Do As I Say, Not As I Do: On Learning Chinese/ Teaching English

Huh?

I’ve been told I’m a good teacher. I’ve been teaching English for nearly a decade now and know how to nurture a reluctant super-low beginner out of their speechless shell and into proud conversations in English. I’ve taught study skills using write synonym sheets and audio files, so many times that I could teach a class on how best to learn a language at the drop of the hat.

I can’t say I do much of that myself when I’m at the other end of the piece of chalk. I’m an abysmally undisciplined language learner and, had I found myself in my own class being taught by myself, I’d likely be the one that Teacher Me gets infinitely annoyed by. Hello! I’m at the back, doodling and making occasional (kind hearted) snarky remarks and frequently refusing to read aloud or go up to the board. I probably also have my phone out, covertly sending an occasional text message from beneath the desk (work stuff, mostly, as I have to balance both this month). I have been known to feed my iFish on my iPod in the middle of Group Reading Aloud Moments, trying to focus my brain with the tap-tap-tapping.  I loathe reading aloud in class. In one ear and out the other. I’d rather sit quietly and parse my sentences.

But I do learn in the end, in spite of my many bad study habits.

From the Teacher Side

My Mandarin course has got me thinking about language learning and language teaching. If I am my own worst student (and yet I speak 5+ languages to varying degrees of fluency, mostly self taught) then I seriously need to stop and think about how we teach languages, what we expect from students (and why), and how we can reshuffle our advice to students about how to improve. I can’t say I’ve ever taken my own advice so maybe alternate advice is called for.

Why I suck at studying languages:

1. I’m shy. I may not look it, but I am. Even in English, I get nervous when I have to speak to people I don’t know. Ask me on my first day of Beginner class to go out in the break and ask 5 people 5 questions and I quake in my boots. Everything I just learned in class flies out the window as I struggle to contain my terror.

In Turkey, although I was actively studying Turkish on my own from the beginning, all my Turkish friends thought I was stubbornly stupid because I wasn’t speaking much more than hesitant, simple sentences for my first year or two. Other teachers, more outgoing teachers, happily blurted out sentences with appalling grammar and cringe-worthy pronunciation and used all the wrong words in all the wrong places and had praise lavished on them.

In my head I secretly deconstructed their errors and reformulated their sentences (in my head, never aloud— this is why I was deemed stupid). I was the toddler who didn’t speak until they were four years old then suddenly started speaking in complete sentences. That’s how it was with me and Turkish.

Somewhere around year three things started to click into place and I started actually using Turkish on a regular basis, aloud rather than just in my head. I needed just a bit more time to get used to it, to feel comfortable around it, before I could really put myself out there.

As a teacher, I’ve preached the language mantra of just getting out there and speaking and making heaps of mistakes and learning from your mistakes and… yeah… but I have to be honest: when I was learning Turkish, when I was busy mentally parsing everyone else’s sentences and reading everything in sight and being almost insanely passive, I was learning a hell of a lot of Turkish. My Turkish vocabulary is awesome. When I finally felt strong enough to speak aloud on a regular basis, people were shocked and impressed.  From what they could tell, I’d gone from beginner to intermediate nearly overnight.

Amendment # 1: Don’t force people to learn in a way that makes them dread learning. If they want to process things internally for a little longer than others, that’s cool. If they are motivated, it’ll all even out in the end.

2. Total immersion makes my head explode. I know it’s the best way to learn a language and I have dabbled in it on a number of occasions and I hate it. The idea of living with, say, a host family and speaking only Language X 24 hours a day makes me want to run away screaming. I did it in South Africa and all that Afrikaans with no rest for my brain left me feeling quite tired and cranky and overwhelmed. I need to be able to retreat to my own little private  English speaking bubble, if only for a short time, to de-stress.

