Unit 4 Chinese Craze

1. Unit 4 Chinese Craze By Zhang Yi Mar. 10, 2008

2. Learning Objectives • Section 1. It Isn’t an Easy Choice To aware that for English speaking people to learn Chinese is a hard choice. • Section 2. Raging Popularity To know that the prediction of China as a world economic power helps to gain the popularity of Chinese. • Section 3. China’s Next Big Export To know that our government has made effort to supply qualified Chinese teachers to meet the ever raising demand oversea.

3. Warm-up A Joke • What is a person who knows three languages? - trilingual. • What is a person who knows two languages? - bilingual. • What is a person who knows only one language? - American.

4. Warm-up • Yet many American parents don’t want their children to be the example of this joke. • Please watch the video clip “ Chinese Craze” to get an idea of the rapid Chinese learning growth around the world esp. in America.

5. Further Information * About 30,000,000 foreigners learn Chinese and Chinese is taught in 2500 universities in over 100 countries. * In Korea, there are 160,000 students studying Chinese, an increase of 66 percent within the past five years. In Japan, more than 500 high schools offer Chinese language courses and there are more than 20,000 high school students learning Mandarin. * Outside Asia, the number of people studying Chinese is smaller but it is growing rapidly. From 2000 to 2004, the number of people participating in the HSK (Chinese language level test) in Englandincreased by 57%.

6. * According to a survey conducted by the Asia Society of the United States, students in US kindergartens, high schools and universities are showing a "rapidly growing" interest in learning Chinese. Brighton College went so far as to make Chinese a required course for students aged 13 to 18. * Even the US media said that it is a must to master Chinese confronted with the globalization.

7. Listen and Speak • Section one • Task 1 Dialogue 1 “What Language to Learn” • Listen to the dialogue and fill in the missing information (p.47) • Useful words and expressions Hispanic adj. 西班牙和葡萄牙的,西班牙语的 subscribe vi. 订购, 预订

8. Role Play • Role A: You are an American student, who have chosen to learn Chinese as your foreign language. Please tell B why you’d like to learn Chinese. • Role B: You are an American student, role A’s classmate, but you decide not to choose Chinese. Please tell A why you don’t choose Chinese. • Possible foreign languages to learn (Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, English, Vietnamese, French, Russian, Indonesian，Thais, etc. )

9. Possible reasons for not learning Chinese • Learning Chinese is a waste of time. • The characters and the tones are too hard. • It's not fun like other studies in the US! The children have better things to do . • Everybody knows English anyway around the world. • Learning Chinese will hurt our English.

10. Possible reasons for learning Chinese • It’s cool. We’ll know things other people have no idea of. • China currently has the second largest economy in the world. China is a huge export market for the US. • China has become the factory of the world and is moving up the technology food chain. • Chinese culture is over 5000 years old. Learning Chinese gives you another viewpoint to this ancient culture. • Learning Chinese will give a student a competitive advantage.

11. Section 2 Raging Popularity • Word Tips • Pack vt. to crowd into a place so that it is full or overfull, or to fill a place with people 挤满 • Commerce n. the large scale buying and selling of goods and services贸易 • bound adj. certain to happen or do something because custom, experience, or common sense tell you that 肯定会（发生或去做） • Urge vt. to advise somebody strongly to do something 极力劝说，催促 • Focused adj. paying careful attention to what you are doing, in a way that shows you are single-minded and determined to succeed 全身心的，聚精会神的

12. Group discussion • Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean, for people whose native language is English. • Discuss in groups to imagine what are the major problems to learns Chinese…

13. Possible answers • 1.The characters (中文字)The most obvious difficulty is the complex system of Chinese characters, the multi-stroke glyphs that look incomprehensible to the untrained eye. The Kangxi dictionary contains 47,035 characters. However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. Moreover, most Chinese characters belong to the class of semantic-phonetic compounds(形、音、意不同部分), which means that one can know the basic meaning and the approximate reading of most Chinese characters, after acquiring some elementary knowledge of the language.

14. 2.The tones (音调-四声与轻声) Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. Many foreigners cannot use the level of their voice to express feelings or emotion. Therefore, the other obstacles are the four tones- high, rising, falling-rising and falling- that give seemingly similar words completely different meanings. The word "da," depending on the tone, can mean "to answer," "to hit," "to hang over something" or just "big".

15. 3. Qualified Chinese teachers Finding qualified teachers can be difficult. Many native Chinese speakers lack the English or teaching skills necessary to connect in the classroom. Those who do can often make more money in business or by teaching at universities.

16. Section 3. China’s Next Big Export • 由于学习汉语热不断升温，国内外已有的汉语教学机构和资源储备远远无法满足日益增长的需求。在这种形势下，中国教育部和国家对外汉语教学领导小组自２００２年开始酝酿借鉴各国推广本民族语言的经验，在海外设立语言推广机构。２００４年３月，中国设在海外的语言推广机构正式定名为“孔子学院”。

17. ２００５年７月，首届世界汉语大会在北京举行。此后，孔子学院项目得到许多国家的热烈响应和支持，发展迅速。截至２００６年３月，已有５４所孔子学院在３０个国家和地区启动建设，其中亚洲１７所、欧洲１７所、北美洲９所、大洋洲３所、非洲３所、拉美５所。此外，还有３０多个国家的７０多家机构正式提出了建设孔子学院的申请，其中３０多家机构正在履行申办手续。预计，孔子学院的总数07年将突破１００所。

18. Listening in • Please listen to “China’s Next Big Export” and complete the exercises on p.53. • Word Tips • boom n. a significant expansion of business and investment, either across an economy or in a specific market 繁荣，兴旺，景气 • Booming adj. increasingly successful economically迅速发展 • Tough adj. difficult to do or deal with, and needing a lot of efforts and determination 难办的，棘手的 • Subtle adj. so small and unobvious that it is not easy to notice or understand unless you pay careful attention 微妙的

19. Extra questions to discuss • 1. What is the biggest difference between English and Chinese words, grammar, etc? What problems would English native speakers be more likely to encounter when they learn Chinese?2. If you are a tutor who teaches Chinese, how will you teach a foreign student with less Chinese background? How would you motivate them, or what would you teach in the first place? For example, Chinese cuisine, scenery, cities or etiquette.3. Given that your foreign friends want to understand the culture of Chinese temples, which temple will you take them to? Which Chinese traditional Taoist (道教的) God or goodness/religious ceremony would you show them?