Eric's Beijing Diary

WHIZZ KID MEMORIZES DICTIONARY
(China Daily)

A 6-year-old boy from Zibo of Shandong Province can give the meaning to any given character and can recall their exact locations in a Chinese dictionary.

Jun started memorizing the Xinhua Dictionary at the age of 4. It took him 11 months to remember all of the characters in the dictionary.

Just the encouragement I need. I recently installed a homemade flashcard program I got from an English teacher on the Teaching in China Yahoo group. My language skill is still quite limited, but for me, it is really a matter of priority. What I mean by that is that my current situation doesn't allow me to study language full time. So that's one thing. I have a job, and I have to give a certain measure of attention to it. But I also have other things to study. For me, the process of "learning" China involves much more than just language. The research says that for Missionary Kids, knowledge of country and culture tends to exceed language proficiency. That is certainly true for me, except for the United States, where I was a native speaker. But even in that case, my interest in the history and culture of the US tended to be significantly above average. I have traveled in every one of the 50 states, and spent a good deal of time talking with local people everywhere I went. Understanding the culture in which I live has always been a high priority for me. I said all that to say this: It is not enough for me to learn the Chinese language. I need to spend a considerable amount of time studying the history and culture of this country. And beyond that, I have a personal need to be involved in some sort of systematic study of the Scriptures. That's just something that's always been part of my life.

How to combine all these. Throughout my adult life, I have expended considerable effort in developing self-teaching methods. When I began to study Chinese, I ran into a roadblock. Every self-teaching method I have developed is based primarily on reading. I diverged from that when I decided to become a technical trainer, because I felt that I would never really have any measure of proficiency if I did not work with the systems I was teaching. So I put a fair amount of emphasis on lab work. Even so, I still spent hundreds of hours reading tens of thousands of pages of documentation. But when I began to study Mandarin, as I said, I hit a brick wall. I didn't know how to read Chinese. So it has taken me quite awhile to develop enough reading proficiency for self-teaching. I am certainly not where I would like to be, but I have managed to get to a point where I can basically make out a sentence, if I have a dictionary available to look up the characters with which I am not familiar.

I started in the spring of 2002 with a tutor about 1-2 hours a week. My first tutor returned to China with her family in August of 2002. Fortunately, I was introduced to Ina at about this time. What a Godsend! Ina was born in Changchun, and lived there until she was 11 years old. At that point, her father moved the family to Japan, where they took out Japanese citizenship. He teaches Chinese at a Japanese university, and she used his textbook to teach me. I will never forget her kind patience as I stumbled through the lessons she gave me. Part of each lesson was a scrambled sentence. I had to arrange the words correctly, using the rules of Mandarin grammar I was learning. Sometimes I frustrated and went to a Chinese restaurant so I could ask a waitress to help me (usually took her about ten seconds). But I really was able to teach myself through my homework most of the time.

When I got to China, I started with a couple tutors here, and then began to take classes at a local language school. The language school really helped my listening comprehension, but it was frustrating, because it is pretty tough to do the exercises in the book if you can't read. So after a year of that, I dropped out and started studying on my own, determined to learn how to read. I bought a book at the level that I thought would fit me, and began to go through the dialogues, looking up one character at a time. The book had forty chapters, so I figured if I could go through one chapter a week, I could finish the book before the end of the year, and go back to the language school. Best laid plans. Took me four months to get through the first two chapters. Pathetically slow, but I do know how to look up a character using the radical chart, now, so the time was well spent. Another thing I did during that time was to develop a self-teaching modus operandi that accommodates my study of the Scriptures. I download sermons from the Internet, and load them in my mp3 player. Every day, as much as possible, I go to the coffee bar with my mp3 player, my Chinese dictionary, and some dialogues and study my Chinese while I am going through the lectures on the Bible. The benefit of a theological lecture as background is that I am guided to keep at my study for a predetermined amount of time.

Just recently, I have started using Chinesepod. This is very helpful, because I can carry the audio with me (the podcast part is free), and read through the dialogues while I am listening to the audio. A little bit of this and a little bit of that and I am somehow slowly getting the job done. But eleven months? That's a little ambitious. Good target, though. If a 4-year-old can do it, I can at least give it a try.