Packard, "Effects of Time Lag in the Introduction of Characters into the Chinese Language Curriculum," The Modern Language Journal, 74.2 (1990), 167-175. Jerry Packard published a relevant study in 1990: My dear wife, Li-ching, went as far as she could toward deemphasizing the characters during the early stages of learning Mandarin within the confining curricula of Harvard, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore. Others who understand the importance of mastering the spoken language first are Bob Sanders (Auckland, NZ) and Cornelius Kubler (Williams College) - Neil was also trained under Eleanor Jorden (there are others who stress spoken language too I cannot name all of them). I've always said that we should learn languages the way babies do they learn to speak long before they learn to write.Įleanor Jorden (praise be her name!) understood that principle well, and she taught people like Ron Walton (at Penn ) and Galal Walker (at Ohio State) who followed her precepts. If I were the czar or god of Chinese and Japanese language pedagogy, I would not teach students a single Chinese character until they were relatively fluent - about two years. Chao and Eleanor Jorden were! I completely agree with their approach. You see how smart and perceptive truly brilliant linguists like Y. I did about 30+ lessons before starting to learn kana, and found it very effective for absorbing the spoken structures quickly. Is Eleanor Jorden’s Beginning Japanese still much used? It took students through 40 lessons entirely in romaji, without a single kana or kanji in the entire two volumes. At Princeton we did each lesson that way: one week entirely in GR then a second week in characters. Chao, in the Introduction to Mandarin Primer, recommends that students learn all 24 lessons of the book in GR only, to establish a strong basis in the spoken language, then to restudy the book a second time, only then starting to read in characters. The current post is intended as a followup and supplement to that post.Įarlier this week, I received from Tom Bartlett, who has had a tremendous amount of experience teaching Chinese at some of the best universities in the world, the following paragraphs: Some years ago (in 2008, as a matter of fact), I wrote a post entitled " How to learn to read Chinese".
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