Toil

When I come home from my classes every afternoon after 4 intensive hours of Mandarin, I usually do the following: I crack open a non-Chinese beer and watch a downloaded episode of Bones. In English. I know I should be reviewing my lesson notes (and as a certified nerd, I take copious notes) but at that point, I want nothing to do with Chinese.  My brain is full. It is tired. I’d probably learn bigger better faster more if I reviewed my notes and promptly did my homework and spent 20 minutes making flashcards for the day’s vocabulary but…yeah no, I drink beer and watch forensic anthropologists dissect half rotted corpses. In English.

And you know what? I’m still learning a lot. Probably not as quickly as I might otherwise be but I’m still learning a lot. Yay me.

3. Absorbing your linguistic surroundings is good, if you can muster up the enthusiasm. In Turkey, I was lucky because I really liked Turkish music so lyrics were a huge factor in my Turkish language learning.  Turkish television was pretty hilarious in its banality/absurdity so I often watched it for a laugh and learned a lot from that too. The ads were frequently barking mad. I can still recite ad copy from 8 years ago. Filli boya- en guzel boya! Form ye, form da kal!

These are, traditionally, good things for language learners to do. Read the books, magazines, newspapers, posters, ads, menus, whatever; watch tv and dvds and try to follow the speech; listen to the music and decipher the lyrics. Marvellous: yay me for doing that in Turkey.

However. Alas. I really don’t like Chinese music. At all. I really can’t get interested in the tv here. I’m functionally illiterate in a country whose written language would take years to memorize and whose written characters aren’t even really related in any way to how a word sounds anyway. I live and work in a cozy little bubble of my own language. I have a feeling my Chinese is never going to be particularly good (though I think I’ll be decent enough if I keep at it) but really, I’m okay with that now.

If this was a language I was passionate about (like, say, Irish was when I was 15 and passionately trying to translate sean nos lyrics into English in the middle of math class) then I might throw myself in wholeheartedly. But I’m not.

For me, Chinese will be a practical tool for living in this city, so I don’t feel like an ignorant dumb ass. I’ve reached the point where I can and do buy my veggies and order my noodles 100% in Chinese. Yay me! I’ll be happy to reach a point where I can banter a bit with the noodle guy as well but it isn’t an urgent need. For now I’m struggling to reach a point where people don’t look at me as if I’m speaking martian whenever I try to say something in Chinese (usually something my Chinese teacher said was properly pronounced and theoretically clear when I said it in class).

Moral of the story?

There isn’t one really. Just notes on realizations. People learn languages in different ways, at different rates, for different reasons and with different goals in mind and mental/emotional blocks to contend with.

I’m not going to beat myself up over my lack of Huge Burning Desire to master Mandarin and I’m not going to feel let down if my own exhausted and bewildered students feel the same way. In my Mandarin class, the motivation levels run the gamut from Haven’t Shown Up in a Week to Taking 4 Extra Hours of 1-1 Classes Every Day. I’m somewhere in the middle.  I’m also juggling work commitments (lots of testing and marking to do at weekends and after class) and a frustrated inner voice that occasionally blurts out that it’s just plain tired of having to learn new stuff. Sorry, inner self.

As a teacher, I tend to have higher expectations of my students than I want to admit. I need to stop and remember that they too are as deeply imperfect as me, with varying level of possibly conflicted motivation (their parents sent them; they only want English for the money a good job will bring; they want English so they can go abroad and escape the pressure their parents put on them; they want English because they genuinely love learning it).

If they are doodling in their books, it isn’t because they necessarily aren’t listening but maybe because doodling helps them to focus (as it does for me- my notebooks are works of art). If they are nodding off in class, it isn’t necessarily because they are lazy (a teacher’s frequent knee jerk reaction to snoring kids)  but could be because they have a lot of stuff going on in their lives right now.

Language learning really isn’t as clear cut as it seems. Too often we see it as an all-or-nothing endeavor. Maybe we should see it more like math- some people are happy with just enough to balance their metaphorical  chequebook  or pass grade 11 algebra while others are happily ploughing on through to calculus. And that’s fine. Just fine.