Starting with this new school year, I have been teaching a Chinese
1 course at our local high school. The students are really enjoying learning
Chinese language and culture. They try
their best at the tones and the sounds, write the characters, and speak the
numbers and daily greetings. They hope that
someday their Chinese language skills will be useful to them in life.
However, mastering the Chinese tonal sounds and memorizing
the characters are challenging. These
days I am constantly thinking how to help my students to memorize the visual
image of characters.
Interestingly enough, this morning I read an article online at
the Wall Street Journal about a spelling bee on Chinese Central TV promoting
Chinese youth to gain and retain their skills in writing Chinese characters.
I found a few interesting passages in the article:
The
show has touched a nerve in China, where purists complain that smartphones are
eroding language skills, thanks to the frequent use of emoticons and software
that lets people write faster using the pinyin system, where Chinese words are
written phonetically in Latin script.
Mandarin
has been an important part of the government's strategy to unify a vast country
that spans the Uighur-speaking Muslims of the far West, and the dialects of
Cantonese and Fujianese in the south. Contestants from various ethnic minority
groups in China also took part in the competition in their ethnic dress,
underscoring the idea that Chinese language brings the country together.
"Save
the children, save the Chinese language, save our culture!" he [Wang Xuming, a former spokesman of the Ministry of
Education] tweets frequently on his account, which has about 1.8
million followers.
When I was growing up in Beijing, I practiced writing
characters with a fountain pen every night and aimed to master the skills to
write each character beautifully. I also
practiced Chinese calligraphy with brush and ink. The idea I was taught was that with the
skills of writing characters beautifully, I would be respected as a well
educated and intelligent person. I guess
this value has changed in the new generation in China as it has in America, where
many young people don’t learn or care much about beautiful cursive
writing. Many learn to type on computers
and use their smart phones to communicate.
I am wondering how long I would like to have my students to
learn to write Chinese characters before I introduce them how to use a computer
to “type” Chinese characters.
