Culture

The Worldwide Wire of Wisdom: Learning Chinese Through the Internet

By Sean Nelson

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Every day that we get closer and closer to August 8th, the date of the Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, is another day that the Western press brings more news of China into Western homes.  NBC has recently announced that it will, for the first time ever, broadcast Olympic events in Chinese on American television.  Three American athletes hoping to qualify for the Olympics in swimming – Ian Crocker, Katie Hoff and former Gold Medal winner Michael Phelps – are planning on learning Chinese to be able to communicate with local Beijingers during the Games.  Both Phelps and Hoff have visited Beijing already to practice speaking Chinese.  In the United Kingdom, parents are paying top-dollar (or, to be more accurate, top pound) to hire bilingual Chinese nannies to watch their children and teach them Chinese at an early age.  Some of these nannies are former teachers who now command a higher price per hour than monolingual English nannies.  To top everything off, Xinhua (新华社) recently reported that pinyin, the Romanization system that has helped a number of foreigners worldwide learn Chinese, just celebrated its 50th birthday. It seems like everyone in the West is jumping on the bandwagon to learn Chinese.

In fact, there is a very real growth in the number of American students who want to learn Chinese.  The number of students of high school age or younger who are currently learning Chinese, according to The Washington Post, number around 24,000.  The Christian Science Monitor has their own set of numbers: up to 50,000 current American students learning Chinese, which is way up from 5,000 students in 2000.  The Chinese School Association in the United States, which offers after-school and weekend classes in Chinese, counts over 300 schools among its members and a total enrollment of over 60,000 students of all cultural backgrounds.  When the College Board’s World Language Initiative decided to offer Advanced Placement courses in Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Italian, 240 schools expressed interest in offering Italian classes, making it the second-most popular option. Chinese, being the most popular choice, found interest among 2,400 schools. Some school systems, such as in Woodstock, Oregon, are even going all-out, enrolling elementary school students in multi-year immersion programs in which students eventually take almost of their classes, including science and math, in Chinese.

During this past Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year, students at the Chinese language club at Langlade Elementary School in Allouez, Wisconsin celebrated the holiday while also enjoying a presentation on calligraphy by Dr. Kou-Ming Sung of Lawrence University. Wisconsin, unlike New York and California, has never been known to be a major home to Chinese culture in the United States. After all, Yi Jianlian (易建联) famously was reluctant to sign with the Milwaukee Bucks because there is such a small Chinese population in Wisconsin. These trends represents a large increase in the number of non-Chinese-American students opting to learn Chinese from years past, when the handful of students below college age who did study Chinese in American schools were often adopted Chinese children being raised by American parents who felt it was important for their children to have a connection to the nation of their birth.  Not too long ago, Chinese-American students were a clear majority of the students in Chinese language classes. Today, that has clearly changed.

However, there is still a bottleneck in this system: the supply of actual opportunities for students to learn Chinese.  The Asia Society’s 2005 report on the state of Chinese language learning in the US below the college level notes that there are still some major steps that have to be taken to expand the number of American high schools that offer Chinese to just five percent of the total.  Currently only two percent of American high school students study Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese or Russian. The Asia Society notes that there is a definite lack of qualified Chinese language teachers in the US, which must be remedied for the number of programs to expand. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the College Board and Hanban, the Chinese government-funded non-governmental organization also known as the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, have been working together to help bring Chinese teachers to the US on a two to three year period. Currently 34 schools enjoy hosting Chinese teachers in the US under the program, which is believed to expand to 250 schools by 2009. Hanban has also been helping private schools in the National Association of Independent Schools to recruit teachers in China to teach in the US. However, as many of these teachers are only in the US on a temporary basis, this program can only go so far. In addition, as the Washington Post notes, there is little enrollment in programs at American universities to become certified Chinese teachers. In 2005, for instance, only two students signed up for such a program at George Mason University.

To fill this gap many are turning to technology to fill the gap. Rosetta Stone has been sponsoring Phelps, Crocker and Hoff to help them learn Chinese to promote their CD-based language learning products. The Chicago Public School system, according to eSchool News, has been using technology to supplement their Chinese classes. By using Chengo Chinese, an online flash tool developed jointly by the US Department of Education and the Chinese Ministry of Education, Chicago schools can tailor-make this online tool to fit their curriculum while taking advantage of the Chinese government’s expertise in teaching Chinese. Meanwhile, Chicago’s students and teachers never have to leave their classroom. Such initiatives do not end with Chicago’s schools. Michael Levine of the Asia Society notes that “clearly, using technology for this generation of kids, who are so familiar with it, is going to be helpful. We haven't broken the mold for how to use technology in languages, and these early projects represent a very good--if inadequate-- start in what we hope will become an extremely important use of technology in the future.”  The Kentucky Virtual International High School, which allows any public school student in Kentucky to study under an international curriculum and earn a diploma, has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Ministry of Education to offer a technology-based Chinese language course. The Director of Education at the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages, Mary Abbott, adds:

Distance learning [is a] great possibility for language courses, because now you can have live chats using the technology, and you can accomplish quite a bit… In previous years, there was quite a bit of skepticism about distance learning, because we didn't have the capabilities we have now, and teachers are more comfortable using the technology… I think we're just starting to see the explosion of Mandarin Chinese, and I think within the next year we'll see more distance-learning programs [for studying the language].

Young students are not the only ones getting on in the action. The New York Times recently reported that 200,000 users hailing from 200 countries have joined LiveMocha, a website that allows users to teach each other their native language for free using chatting programs and webcams. Many professionals without the time available to dedicate to intensive, traditional study of the language in a classroom are also turning to Chinese podcasts as a way to learn Chinese. Mike Kuiack, a Vancouver-based investment banker who frequently travels to China on business, is described by the New York Times as “an off-and-on student of Chinese for eight and a half years." After switching to a podcast-based learning technique, he saw his vocabulary double in under two years, equaling his entire accumulation of Chinese vocabulary over his eight and a half years of studying Chinese. Studying in traffic or at his computer, he credits the multimedia approach’s focus on the more active skills of listening and speaking as a major contributor to his quick advancement in learning the language.

The study of the Chinese language in the West, especially in the United States, has definitely taken off as of late. However, the shortage of qualified teachers means that there is still much that the US must do to improve its Chinese language educational infrastructure. Whether you are a ten-year-old student studying in an immersion program at your local public school or a corporate lawyer who often flies to Shanghai to meet with a Chinese partner in a joint venture, studying Chinese online is an easy and useful way to bring the Chinese language from China into your home. As globalization and the spread of the internet create more cross-cultural interaction between Chinese and Americans, we will see a clear increase in the number of Americans taking advantage of online opportunities to learn the language.

Vocabulary:
Olympic Games: 奥运会 ào yùn huì
Opening ceremony: 开幕式 kāi mù shì
Spring Festival: 春节 chūn jié
pinyin (the Romanization system that helps foreigners learn Chinese): 拼音 pīn yīn
hanban (National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language): 汉办 hàn bàn

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