Mandarin for High School Student Beginner

I spoke with the Asian lady again last night. She took Chinese at Seton Hall as a summer college course and continued for her purposes. That was a lot of yrs ago. She did offer a couple of additional.
She said a Chatham hs offers a course, as do some adult schools. She also said that there various local Chinese associations that have schools. Since doesn,t anything like she doesn,t any strong prefferences. Final additional idea she passed along... she has fios- Morris cty- and said that there,s a chinese channel that has language instruction, in English, by a New York born woman that lived in China for 30+ yrs. she said, in her area, the station is CCTV -central china tv-. Ch 181 Morris cty...181 MW is A&E.
G L

It's interesting that the Chinese haven't modified their writing structure a bit to make it easier for others to learn (and even for their own people). From what I have heard, the Japanese have adopted a phonetic based system in addition to characters and that is increasingly becoming more common. A Japanese friend told me she thinks one day it might replace the characters completely. It would make sense. I just find the writing methods of some of these east Asian cultures very primitive, reminds me of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I guess in concept the Chinese characters are no different.

touba said:

It's interesting that the Chinese haven't modified their writing structure a bit to make it easier for others to learn (and even for their own people). From what I have heard, the Japanese have adopted a phonetic based system in addition to characters and that is increasingly becoming more common. A Japanese friend told me she thinks one day it might replace the characters completely. It would make sense. I just find the writing methods of some of these east Asian cultures very primitive, reminds me of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I guess in concept the Chinese characters are no different.

When was the last time English was modified to make it a bit easier for non-English speakers? As to finding the writing methods of some cultures inferior, I'd say it is all relative, in the eye of the beholder etc.

dg64,
I didn't say inferior. Maybe primitive was the wrong word to use. My apologies if I offended you. But I do believe that the phonetic system, be it Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hiragana, etc do make more sense and are much easier to learn. If a kid in using a phonetic system learns the basic alphabet they are off and running with reading. Not so the case with pictorials. My understanding is that the Chinese kids really struggle in the beginning learning these characters and even afterwards it's not easy retaining all those memorizations. Not to mention the whole digital aspect of alphabets/writing systems. Are you aware of how difficult it is to "type" Mandarin? I've seen others do this and it's really quite complicated. Not so sure this type of image-based writing system makes sense in a binary world where everything is digitized unless the technology leaps to the point where translation and voice recognition will make writing much easier for Chinese.

Learning a new language is not easy and every language has nuances that might be difficult to master. To ask all languages to conform to an English dominated binary system may mean loss of cultural values that you may not care for but more important to others. Many Asian languages are hard to type, but hopefully that does not mean that they have to lose innate characteristics of the language.

touba said:

It's interesting that the Chinese haven't modified their writing structure a bit to make it easier for others to learn (and even for their own people). From what I have heard, the Japanese have adopted a phonetic based system in addition to characters and that is increasingly becoming more common. A Japanese friend told me she thinks one day it might replace the characters completely. It would make sense. I just find the writing methods of some of these east Asian cultures very primitive, reminds me of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I guess in concept the Chinese characters are no different.

They do have western character versions (called something like Pinyin, I think???) and most signage that I observed when I was there had both.

sac said:

touba said:

It's interesting that the Chinese haven't modified their writing structure a bit to make it easier for others to learn (and even for their own people). From what I have heard, the Japanese have adopted a phonetic based system in addition to characters and that is increasingly becoming more common. A Japanese friend told me she thinks one day it might replace the characters completely. It would make sense. I just find the writing methods of some of these east Asian cultures very primitive, reminds me of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I guess in concept the Chinese characters are no different.

They do have western character versions (called something like Pinyin, I think???) and most signage that I observed when I was there had both.

Ironically they use pinyin (roman characters which represent the sound) to type and identify the character palette before the exact characters are chosen. A kind of autocorrect. It is what it is. If it works for them, more power to them. Some cultures though moved away from this or are moving. The Japanese are favoring their phonetic systems more and more. The Vietnamese switched to an alphabet at some point. Even Korean, from what I know, is a phonetic character system or something like that. I don't quite understand it all but the number of characters has been greatly reduced.

pinyin made it possible for me to learn when I was taking Mandarin. Once I knew how the letters were pronounced; I could learn faster.

In addition to pinyin (which is for western learners), the PRC created a simplified character set.
Japanese still read traditional Chinese characters and call it kanji.

Also, typing is no more difficult for Chinese than those typing in English . There are typically as many keystrokes to type a hanzi character as there are to type a word in English. There are numerous typing systems, so you can type in whatever is most natural for you: pinyin, wubi, zhuyin xing, cangjie, sucheng, etc. For example, to type 'day' we have to use three keystrokes. In the cangjie typing system, it's just one.

And with trackpads and touch screens another option is simply drawing a character.

I've been off the MOL grid for a week and just checked into this thread. I am so touched by the quantity of thoughtful responses! Thank you, everyone. I know this isn't environmentally sound, but I am printing out the thread for my son to read, and will read everyone's response carefully over the coming week. One of my oldest friends didn't begin Mandarin lessons until he was 20 (36 years ago), when he took two years off, after his sophmore year at Rice (where he started) and UC Berkeley (where he finished) to live in China. So, I guess that he had total immersion training, but he did indeed become so fluent that he became an early investor in China, bringing Reebok there and Motorola (he is now in another financial stratosphere and I rarely see him ...). My son's interest is as a crazy avid reader of history. He is taking German lessons on Saturday mornings at the school in Morristown because of his interest in philosophy and history. He is such an odd duck at Columbia High School that I try to do whatever I can to supplement outside of school. But, as you can see from my just now looking again at this thread, my follow through isn't what it should be. So, I thank everyone again for their ideas and input!

@spry, your son can definitely take German as online course at CHS if he gets the World Language Supervisor approval.

Spry, my daughter is a freshman at Columbia and also interested in taking either Mandarin or Korean over the summer. I was in touch with the World Languages Supervisor and there is an online option which we decided against as we felt that classroom instruction for either of these languages would be better. I am waiting on information from Seton Hall and can PM you if you'd like when I hear back from them.