Chinese/Japanese school

[kimpossible]

Not a single person that I know of who attended Chinese or Japanese school, or *insert your ethnicity/language here* school has a single good thing to say about it.

In your opinion, was it a waste of time and your parents' resources? Was it of any use whatsoever? I'm talking about the kids' schools, not college or loveboat*, etc.

*loveboat is/was a Taiwan based program. despite the name it wasn't really a boat.

[deez nuts]

arggggh nightmares! but seriously i'm kinda thankful my parents did it. would've been a waste to lose the few years of elementary school education I had in Taiwan.

But it was miserable when I was going through it.

edit but there were some cute girls though!



<!--EDIT|Chasiubao_Boy|Sep 5 2002, 11:43 AM-->

[AliBabaIncorporated]

most teachers of such schools are not trained in applied linguistics. They have no idea how to teach languages. so basically they are daycare centers where the adults talk in chinese and the kids talk in English. unfortunately they don't have childcare licenses either. the only way to promote language ability in youth is to give them a natural social context to use that language with each other.

courses in such schools aren't usually so good at that since they're structured as a language course, rather than a standard class which conveys actual information. they don't teach kids anything which they wouldn't already use English to talk about. a language class which just teaches vocabulary to kids is completely useless, cuz kids don't understand why bother learning a second language, they just wanna express themselves in whatever words they can wrap their brains about and their friends can understand. teach them something they DON'T know in English but do know in the mother tongue, and they'll use the mother tongue to express it.

i skipped out on the whole chinese school experience when i came to the states. my HK friends in high school came along and rescued my Chinese abilities. Free of tuition and a lot more effective.

[amietron]

Originally posted by Chasiubao_Boy@Sep 5 2002, 08:42 AM
arggggh nightmares! but seriously i'm kinda thankful my parents did it. would've been a waste to lose the few years of elementary school education I had in Taiwan.

But it was miserable when I was going through it.

edit but there were some cute girls though!
Mine was primarily (if not solely) for kids who would return to their homeland after living in the states for a few years cus of their dad's job. Mondays and Wednesdays 3-7PM. A little much. Lots of homework so kids wouldn't forget their native tongue. It was hellish. Recess was fun though. And summer school was fun too. It helped me with math too. I think that's how I gained edge.

I'm thankful to my parents also.

[Chris]

I am a product of the Chinese School here in San Francisco.

The schools I went to have teaching degrees in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. The text books were mostly from Taiwan, so basically what we learn is on par with the education I would get in Taiwan. The first 6 years were bad because i was force to go to chinese school by my parents. But after I started in 8th grade. I realized the importance of having learned Chinese. I wanted to finished all my levels and graduated. I pratically begged my parents to paid my last tution. I paid my own for another school in the advanced level. I finished!

Now I am capable to read a newspaper with no help. Can do translations for nonprofit and law firms. And contemplating to become a translator for the health care industry.

Not bad for someone who has been here for 21 years.

Where are you at HH? I might be able to direct you to a good school.

One thing to remember that you MUST BE FIRM with the school. My parents were and I can't thank them enough for doing that. When I was young, I would complained a lot of why I am going through so much schooling but then I finally realized the importance of it. :)

[kimpossible]

Originally posted by Chris@Sep 5 2002, 11:40 AM
I am a product of the Chinese School here in San Francisco.

The schools I went to have teaching degrees in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. The text books were mostly from Taiwan, so basically what we learn is &nbsp;on par with the education I would get in Taiwan. The first 6 years were bad because i was force to go to chinese school by my parents. &nbsp;But after I started in 8th grade. I realized the importance of having learned Chinese. &nbsp;I wanted to finished all my levels and graduated. I pratically begged my parents to paid my last tution. &nbsp; I paid my own for another school in the advanced level. &nbsp;I finished!

Now I am capable to read a newspaper with no help. Can do translations for nonprofit and law firms. And contemplating to become a translator for the health care industry.

