Curtis Said:

Is there an online 'dictionary' or an index of writing terms?

We Answered:

http://www.virtualsalt.com/

Scroll down to "Articles Related to Literature." Pretty comprehensive.

Joan Said:

I'm in a learning rut! Help me please?

We Answered:

Taking a class is the best thing you can do if there is one available to you because the class format forces you to study necessary background subjects that are not terribly interesting in and of themselves and also forces you to be persistent even during the phases when your interest is waning.

If reading through the grammar book and doing the exercises is unappealing consider your motivation for learning Japanese in the first place. If you like manga, then look for the series of books for learning Japanese through manga. Often you can get such books at the library. If you are interested in reading in general, try to find Japanese children's books and practice reading or translating those (these are almost exclusively in hiragana/katakana and sometimes the library, used bookstores, large Asian grocery stores, etc will sometimes have some of these if there are Japanese people in your community). If you like JPOP then pick songs from one of your favorite singers/bands and practice translating the lyrics. Want to practice listening skills? Many American DVD's of Japanese movies have Japanese sound track and English subtitles included (try Kamikaze Girls, Linda Linda Linda, the Miyazaki anime or others depending on your age and interests). Hopefully, whichever exercise you choose will send you back to your grammar book often enough that you will see the advantage of studying in a systematic way and help you put your desire to gain knowledge about the language into a context where it doesn't seem so tedious.

There are many online sites for specific topics, but I haven't seen a great comprehensive site. Good luck.

Danielle Said:

A "home-study" Mandarin Chinese lesson plan?

We Answered:

Hi flower power!

I think I can appreciate some of the difficulties in learning Chinese, and it's one of those languages in which it is extremely difficult to pinpoint an exact syntactical/lexical structure to the language such that you will find it difficult to understand the meaning of many metaphors, which many Chinese people tend to use (I'm Chinese and I don't understand everything that others say, especially across different age groups).

Here's what you can try as a step-by-step plan:

1. Know your tones

Since you've mentioned that you already have a good awareness of them, that sonuds to me that you've got a good grasp on planning for learning, which is a really good starting point.

But that won't suffice for Chinese, one of the most difficult languages to learn.

The thing is, when you learn a word (which may consist of two or more characters), you've got to attach the tones to it for it to have a correct meaning. And this, really, is the largest obstacle in learning Chinese, because one character, even with the same tone can have many meanings, even if you try to learn different words with the same character (different combinations), the meaning will be invariably unrelated, as you'll find in many circumstances.

I'd suggest getting a decent vocabulary book, and start perusing the basic vocabulary to get a basic grasp of the language. To top that off, prounciate every word many times until you have a feel for the word's meaning, such that you can simply insert the word in a sentence and feel natural. A really good vocab book should have examples sentences illustrating the uses of some vocabulary, while giving you some really good sentence structures which you can mirror. You can start there.

2. Your native friends

Use every opportunity to ask them to help you check the integrity of you pronounciation and sentence structure, as well as practicing general conversations with them in Chinese, while giving your all to maintain it in the language.

Again, the diverse flowery nature of the language renders it important for any Chinese-learner to have a good memory, because every phrase seems to me to have a completely different sentence structure by itself, which just complicates attempting to achieve fluency in the language, because just a small addition, insertion, replacement of a word in a sentence can leave you wondering, 'why did he use 'x' instead of 'y' in that sentence?'

But, of course, the barriers to entry may be high, but development will become easier. If you simply want to reach a conversationalist level proficiency in Chinese, you'll find the beginning very difficult, and development progressively easier. That's some good news, I guess.

3. Grammar

Normal rules for Romance languages don't seem to apply to Chinese.

- There are no tenses, only adverbs of frequency.
- Every descriptive word in a Romance language seems to translate to a proverb in Chinese
- Normal adverbs (e.g. especially) seem to have no distinct structure to discern it from another word
- There are many 'annoyance words' I call them which exists in Chinese, which have no meaning, but express emotions (kinda like 'uh', 'hm', 'then', 'o', In English, you don't have to know them. In Chinese, especially Catonese, you have to.
- There are many dialects of Chinese. If you go to Beijing, you speak Mandarin (official). If you go to Sichuan, you speak the local dialect, which will be very cultural and not make any sense to you unless you've got a really good ear. (I'm local Chinese, and have no idea what Sichuan people say, probably because I'm a bad listener.)

I recommend you just to understand the basics, because it's not a language you can just overcome with studying grammar and vocab. By all means, do try and immerse yourself in a Chinese experience, including culture. I do mean face reading and feng shui if you're interested. It reveals a WHOLE lot about the language and superstitions, trust me.

4. Writing

I'm going to tell you the way we learnt writing in school. We literally copied vocab lists, every word 10 times in a little book, and are rewarded with stickers/prizes for the best handwriting. Character recognition and writing is no mean feat by ordinary means, but you can always read more to compensate, if you don't feel trepidation in using a Chinese dictionary, which actually takes skill to use (you have to learn radicals, which are kinda like suffixes and prefixes in English) and stroke order to check up a dictionary (you can use pinyin for a word you don't know how to pronounce!).

To practice writing, you have to read. I would consider getting an appropriate novel for foreign language learners an accomplishment in itself. If I didn't know how to pronounce a word, I had to ask my parents, it is very difficult to guess how to pronounce, or even what something means, unless you know your radicals really well.

That's a general overview of the language in terms

Dave Said:

ESL Teachers TEFL Teachers, Please help me answer this Q. What would you do? What is your opinion for this Q?

We Answered:

hi shalina, first of all good luck on your endeavours

ok Q1: you need to remember that English is a Germanic language so when teaching English to students who speak German can become somewhat simpler than teaching students from other backgrounds because many words in English have the same phonemes as the ones in German. For example /haus/ in German is /house/ in English, the word kindergarten for example is a German word meaning garden of children, and many other words have similar sounds but different spellings.
Similarly many words in English are derived from French and Spanish words, 2 languages which have their roots in Latin, for example non is a word we use English while at the same time it means 'no' in French.

Q2: using many visual aids will always help students out; posters, dialogue, etc. Having them practice online games to further improve their verbal and written skills are always a must, you may even want to put in your answer that the school may want to implement the Rosetta Stone Program, it's been such a huge success at a school I taught ESL. The way the program places real life events with pictures helps students memorize, and it's also hands on so that helps students who are easily distracted when doing boring book and lecture work.

Hope this helps!

Zachary Said:

Tefl Question Check point 5?

We Answered:

The key here is, I think, to check with your tutor to find out what kind of answer they are expecting. Explain to them that you're concerned as it's your last attempt and want to make sure you've understood all the requirements.