Language Classes Update
So far, we’ve had the first two weekends of Japanese/Chinese classes for the summer.
In Japanese, the first session actually covered somewhat more advanced material than the second session, owing to a much smaller group the first session who were of at least advanced-beginner level. Thus, the first session we covered the three main categories of words (nominals, adjectivals, and verbals — yes yes I know I’m totally missing particles and other things, hush) and useful verb conjugations, while in the second session, we went over the writing system and a little basic grammar, including particles. Next week I think I’ll bring in my textbooks and we’ll start with basic conversations and vocab-building, so we’ll be following the curriculum here to a degree except for the part where I will randomly throw in more advanced and useful grammar where it makes sense to.
The first Chinese session was mostly an overview of phonemes and introduction to pinyin, although I mostly expect people to pick up pinyin with repeated exposure. (It’s somewhat more lacking in rules than is terribly useful.) During the second session, with a much better showing (just like Japanese-Learners, I guess), we covered tones and learned some basic vocab and grammar, with a practice conversation that I made up on the spot! As Greg Price pointed out, what you want to start learning for conversational purposes doesn’t match what you want to start learning for literacy purposes (e.g. why would you start out with the moderate-to-quite-complicated character for “I”?), so we’re going to be trying to stay more focused on conversational skills, and while I write as many relevant characters as I know on the board during class, it’s mostly for the purposes of exposure and students are not really expected to remember them (except for the two characters that make up “Chinese”: 中文). Thus, for this weekend’s session, we should have more practice conversations, and hopefully we’ll have a workable ratio of actual beginners and people who have some familiarity with the phonemes and/or tones so that partnering up for conversation practice will work well. For Chinese, as opposed to Japanese, I don’t really have a curriculum to follow, so I’m going to be making these conversations up, and I will probably try to theme them, as is frequently the case in language classes. So far I’ve come up with at least two sessions worth of food-related vocab and one session’s worth of weather-related vocab. Help me out here: what other vocab themes and/or useful conversational phrases might y’all be interested in learning?
Tags: Chinese, Japanese, learning/teaching
Languages | Zek | 
June 25, 2010 01:09 | 
Comments (1)
Subscribe