Not bad for someone who has been here for 21 years.

Where are you at HH? I might be able to direct you to a good school.

One thing to remember that you MUST BE FIRM with the school. My parents were and I can't thank them enough for doing that. &nbsp;When I was young, I would complained a lot of why I am going through so much schooling but then I finally realized the importance of it. :)
No kids as of this moment - will keep the YW folks updated though. Promise :)

I asked because most people I know have just absolutely hated it and it was of zero use to them because they're still monolingual English. When we have kids we're probably going to move to Taiwan for a while. Ideally enough for them to get through grammar school and then move back to the states to finish out the rest. That's the ideal which isn't reality.

Reality is that we might have to send them to Chinese school. Mainly, I want to ensure our (future) children have good Mandarin, both spoken and written, and that is something I unfortunately can not provide for them as a parent.

edit: Plus, I'm going to try to make the conversion to primarily Mandarin at home when we have kids, for their sake. I speak it like a foreigner and I don't want them to pick up my bad habits. Therefore, Chinese school.

I'm north of you California people. PM me if you want to know exactly where, I just don't want to post it up on the internet.



<!--EDIT|Hello_Hapa|Sep 5 2002, 11:59 AM-->

[amietron]

If you don't get around to moving to Taiwan, your best bet would be to find a Chinese school that is.. as Chris put it "on par with the education I would get in Taiwan."

Do they have special Chinese schools that you have to test into? Cus I know that's how mine was.

[kimpossible]

Originally posted by amietron@Sep 5 2002, 12:04 PM
If you don't get around to moving to Taiwan, your best bet would be to find a Chinese school that is.. as Chris put it "on par with the education I would get in Taiwan."

Do they have special Chinese schools that you have to test into? Cus I know that's how mine was.
The problem there gets a little political - literally. Most schools in America that teach Chinese, be they elementary or college, teach it mainland style with anglicized Chinese alphabet (like romaji) and Simplified characters. You've probably seen the difference between the Chinese version and Japanese versions of some characters. Like... country.

Anyhow, just using a different system and way of speaking can conjure up images of the Cultural Revolution and Communism. Taiwan uses the Traditional characters and an 'alphabet' that functions like hiragana or furigana. Plus they don't curl their tongue when they speak or use mainland words that sound too commie. Taiwan Mandarin sounds softer to me, not so much "rrrrrrrrrr" to it.

There isn't a school in my area like Chris went to. We have a makeshift one put together by the Taiwanese community that we of course have access to but it's kind of haphazard and uneven at best.



<!--EDIT|Hello_Hapa|Sep 5 2002, 12:55 PM-->

[Chris]

Originally posted by Hello_Hapa@Sep 5 2002, 12:29 PM
Originally posted by amietron@Sep 5 2002, 12:04 PM
If you don't get around to moving to Taiwan, your best bet would be to find a Chinese school that is.. as Chris put it "on par with the education I would get in Taiwan."

Do they have special Chinese schools that you have to test into? Cus I know that's how mine was.
The problem there gets a little political - literally. Most schools in American that teach Chinese, be they elementary or college, teach it mainland style with anglicized Chinese alphabet (like romaji) and Simplified characters. You've probably seen the difference between the Chinese version and Japanese versions of some characters. Like... country.

Anyhow, just using a different system and way of speaking can conjure up images of the Cultural Revolution and Communism. Taiwan uses the Traditional characters and an 'alphabet' that functions like hiragana or furigana. Plus the don't curl their tongue when they speak or use mainland words that sound too commie. Taiwan Mandarin sounds softer to me, not so much "rrrrrrrrrr" to it.

There isn't a school in my area like Chris went to. We have a makeshift one put together by the Taiwanese community that we of course have access to but it's kind of haphazard and uneven at best.
hehe HH the funny thing about the school in the bay area is that they teach the traditional course BUT they would use the anglized alphabet to teach us the tones. BECAUSE we were the US and most of us were goign t english school as well. They adapted that system so we can learn mandarin faster.

