Sharing a world of words

NBC Chinese language program enters second year

By: Stephanie Prokop
   MANSFIELD—The students in Bonnie Yang’s fourth period class at Northern Burlington County Regional High School start off with a chorus of zhè’s, dà’s and wo’s.
   The 15 students, enrolled in the Level 2 Chinese class, begin by singing a few bars of a tune that they had learned while they were in the first level class.
   The Chinese course, in its second year at Northern Burlington, is what Sally Lopez, foreign language director of instruction, considers a success, with several of the students taking Chinese as well as another language.
   "We took a survey as to what language we wanted to add to our curriculum," she said. "We had people interested in it; and from there we had a class."
   Ms. Lopez said the school community was supportive of the Chinese courses, which are now available to middle and high school students. The program has equal enrollment in both schools, with 31 middle school students and 31 high school students each taking the course.
   According to state graduation requirements, students have to take a minimum of one year of a foreign language, although Ms. Lopez said many choose to take more for college preparation.
   While paging through a sample workbook that the Level 2 students use, Ms. Yang rapidly explained an entire page of symbols, and showed where last year’s high school classes had left off.
   As a native speaker from Beijing, Ms. Yang patiently explains that anyone who has not spoken or read any Chinese in the past need not feel intimidated by viewing the symbols.
   "I tell my students not to think of it as difficult, but rather to just ‘follow me.’"
   Ms. Yang credits her students with being very proficient in their association of the characters and the pronunciation of the words.
   "They make beautiful characters," she noted.
   The characters, Ms. Lopez said, are unique because each pictogram tells a story.
   This way, she said, the students can make an association with the little story behind the symbol.
   Ms. Yang pointed to a symbol that had two horizontal lines intersected by one longer vertical one.
   In the workbook the English word "king" was produced right near the bottom of the symbol, but Ms. Yang elaborated that the marking is something that Chinese associate with tigers.
   "The symbol stands for kings because we regard tigers as one of the mightiest animals in Chinese culture," she explained.
   Something that took students some time learning, said Ms. Yang, was the stroke order in which to draw characters on a page — it is not just straight copying from left to right.
   Another method that Ms. Yang uses is the "pidgin" method, which places the English letter above the Chinese symbol. Although this isn’t technically a correct way to translate, for beginners it is a means of learning how to pronounce the words, explained Ms. Lopez.
   In the classroom, red paper lanterns with golden tassels hung from the ceiling as students read with ease from a workbook while Ms. Yang circled the room, asking if they could translate what they just read.
   The paragraph, which was about six sentences long, talked about family and how many brothers and sisters the students had.
   Students then went up and down the rows of the classroom and took turns reading the questions and answering the question that was read before them.
   Ms. Yang circled the room while she helped some students out with specific pronunciations.
   Despite it only being the fourth school day of the 2007-08 school year, many students pronounced the words with ease, although Ms. Yang said that the first few weeks of the course will focus on review.
   Some of the other topics that the students will learn this year include dates, how to identify family members and modes of transport, in addition to telling time.