Learning to Read Chinese

Because we have a Chinese-American daughter, our whole family at various times has studied Chinese. At the moment, it's mostly us parents who are studying, because Younger Daughter has been resistant, but I'm hoping to get YD back to it later.

Our teacher is American, and she's been teaching us to read Chinese characters by decomposing the characters into smaller pieces, called "radicals". Here's an example:

In this case, the top part of the character ("jia") represents a roof, and the bottom part of the character represents a pig.  A pig under a roof -- what does it mean?  Why, home (or, by extension, family), of course!

Here's another one:

Here, the radical in red means "female" (it's a pictograph of a woman), and the radical in black means "horse" (imagine four running feet and a flowing tail at the bottom.)  This character represents something female, which sounds like the Chinese word for horse, "ma" (low dipping tone).  What is it?  It's "ma" (high even tone), which means "mother".  (Famous advice to beginning Chinese speakers:  "Don't call your mother a horse!")

You can see how decomposing a character into radicals is a big help in memorizing characters.  So here's the funny thing — apparently, reading is never taught this way in China.  In China, kids are taught to read purely through brute-force memorization.  They get a list of characters and are told to write them out multiple times until they've got them memorized.  If you talk to a Chinese-taught person about radicals, you're likely to get a blank stare.

I had this experience myself once.  I was talking to a Chinese friend of ours, when I noticed the character "jia" in something he was writing.  I pointed to it and said, "we were just studying that character!  It's a pig under a roof!"  He looked at me like I was crazy and said "it means home or family." 

It's the Chinese version of whole-language versus phonics.

Homework in China

(From Country Driving, by Peter Hessler.)

On the whole, six-year-old boys are not naturally cut out for the demands of boarding school, and Wei Jia was especially disorganized.  Often I picked him up on Friday afternoons, on my way to the village, and I always reminded him to make sure he brought the books he needed. But every Friday evening, back in Sancha, it was a complete mystery what would emerge from within the bowels of the Mickey Mouse backpack.  Wei Jia opened the bag like a magician:  anything could come out, and the trick was that even the boy had no idea.  Tonight he conjured up four textbooks, a few pencils, and a dozen crumpled papers.  His father snatched one of the pages.

"What's this?  This is your homework!  How are you going to do your homework if it's torn up like this?"

Wei Jia stared down at the kang.

"Where's your math book?"

"I forgot it," Wei Jia said softly.

"How are you going to do your homework if you don't have the book?"  Wei Ziqi's voice became sharp. "You know what Teacher Yang said today? She said that you always forget your homework.  And you don't pay attention in class!  What's going to happen to you if you don't study well?"

Overachiever's footnote: from Dictionary.com, a "kang" is:
(especially in northern Chinese houses) a masonry or earthen platform at one end of a room, heated in winter by fires underneath and spread with mats for sleeping.

Parent-Teacher Conferences in China

(from Country Driving, by Peter Hessler.)

During the first six weeks of school, Wei Jia distinguished himself by an early interest in English, an unruffled demeanor, and a complete refusal to sit still. In a Chinese classroom, the group is the foundation for every endeavor, and each child always knows his place within that organization ... Peer discipline is crucial — children who misbehave are often asked to stand before the class, where other students help the teacher criticize the guilty party. At the beginning none of this seemed to faze Wei Jia. Having missed kindergarten, he had no concept of school routines; he talked out of turn and he played with pencils at his desk. He lost school assignments and he forgot homework. He wandered the classroom during lessons ...

These infractions, along with a host of others, were described at the first parent-teacher conference. In Chinese schools, such meetings are communal: all of the parents attend at once, and all of them listen as the teacher summarizes each child's performance. The good students are praised, the bad students are criticized, and the listening parents are socialized in much the same way as the children: by the power of the group. There is no greater loss of face than hearing in public that your child does poorly at school. And the bad ones always receive the most attention ... And Wei Jia — he was the fidgeter, the classroom-wanderer, the kid who played with pebbles in the principal's presence.

Yong Zhao takes on Tiger Mom

You Must be Joking, Professor Chua

The more I read by Yong Zhao, the more I like him.

If I Must

If you've been reading around on the blogosphere, you are no doubt aware of Amy Chua's essay, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." In it, she describes her abusive campaign to make child prodigies out of her hapless daughters, on piano and violin (strangely, she allows no other instruments.)

The essay was published as part of the marketing campaign for Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The omnipresent coverage reminds me of the run-up to another book: Creating A Life, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett. Creating A Life was flogged relentlessly by all the media, but then racked up disappointing sales. I can only hope the same for Chua's book, which I have no desire to read. I'll wait for the bitter memoirs from her daughters, after they've completed a few decades of therapy.

It's not clear to me why Chua, and other Asian mothers, have set their sights on training their children in Western classical music. If they believe that mastery of the techniques of violin and piano playing is the road to fame and fortune in the U.S., they're in for a rude shock.

Above all, Chua strikes me as a ruthless self-promoter, aiming to get media attention and a quick buck at the expense of her young daughters. Really, how American can she get?

Two Looks at Education in China

The state of education in China is a big topic this week. First up: an interesting article in the NYTimes, China's Army of Graduates Struggles For Jobs. Last May, China graduated more than six million young people from college. Many of the new graduates come from families who spent their life savings putting their one child through college. But there's not enough professional-level jobs to go around.

As I've remarked before, education doesn't create jobs. The economy creates a certain number of highly-paid jobs, and most of them go to people with college degrees. But that doesn't mean that increasing the number of people with college degrees will improve the economy. If the economy isn't creating more professional jobs, the new college graduates could wind up unemployed (or underemployed) with unsustainable college debt.

Gee -- think that could happen here? I wonder about the graduates of KIPP and HSA. If they actually get through college, then what? Is there still a ladder for them to climb, or will they find themselves adrift in a brutal economy, without all the supports that are available to middle-class kids?

From Yong Zhao, here's an interesting look at the downside of China's testing culture: A True Wake-up Call for Arne Duncan: The Real Reason Behind Chinese Students Top PISA Performance. Apparently Chinese students are compelled to spend endless hours on soul-sucking test prep. A Chinese mother reports:

This kind of practice has seriously damaged students’ health. They have completely lost motivation and interest in studying. My child’s health gets worse day by day. So is her mental spirit.