[Ayers]

I went to Korean school on Saturdays while I was in elementary school and although I didn't retain much of the lessons that were learned, I thought it was a good experience and wish I spent more time learning korean.

I think the program I went to was sponsered for free (?? not sure.. never asked) and the the program had language lessons in the am, and your choice of music lessons (piano, violin, etc), art, or Tae Kwon Do. All I remember doing is fooling around with friends... ditching class to go to an arcade near by, and learning maybe a kindergartener's level of korean.
Sad eh? :(

I'm going to try and encourage some level of korean language proficiency with my kids, but in the meantime I need to brush up on my own skills. Anyone know of any good korean language programs in San Diego?

[SunWuKong]

Originally posted by Hello_Hapa@Sep 5 2002, 03:29 PM
Originally posted by amietron@Sep 5 2002, 12:04 PM
If you don't get around to moving to Taiwan, your best bet would be to find a Chinese school that is.. as Chris put it "on par with the education I would get in Taiwan."

Do they have special Chinese schools that you have to test into? Cus I know that's how mine was.
The problem there gets a little political - literally. Most schools in America that teach Chinese, be they elementary or college, teach it mainland style with anglicized Chinese alphabet (like romaji) and Simplified characters. You've probably seen the difference between the Chinese version and Japanese versions of some characters. Like... country.

Anyhow, just using a different system and way of speaking can conjure up images of the Cultural Revolution and Communism. Taiwan uses the Traditional characters and an 'alphabet' that functions like hiragana or furigana. Plus they don't curl their tongue when they speak or use mainland words that sound too commie. Taiwan Mandarin sounds softer to me, not so much "rrrrrrrrrr" to it.

There isn't a school in my area like Chris went to. We have a makeshift one put together by the Taiwanese community that we of course have access to but it's kind of haphazard and uneven at best.
they teach simplified??? shoot i would rather learn traditional regardless of political feelings. if you can read traditional, you can read simplified.

and the "r" emphasis i think is in beijing and northern china. in southern china, mandarin is softer also. my mandarin is only so-so, i cannot understand the beijing mandarin accent with its r's at all.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Originally posted by Chris@Sep 5 2002, 08:45 PM
hehe HH the funny thing about the school in the bay area is that they teach the traditional course BUT they would use the anglized alphabet to teach us the tones. BECAUSE we were the US and most of us were goign t english school as well. They adapted that system so we can learn mandarin faster.
hmm, I never learned the mainland hanyu pinyin at all, only taiwan's zhuyin fuhao. (my taiwanese friend taught me and I got it reinforced from this educational program on TV). some linguistics educators feel that teaching kids a romanization system for, say, Chinese, can interfere with their developing a good accent, because then they associate characters with English letters and thus English pronunciation, and so the sound they make gets filtered through their English phonics lessons. Whereas they should really directly associate a character with a sound they hear. I learned to speak and read (though I think in Cantonese or Hakka when I read) without reference to any phonetic system, only by my friends telling me "this character is read exactly the same as this other character" whenever they taught me new words, and personally I think it's a lot better.

now my Mandarin teacher here in HK cannot read zhuyin fuhao whatsoever even though she has taught Mandarin for years. (not to mention she's been in HK for all those years and barely understands Cantonese, let alone speaking it). you'd expect that regardless of political affiliations, if a teacher is being paid a salary by a university to teach Mandarin to overseas students of all various backgrounds, she'd at least learn to read it or at the basic minimum have an easily accessible pinyin-zhuyin conversion chart somewhere in her class room. NOPE. oh well, pinyin only took me about a week to figure out, so not much time was wasted, but, by the same token, zhuyin should only take my teacher a week to figure out, and by learning it she'd benefit all of her students ... uugh ...

