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Split Thread Teaching Chinese

Roboramma

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Think how different it must be to teach Chinese students to write. Is there such a thing as phonics? Does the need to remember hundreds of characters contribute to the ability to memorize "math facts"? I constantly look up stuff like this and obviously love to discuss it.

Chinese characters are hard to learn but they actually aren't quite as hard as it looks. It's still hard.

Anyway, one conceptual aspect is that many characters have two parts: one part signalling pronunciation and another part signalling meaning. For instance:
请,清,青 are all pronounced "qing".
The left part of the first one basically means the word has something to do with language, or communication maybe? Anyway the character means "please", or "invite", and you can see how the word is "the word pronounced "qing" that has something to do with language".

The left part of the second one is water, and the word means "clear", as in 清楚. The third has no "left part", and it's the basic character which is pronounced "qing" and which is put into those other characters to signify meaning. It means "green", but it's not used the way 绿 is. I think it's got to do with the green in living things, like 青菜, which is a green vegetable. As you can see my chinese still needs a lot of work.

Anyway, when I was first learning chinese I had a teacher who would break down every character we learned in this way and I found it really helped me to learn to distinguish between characters that look pretty similar and also to remember how to write a character "it's the 'qing' that has something to do with water...".

Mind you, I stopped studying writing many years ago. I can read and type much better than I used to be able to, but I can't even really write anymore.

Thread split from here.
Posted By: zooterkin
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Chinese characters are hard to learn but they actually aren't quite as hard as it looks. It's still hard.

Anyway, one conceptual aspect is that many characters have two parts: one part signalling pronunciation and another part signalling meaning. For instance:
请,清,青 are all pronounced "qing".
The left part of the first one basically means the word has something to do with language, or communication maybe? Anyway the character means "please", or "invite", and you can see how the word is "the word pronounced "qing" that has something to do with language".

The left part of the second one is water, and the word means "clear", as in 清楚. The third has no "left part", and it's the basic character which is pronounced "qing" and which is put into those other characters to signify meaning. It means "green", but it's not used the way 绿 is. I think it's got to do with the green in living things, like 青菜, which is a green vegetable. As you can see my chinese still needs a lot of work.
What an adventure. I love learning about this stuff. It's bound to affect other academic areas, recognizing spatial patterns. Some of the best Scrabble players in the world don't speak English; they are just exceptionally good at sight-reading English words.

I've also heard this: that Chinese numbers in general have only one syllable and are combined in a way that facilitates mental math etc. My memory is hazy here but it would be like the number 83 would be "eight 10s then 3," so numbers are explicitly grouped by tens. We do this with the suffix "teen" for the teenage years and the suffix "ty" for higher numbers, but I read somewhere that Chinese is more explicit this way. This was in a Malcolm Gladwell book. I've heard mixed ideas about his theories but they are usually interesting reads.

Also I have read about the differences in how math instruction is done. The teachers have time set aside to collaborate and fine-tune lessons but actually spend less time teaching. They make up for it in consistency, staying on message and avoiding cognitive overload. Yet they are interested in borrowing aspects of the U.S. system!

ETA: I wonder if being on the metric system helps. U.S. money is explicitly base 10 but other forms of measurement aren't.
 
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I've also heard this: that Chinese numbers in general have only one syllable and are combined in a way that facilitates mental math etc. My memory is hazy here but it would be like the number 83 would be "eight 10s then 3," so numbers are explicitly grouped by tens. We do this with the suffix "teen" for the teenage years and the suffix "ty" for higher numbers, but I read somewhere that Chinese is more explicit this way. This was in a Malcolm Gladwell book. I've heard mixed ideas about his theories but they are usually interesting reads.

Yeah, the numbers are a little easier to learn than English: 83 is just 八十三 (ba shi san)。 八 means 8, 十 is 10, and 三 is 3. All numbers follow that pattern.

One of the cool things is that we count to one thousand, then count three powers of ten more before a new word comes up. Ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million...

In chinese they have a word for ten thousand:万. To say ten thousand you'd say 一万:one ten thousand. And then new words come up in increments of four powers of ten. It gets confusing for me when number words go above 1 million, because in chinese 1 million is "one hundred ten thousand". Ten million is "one thousand ten thousand", and 100 million has a new word:亿。
 
This is the moderator's thread title - more specifically it would be how math is taught in China, or how people learn math.

In his book "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell has a chapter called Rice Paddies and Math Tests. I'm wondering if it has lessons for how we teach children primary and secondary math.

China seems set up to reinforce base 10 with short words combined to say something like "5 10s and 1." There is no new word "fifty" and no -ty suffix. A problem in English, described verbally, might be "Thirty-seven plus fifty-three," while in Chinese it would be "Three tens, seven plus five tens, three."

Adding 3 10s to 5 10s gives us 80 and due to experience and/or intuitive "number sense" we know that 2 single digits will never add up to more than 19. So we know the number is more than 80, less than 100. Some kids will grasp this sooner than others, who may decide they're "bad at math."

At about 3:00 in this video Richard Feynman talks about how differently 2 people can do something as simple as counting.

Has anyone else been surprised they process numbers differently from other people?
 
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