The May holiday finished without giving a minute for people to feel it. Time can never be enough when you are having fun. This rule sometimes is even applied to assessing whether the students actually enjoy their class or not. If both the teacher and the students are so engaged in the class to forget the time, to some extent this class is a success.
Used to be a beginner of English, I was just like most of my students struggling in memorizing hundreds of words and expressions and trying hard to find each possible way to master the grammatical rules. What was harder for me, for every Chinese student who studies English, is to get proficient in tense uses. I always find my beginner students trying to get the connection between English and Chinese sentence formations. Therefore, they come up with questions like why there are no tenses in Chinese, why there is no equivalent of “to” after each verb, why there can be two verbs appearing together in one sentence without any other word in between…… It is actually understandable as well as unavoidable when people are confronted with a brand-new language as their mother-tongues have long been deep-rooted in mind. But it is also a habit that a teacher would not encourage the student to form. For beginners of Mandarin, English is a tool used by the teacher to help students understand grammars and abstract words which can not be presented by actual images. As the learning is proceeding, English, as an intermediary, will be used less and less.
If each language is a friend whom we have interest in and intention to know better, we must have the awareness that each friend is unique, that it is not sensible to compare her with another friend, and that even if the friend could be very different or even weird, it is just the way she is. All we need to do is to show our patience and give it some time to get familiar and gradually used to her personalities, living style and the way she gets on with other people so that we could maintain the friendship in harmony. Therefore, when it comes to Mandarin, we should be aware that unlike English, French or some other languages, Mandarin never changes the form of its verbs and adjectives when other functional words are employed to express a completed action, an action which is taking place at the moment, or a past experience. In the beginning period, confusions and the sense of frustration are unavoidable, yet it is safe to say that it is only a matter of time, or a process every beginner will go through. The recipe for handling the process well is perseverance and the tolerance to differences and to learn it just the way it is.
Used to be a beginner of English, I was just like most of my students struggling in memorizing hundreds of words and expressions and trying hard to find each possible way to master the grammatical rules. What was harder for me, for every Chinese student who studies English, is to get proficient in tense uses. I always find my beginner students trying to get the connection between English and Chinese sentence formations. Therefore, they come up with questions like why there are no tenses in Chinese, why there is no equivalent of “to” after each verb, why there can be two verbs appearing together in one sentence without any other word in between…… It is actually understandable as well as unavoidable when people are confronted with a brand-new language as their mother-tongues have long been deep-rooted in mind. But it is also a habit that a teacher would not encourage the student to form. For beginners of Mandarin, English is a tool used by the teacher to help students understand grammars and abstract words which can not be presented by actual images. As the learning is proceeding, English, as an intermediary, will be used less and less.
If each language is a friend whom we have interest in and intention to know better, we must have the awareness that each friend is unique, that it is not sensible to compare her with another friend, and that even if the friend could be very different or even weird, it is just the way she is. All we need to do is to show our patience and give it some time to get familiar and gradually used to her personalities, living style and the way she gets on with other people so that we could maintain the friendship in harmony. Therefore, when it comes to Mandarin, we should be aware that unlike English, French or some other languages, Mandarin never changes the form of its verbs and adjectives when other functional words are employed to express a completed action, an action which is taking place at the moment, or a past experience. In the beginning period, confusions and the sense of frustration are unavoidable, yet it is safe to say that it is only a matter of time, or a process every beginner will go through. The recipe for handling the process well is perseverance and the tolerance to differences and to learn it just the way it is.