as for traditional vs simplified: even though i can read traditional characters fine, my reading speed drops down to damn near nothing when i have to read something in simplified ... tons of simplified characters don't make any sense at all unless you speak mandarin. They replace the normal phonetic part of many characters with a phonetic that only sounds like/rhymes with the real pronunciation of the character in Mandarin, not in any other dialect. e.g. hua of "zhong hua min guo" Republic of China ... the top part gets replaced with a character read "fah" in cantonese while the whole character is read as "wah." or shi of "ren shi" to recognize ... the right phonetic part gets replaced with a character read "tzee" in Cantonese while the whole character is read "sik." but hey, when i'm taking notes in class, i'll happily use many simplified characters just like my local classmates.



<!--EDIT|AliBabaIncorporated|Sep 6 2002, 06:33 AM-->

[kasia]

i loved chinese school. i graduated from cantonese school and went on to mandarin. i met some of my very best friends (and past boyfriends) there. my mom was my chinese school teacher for a few years, so my best friends and i would get really good grades (but really bad citizenship grades =p)

but yeh, i relied heavily on pinyin (boh, poh, moh, foh)--it was almost like cheating.

at our chinese school, we also had to take an elective class--which took place after two hours of our actual chinese class. they offered chinese calligraphy, basketball, chinese speech, chinese history, chinese painting, and chinese ballet. did anyone else's school have that?

[SunWuKong]

Originally posted by kasia@Sep 6 2002, 02:06 AM
but yeh, i relied heavily on pinyin (boh, poh, moh, foh)--it was almost like cheating.
i thought pinyin and bpmf are two different things? well i guess bpmf is one way to pin yin. but they don't use bpmf to pin yin in china. they use pinyin.



<!--EDIT|SunWuKung|Sep 6 2002, 02:59 AM-->

[kimpossible]

This may sound dumb, but I have a harder time reading Chinese or Japanese when it's written in English. I need those characters to get the meaning faster, plus with so many words that sound the same, I have to figure out context to get the meaning. Plus, if it's a word I don't know I can usually figure it out by looking at what's in the character or at the very least look it up in a Chinese dictionary.

One of my cousins write to me in romaji, drives me freakin' nuts because I see English but have to think in Japanese. I think she does it because she feels cool. My other cousin writes normally in Japanese. I have a much easier time reading his letters.

i thought pinyin and bpmf are two different things? well i guess bpmf is one way to pin yin. but they don't use bpmf to pin yin in china. they use pinyin.

I think she means English versions of bpmf instead of straight up pinyin. No q or x or other weird stuff.

my reading speed drops down to damn near nothing when i have to read something in simplified

In some ways it isn't too hard for me because I've noticed Japanese uses a lot of simplified (or just plain different) versions of Chinese, but some simplified is just too abstract for me to read. I was trying to read a box of medicine from the mainland and I had to give up.

[deez nuts]

Originally posted by Hello_Hapa@Sep 6 2002, 10:31 AM
This may sound dumb, but I have a harder time reading Chinese or Japanese when it's written in English. I need those characters to get the meaning faster, plus with so many words that sound the same, I have to figure out context to get the meaning. Plus, if it's a word I don't know I can usually figure it out by looking at what's in the character or at the very least look it up in a Chinese dictionary.


Me too. Never had experience with pinyin. It took me a good few minutes to figure out SunWuKung was monkey king in english, in fact I was then unsure and had to ask the man, MK "the voice of reason and everything holy", himself.

