long. I felt lonely, isolated, stupid, and totally frustrated. I cried myself to sleep many, many nights during those first nine months. After I began to be able to correctly hear words, it took me still longer to speak correctly. Even today, my tones go out of whack when I switch too quickly from English to Chinese, and my brain gets stuck in English track where I don’t hear the tones in my mind.

PART TWO: Learning Chinese

My Mandarin Training Center Student ID

Chinese classes started a whole new stage of our Taiwan experience. We gradually gained the tools to communicate and make sense of our surroundings. I have to say that Chinese was the hardest language I have ever tackled. It was the seventh language I had studied formally, and I was expecting to master it in nine months, but it was too different from European languages. I was barely conversational by the end of nine months, and even today I frequently learn new things although I’ve been speaking it every day for more than 26 years.

Chinese is a tonal language, and our first challenge was learning to hear and say the tones. When we weren’t careful, we called our mothers horses, or made other equally terrible errors like saying “Jesus is a pig,” instead of “Jesus is the Lord,” when we were testifying at church. Chinese grammar is deceptively simple. There is no case or tense or even fixed parts of speech, but that made things hard, too, because without those markers we had to learn to evaluate contextual clues to determine the true sense of what was being said. Because Chinese people insulate themselves behind interior walls, you have to learn to pick up several layers of meaning in their words. That means in order to be fluent, you have to get to the point where you sense what they feel, not an easy proposition for a Westerner. Then, of course, there is Chinese writing. Taiwan uses the traditional characters, some of which have more than twenty strokes. Many characters contain no clues to their pronunciation and have to be learned entirely by rote. Since returning to America and opening my own translation business, I have also learned to get by with the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China. The Chinese have a proverb that says “As long as you are living, you have to keep learning.” It certainly is true of the Chinese language.

Life in a Sardine Tin

Pictures in the Living Room

One of the hardest things for us to get accustomed to was the population density. The picture to the left shows half the women in our home. You can see a little three-year old perched on the top of the sofa. Her father also lived in the apartment, but he was at work when the photo was taken. The only outsiders in the picture are two English-speakers for translation and an old lady from church who is about to take us all out for a banquet-style lunch.

Our apartment took up the entire side of the third floor in our building. There were a total of four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large living room and a small kitchen. The family of three lived in the large bedroom at the end of the hall. They had a small balcony off their room where they hung their laundry up to dry. Their room was pretty much filled by a huge bed, and they all three slept together in it. Their clothes and belongings were in boxes and piles around the edges of the room. The mom and little girl spent a lot of time shut up in their room when all of us were at home.

The two bathrooms were off the hall between the living room and the largest bedroom. They were exactly across from each other. The one to the left was larger and held the laundry spinner. The one to the right was smaller. Both had bathtubs, but the bathtub in the room on the left was much larger than the one on the right. The floors to the bathrooms were raised above the level of the rest of the apartment, and they had tiled lips that you stepped over, so water on the floor didn’t run out into the rest of the apartment. As I mentioned in the post about low-tech living, there were drain holes in the middle of the floor of each bathroom. The bathtubs had flexible shower heads attached to the faucets, and you could stand in the tub or in the middle of the floor to shower. A number of our roommates seemed to believe that showers belonged outside the tubs, and they left every corner of the bathroom dripping with water.

Lynne and I had a very small room next to the right bathroom at the beginning of the hall. It was long and narrow with windows at the far end. It was crowded by American standards, but we had more room than anyone else in the apartment. There were two slightly larger rooms just off the living room. These rooms each had two metal bunk beds and four desks. They also had small armoires in one corner. The girls did not have enough room for all their clothes, so they would go home with each change of weather to exchange clothing. In one room, they could not fit in chairs to go with two of the desks, so the girls on the bottom bunks had their desks right near the ends of their bed and sat on their beds to work at their desks. These rooms had windows along the outside walls, and the windows looked out on the balcony that wrapped around the corner from the living room to the end of the second bedroom. This was the laundry drying area for us girls. There were hooks in the roof of the balcony holding two rows of bamboo canes on which we hung our laundry out to dry.

The kitchen was a tiny room off the opposite side of the living room from the bedrooms. A small refrigerator stood against the far wall. There was a small sink immediately next to the door and cabinets with a metal counter on the top between the sink and the two-burner gas stove that you can see in the picture with my last post. A maximum of two people could fit in the kitchen at one time. We cooked dinner for thirteen there every night after the student center stopped its food service during the hepatitis B outbreak.

The living room had a piano in the corner between the sliding glass door to the balcony and the door into the kitchen. A small dining table with three chairs was pushed against the wall between the kitchen door and the front door. The electric rice cooker was on the dining table because there was no room for it in the kitchen. The rest of the living room was filled with a leather couch and arm chair set and a long coffee table between them.

So we had a total of thirteen people in one four bedroom apartment. It worked surprisingly well. We had a cleaning schedule and did chores in pairs. Nobody really got into fights or anything. Everyone tolerated everyone else and life was great. If you needed space, you just went out. Lynne spent a lot of time in the teachers’ lounge at NTNU when she needed space. That left me in our room alone. At the time, I didn’t know how the girls who were four to a room did it. I learned that lesson during my third year when I was living in a converted office space with twelve women and a family of five, but that was much later in the story. I think a lot of survival at close quarters came down to giving others psychological space and learning to maintain interior walls. Even though we did almost everything as a group, I came out of that year with only two real friends. It is much harder to hurt or be hurt, if the relationship remains on a superficial level and you never open up.

From now on I plan to post on the dates of the month that are multiples of 5. So there will be new material on the blog on the 5th, the 10th, the 15th, the 20th, the 25th, and the 30th of every month.