I do think she misrepresents the benchmarks for success as you have said yourself, this is nigh on unforgivable. (In fact she does so in the video as well, she uses 众.) I haven’t got the books but I do have a set of flashcards given to me by a friend. I have also heard that the resources themselves mix scripts to be best fit the images, granted this is is made clear in the books, but seems contrived and counter productive in the long run. It’s probably just the first well publicised effort at using this kind of mnemonic system for learning Chinese, as the language is “relatively” in vogue for the first time. As many others have pointed out, her method is FAR from new or innovative. I find that many people who are unfamiliar with Asian languages find them intimidating, and I applaud anyone who tries to make Chinese language fun.
In any case, even though I disagree with her benchmarks for success, I really like that Hsueh has attempted to make Chinese written language somewhat more accessible to foreigners. I hope this doesn’t put anyone off learning Chinese, but I have studied formally for five years and probably recognize somewhere between 1,500 – 2,000 characters, and I still struggle with reading menus and newspapers, just because of the sheer volume of characters in use today. (She’s also created Chineasy, a visual learning system for Chinese.) Here, she dives into the history and modern. And, according to Hsueh, if you can recognize the most basic 200 characters, than you have achieved “basic comprehension”, enabling you to read menus, most signs, etc… Personally, I think Hsueh has a relatively low bar for what “basic comprehension” means. For ShaoLan Hsueh (TED Talk: The Chinese zodiac, explained), the zodiac isn’t scientific truth, but teaching it is a fun way to achieve her real goal: to help the Western world develop a deeper understanding of Chinese culture. She also mentions that if you know 1,000 characters, you have achieved basic literacy in Chinese. Hsueh uses the traditional variant, that looks like this: 門Īs opposed to the simplified version that looks like this: 门 This is apparent when you look at the character “door”. It’s important to remember that since she is from Taiwan, Hsueh is actually using traditional characters instead of the simplified characters that are used in mainland China. And you can check out the Chineasy website as well if you’re interested. You can learn more about Hsueh’s background on the TED website.
0 kommentar(er)