[artsfartsyjanet]

I never went to Chinese school. Come on, I'm from St. Louis! There weren't any back in the day when I was growing up. I'll be taking Chinese out of my own will at Washington University next semester because I've always wanted to learn how to read and write it.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Originally posted by Hello_Hapa@Sep 6 2002, 03:31 PM
This may sound dumb, but I have a harder time reading Chinese or Japanese when it's written in English. I need those characters to get the meaning faster, plus with so many words that sound the same, I have to figure out context to get the meaning. Plus, if it's a word I don't know I can usually figure it out by looking at what's in the character or at the very least look it up in a Chinese dictionary.

yeah, I completely cannot understand the romanized cantonese, can't even see how sunwukung comes out as "monkey king." which is a bit weird cuz when I write out romanized cantonese (usually to indicate pronunciations to non-cantonese speakers on bulletin boards, actually), other cantonese-speakers say they understand fine. maybe it's just cuz I'm not a native speaker and didn't get the language implanted in my brain until after the age where the brain's childhood language learning capabilities shut down.

but ya know what's worse? reading non-Chinese names written in Chinese. the first time i read a newspaper article which was discussing the history of communism, it took me a good 10 minutes of sitting there staring off into space (this was before I could speak any Mandarin at all) before I had all the names figured out. I'm not sure whether to blame Russian or Chinese for that one. I don't even wanna imagine trying to puzzle through an article on Arab politics just cuz figuring out the names would drive me nuts before I got halfway through. this can make it near impossible sometimes to talk about politics with Chinese people who don't read English newspapers.

then again I suppose it gave me some advantages. other students in my Japanese class always complained about trying to figure out foreign names written in katakana but for me it was a breeze compared to a lifetime spent puzzling out ""Hei Dak Lak" = Hitler.


my reading speed drops down to damn near nothing when i have to read something in simplified

In some ways it isn't too hard for me because I've noticed Japanese uses a lot of simplified (or just plain different) versions of Chinese, but some simplified is just too abstract for me to read. I was trying to read a box of medicine from the mainland and I had to give up.


yeah, fortunately most of the japanese simplifications are pretty transparent to read and easy to remember, cuz they're NOT based on phonetics which only work in Japanese, or on writing strokes and shapes which don't look anything like historically normal Chinese writing. also some mainland simplified characters were simply lifted directly from Japanese simplifications. e.g. kuni/guo2 "country" or tona.eru/cheng1 (cheng1 of cheng1fu1) "to address as."



<!--EDIT|AliBabaIncorporated|Sep 6 2002, 08:03 PM-->

[SunWuKong]

Originally posted by AliBabaIncorporated@Sep 6 2002, 03:02 PM
yeah, I completely cannot understand the romanized cantonese, can't even see how sunwukung comes out as "monkey king." which is a bit weird cuz when I write out romanized cantonese (usually to indicate pronunciations to non-cantonese speakers on bulletin boards, actually), other cantonese-speakers say they understand fine. maybe it's just cuz I'm not a native speaker and didn't get the language implanted in my brain until after the age where the brain's childhood language learning capabilities shut down.

but ya know what's worse? reading non-Chinese names written in Chinese. the first time i read a newspaper article which was discussing the history of communism, it took me a good 10 minutes of sitting there staring off into space (this was before I could speak any Mandarin at all) before I had all the names figured out. I'm not sure whether to blame Russian or Chinese for that one. I don't even wanna imagine trying to puzzle through an article on Arab politics just cuz figuring out the names would drive me nuts before I got halfway through. this can make it near impossible sometimes to talk about politics with Chinese people who don't read English newspapers.

then again I suppose it gave me some advantages. other students in my Japanese class always complained about trying to figure out foreign names written in katakana but for me it was a breeze compared to a lifetime spent puzzling out ""Hei Dak Lak" = Hitler.
actually "sun wu kung" is not cantonese romanization. it's mandarin pinyin. :) in cantonese it would be syun ngh huhng.

and yeah, chinese "romanized" western terms and names are very difficult to recognize. the most annoying thing is when a name is "romanized" to mandarin sounds and then read in cantonese (or another dialect). the cantonese name for "clinton" sounds nothing like "clinton" at all. at least in mandarin there's a little bit of semblance.

i suppose there's not many other alternatives (besides reading the names in the actual foreign languages themselves) since chinese is not phonetic.



<!--EDIT|SunWuKung|Sep 6 2002, 07:35 PM-->