Eric's Beijing Diary

Signed up for Mandarin classes this week. They gave me a free trial course yesterday, and I like what I saw, so I signed up for ten days of classes. You have to pay for at least ten days to get the discount. This school is operated by a Korean businessman (as are most of the language schools in Wudaoko), and is very flexible, because you can select any two hour period during the business day.

I have always resisted doing this. I have been working with tutors for two years. The advantage of working with a tutor is that you get a lot more feedback about your pronunciation. Ina, my tutor in Arizona, was very patient, but she also had a very sharp ear, so she could correct me if my pronunciation was off, which was most of the time. The book her dad wrote had a chart which showed all the sounds of Mandarin. So we would go through this chart at Einstein's Bagels and I would actually practice pronouncing every sound in the Chinese language. This is something that does not happen in a class. But the problem is the tones. Tones are auditory. To learn tones, we use the four marks which are placed above the vowel. But tones are sounds, not marks on a piece of paper. So in the end, you just can't learn them unless you engage in or hear a lot of conversation. More than once, since I came to China, I have actually found myself correcting someone when they indicated which tone they were using. This is because they are native speakers. They don't think in terms of marks, they just speak naturally. I have come to the point where I can identify a given sound with the correct tone, but the problem with me is that I can never seem to remember which tone is the right one to use for a given syllable in a given word. The only way to get there is to hear that word hundreds of times. This only happens in conversation, and tutoring does not tend to be conversational. So with tutoring, there tends to be a point of diminishing returns, where the advantage of concentrating on pronunciation is eventually overcome by the disadvantage of not hearing enough conversation.

My teacher at the Global Village school in Wudaoko does not really correct everyone the way a tutor would. But this school practices language immersion--they teach Chinese in Chinese. So I have a lot of opportunity to hear Chinese spoken at my level. Perhaps I am making the switch at about the right time. I hope so.