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What to Know About Chinese

  

Why Study the Chinese Language?
There are more than a billion speakers of Chinese around the world, including a substantial population in the US. The Chinese writing system is one of the very few independently invented writing systems in all of human history and it dates back at least to the third millennium BCE. An astounding number of Chinese texts written in even the earliest periods have been transmitted to the present. For many periods during its history, China was the most culturally, economically, technologically, and scientifically dominant nation in East Asia, where the Chinese writing system was widely learned and taught and Chinese characters were incorporated into the native writing systems of nations stretching from Japan to Vietnam. Chinese culture has long enjoyed global recognition, in recent years in the form of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Gao Xingjian, the growing familiarity with Peking opera, and the widespread influence of films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Farewell my Concubine.
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How Hard is the Chinese Language to Learn?

Hard things about Learning Chinese:  

  • Chinese shares very little vocabulary with European languages, so speakers of these languages have to work harder than if they were learning another European language. And even though Chinese shares vocabulary with several Asian languages (especially Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese), this shared vocabulary is often difficult to recognize.
  • The writing system is definitely hard to learn, though there is nothing conceptually difficult about it; there is just a lot to memorize.
  • Chinese is a tone language--that is, different pitch patterns do not just add emotional color, as in English; they actually distinguish one word from another. How much of a problem this is depends a lot on the individual student: students with a good ear do not necessarily find this a difficulty.

Easy things about Learning Chinese:

  • Unlike many European languages, Chinese has no irregular verbs or noun plurals to learn, because words have only a single form, with no suffixes for tense, number, case, etc. (There are some particles which work somewhat like tense endings, but they always take the same form, no matter what they are added to.
  • Chinese speakers are usually tolerant of a foreigner's mistakes--perhaps because so many Chinese themselves speak standard Mandarin Chinese as a second language.

And here are some actual numbers...
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring English-speaking students to a certain level of proficiency. Here are their figures (1973):
Languages included
(Languages regularly offered at the University of Michigan are in capital letters; this is NOT a complete list)


GROUP I Afrikaans, Danish, DUTCH, FRENCH, Haitian Creole, ITALIAN, Norwegian, PORTUGUESE, Romanian, SPANISH, Swahili, SWEDISH

Hours of instruction to reach average aptitude 480; Speaking proficiency level after 720 hours  3

GROUP II Bulgarian, Dari, FARSI (PERSIAN), GERMAN, (MODERN) GREEK, HINDI-URDU, INDONESIAN, Malay

Hours of instruction to reach average aptitude 720; Speaking proficiency level after 720 hours  2+/ 3

GROUP III Amharic, BENGALI, Burmese, CZECH, Finnish, (MODERN) HEBREW, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, FILIPINO (TAGALOG), POLISH, RUSSIAN, SERBO-CROATIAN, Sinhala, THAI, TAMIL, TURKISH, VIETNAMESE

Hours of instruction to reach average aptitude 720; Speaking proficiency level after 720 hours  2/ 2+

GROUP IV ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN

Hours of instruction to reach average aptitude 1320; Speaking proficiency level after 720 hours  1+
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Chinese Language Study at the University of Michigan
The 2007-2008 academic year is the 70th anniversary of the teaching of Chinese language at the University of Michigan. Chinese language courses (Mandarin dialect) are taught through the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures (www.lsa.umich.edu/asian). We offer beginning through advanced levels, including a series of courses aimed at heritage learners, a number of topics courses geared towards pronunciation, using technology with Chinese language, and Business Chinese. Students with advanced language skill can also choose to enroll in graduate seminars, where most of the reading is in the vernacular.
The faculty of the Chinese Language Program (www.lsa.umich.edu/asian/language/chinese) are some of the leaders in the field of Chinese language teaching. They have authored many articles and textbooks on language teaching and are regularly called upon by colleagues at other universities to present papers and lectures regarding the methodology used at the University of Michigan.
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Chinese Language in the Classroom

Additional Language Weblinks

  • Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools (CLASS)
    Provides a national network of information exchange, ideas, and curriculum resources.
  • Chinese Language Initiatives/A Newsletter, compiled by Asia Society
    A monthly news and event digest on Chinese language learning.
    To subscribe e-mail Chinese@askasia.org
  • Chinese Language Teachers Association
    Facilitates Chinese language acquisition and instruction, including the the integration of non-textbook-specific national standards and serves as a provider of teacher training programs of both a pre-service and in-service nature.
  • Learning Chinese Online, compiled by Tianwei Xie, CSU Long Beach
    Provides information about online schools, pronunciation and grammar; supplies lists of Chinese schools, forums, tools for teachers, exchange clubs, and cultural exchanges, to name only a few of the many language-based topics covered at this site.
  • Marjorie Chan's China Links
    Annotated links to over six hundred China- and Chinese language and linguistics-related websites.
  • National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages: CouncilNet
    Addresses communication and information for institutions and individuals interested in teaching and learning less commonly taught languages (LCTLs).

Online Learning Chinese Weblinks--See AP Chinese Language and Culture Teacher's Guide by Miao-Fen Tseng, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (College Board)

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K-12 Certification in Chinese

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, all classroom teachers in public schools must be certified and highly qualified to teach their subject within a specified time period.  Certificates can range from fully certified to alternatively certified to provisionally certified, but all teachers must be "licensed" to teach students.  Because Chinese is a relatively new addition to the menu of certification areas, not all states have certification procedures in place to license teachers of Chinese.  However, there are agreements among many states through which reciprocity of teaching certificates may be honored.  Information on which states currently offer certification for Chinese can be found on www.AskAsia.org/Chinese. Because matters related to certification vary from state to state, schools should contact the state foreign language supervisor (www.ncssfl.org) or the state teacher accrediting agency for information about their specific state's certification procedure.  In the absence of a K-12 certified Chinese language teacher, an option is to pair a Chinese-speaking paraprofessional with a certified ESL teacher or teacher of another language.  Excerpted from Asia Society, Creating a Chinese Language Program in Your School

K-12 Certification in Chinese in Michigan

  • Wayne State University
  • Eastern Michigan University