| FAQ |
1. Why Learn Chinese?
2. What kind of Chinese is taught at St.
Edwards University?
3. How hard is it to learn Chinese?
4. Are Chinese characters hard to learn?
5. What is the focus of the program here?
6. What are dialects?
7. What are tones?
8. Does Chinese have an alphabet
|
| For all other questions, please contact Rui Li at 512-416-5863
or email ruil@admin.stedwards.edu |
| 1. Why Learn Chinese? |
Being one of the world's oldest civilizations, and having
the world's largest market, China offers unique opportunities
to a wide array of disciplines that range from business
to science. The possibilities are truly endless in China's
steadily growing economy. Learning Mandarin (Chinese) enables
us to explore the endless treasure of its ancient past as
well as provide us ample opportunity to a huge job market
in all of the countries where Mandarin is the language of
commerce.
The Chinese courses are designed and taught to prepare our
students to excel in listening, speaking, reading and writing.
New Trier High School Chinese program also offers students
the opportunity to travel to China in our summer trip exchange
program. This program gives students who choose to go and
visit China and gain basic knowledge and skills necessary
for their study abroad. |
| * More people read Chinese than any other
language in the world! |
 |
| 2. What
kind of Chinese is taught at St. Edwards University?
|
Our Humanities department teaches Modern Standard Chinese,
the official language of the People's Republic of China
and Taiwan. This dialect is also known as "putonghua"
(a term used in the People's Republic of China), "guoyu"
(a term used in Taiwan), Beijing dialect, and Mandarin.
It is different from Cantonese, Shanghai dialect, Taiwanese,
and many other regional dialects, which can be considered
mutually unintelligible, although the written language is
virtually the same for all.
Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world.
A great deal of world trade is conducted in Singapore, Hong
Kong, Beijing, and Taipei where Chinese is spoken. |
| 3.
How hard is it to learn Chinese? |
According to U.S. State Department language training experts,
Chinese ranks with Japanese and Arabic as one of the hardest
languages for native speakers of English to learn. It takes
about three times as long to attain a given level of fluency
in Chinese as in Spanish or French.
Three things make Chinese harder than European languages
to learn. First, the writing system is very complex. Perhaps
half of the time spent in learning Chinese is spent memorizing
characters. Second, European languages have many words which
are similar to English words. Third, unlike English, Chinese
is a tonal language, and for some students it is difficult
to develop the habit of listening for tonal distinctions
and producing them in speech. On the other hand, Chinese
grammar is remarkably simple. There are no inflections,
cases, genders, or declensions. Many people who begin to
study Chinese quickly get "hooked" on it, because
it is so interesting. |
| 4. Are
Chinese characters hard to learn? |
| Chinese characters can be difficult (although learning
to recognize characters is easier than memorizing how to
write them). But spoken Chinese is easier to learn than
you might think. Chinese grammar is very simple. English
speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish
have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders,
verb conjugations, etc.). Well, Chinese speakers complain
that way about English. Make sure you start off by practicing
pronunciation, because a bad pronunciation is hard to correct
later. And make sure to get your tones right! |
| 5. What
is the focus of the program here? |
| The Chinese program at St. Edward's is multimedia based,
designed to provide students with the basic language skills
needed to function in contemporary China with the skills
needed to read classical and contemporary Chinese publications.
In the first year classes we give roughly equal emphasis
to speaking and reading. In the second year, the emphasis
shifts slightly toward reading. Our general goal throughout
is to make the coursework practical, interesting, and relevant.
We see language as part of a larger culture and try to integrate
the part with the whole. |
| 6. What are dialects? |
| A dialect is a variation of a particular language (for
instance, British English versus American English). Chinese
has numerous dialects. Because of China's long history,
these have diverged greatly, to the point that they are
mutually unintelligible (speakers of one dialect can't understand
speakers of another dialect). For this reason, Chinese dialects
are sometimes considered separate languages, but common
history and a common writing system (Chinese characters)
have had a strong unifying influence. The main dialect spoken
in mainland China is Mandarin (sometimes called Putonghua).
There are more people on Earth who speak Mandarin than speakers
of English. Cantonese is widely spoken in Hong Kong and
in many overseas Chinese communities. Taiwanese (sometimes
called Hoklo) is spoken in Taiwan, in addition to Mandarin.
|
| 7. What are tones? |
| In English, words are sometimes spoken with a certain
intonation. Rising intonation indicates a question: * He
left. [stating a fact; voice is flat] * He left? [asking
a question; voice rises] |
| In Chinese, intonation is much more fundamental: it's
part of a word's pronunciation. If your voice rises when
it should have fallen, you can end up saying a completely
different word (with embarrassing consequences). Linguists
call Chinese a tonal language. A classic example is "Ma
ma ma ma?", which means "does mother curse the
horse?" (but only if you say it right!). Getting tones
right is pretty tricky for English speakers learning Chinese,
but it's important. |
| 8. Does Chinese have an alphabet?
|
| No, Chinese uses characters which are very different from
an alphabet. Characters generally have two parts, one of
which represents the meaning and the other the sound. Every
character corresponds to a single syllabble in Chinese,
so the part which represents the sound does not represent
a phoneme like a letter in an alphabet but rather represents
a whole syllable. For this reason, it is said that Chinese
has a syllabary rather than an alphabet. This syllabary
is not very helpful since the same symbols often represent
many different sounds and the same sounds are represented
by many different symbols. This is due to changes in speech
over the millenia. |
