A First Note
Foreign-language classes face a perennial dilemma in the sense that one can prioritise
1) Learning how to say or write anything in a language, or
2) Learning specific stock phrases for practical situations such as ordering dishes, shouting for help in emergencies, explaining yourself to the police, or flirting.
It is usual, at least in the courses that I have attended, to juggle both of these priorities according to the needs of each student. However, I am going to place some more weight on the former focus because
1) Valerio asked for it,
2) Grammar allows for a more flexible and therefore more formidable command of a language, and
3) If you rely on a phrasebook to flirt (for example) and then the conversation moves on to more specific things, then it becomes very awkward very quickly.
If unprepared, native speakers of Mandarin are in for a hard slog when they pick up a language such as French, German or Spanish, all of which are rich in grammatical artifacts like gender, declension of nouns according to case, conjugation of verbs according to pronoun, and tenses for actions that happened in the past, in the present, in the future, in the future but before an earlier-mentioned future event, a hypothetical past event after another hypothetical event further in the past, or suchlike. In contrast, Mandarin Chinese is blessedly free of such rules, and it becomes easy to write the language off as something grammarless. That said, I shall prove this wrong shortly.
Scope of Grammar: Copula, simple verbs, phrasal verbs, negation, tenses, imperative voice, passive voice, questions, conjunctions, sentence structure, subordinate clauses
The idea of lessons 2 to 5 two was to teach the bare skeleton of the language in the hope that it becomes something like a form into which you can just fill in the blanks to suit any purpose, which is fine if you don't try to be too adventurous. Let's try an example:
我是人 - I am a human being
This is a copula sentence. We learn here that 是 is the Mandarin from of "=".
Now for the case that I = cat, we say: 我是猫 - I am a cat
Or for the case that I = police officer: 我是警察 - I am a police officer
Suppose you are neither a cat nor a police officer. In this case we use the character 不 for negation:
我不是猫。我不是警察。
There is a second noun that means "to be" in Mandarin. This could be a problem for English, French or German native speakers, who can then go and run to the Swedish and Spanish speakers for help, because both of the latter also have two such nouns roughly corresponding to the Chinese:
是 (to be a thing, to be equivalent to) ≈ Ser ≈ Vara
在 (to be somewhere, to be doing something) ≈ Estar ≈ Finnas
The negation for "to have" is trickier because it uses a different character, 没. For example:
我没有钱 - I don't have money; not *我不有钱
The negation of an imperative verb is also different:
走开！不要走开/别走开！ - Go away! Don't go away! not *不走开
On top of these, we seem to run into a special class of verbs whose negations go in the middle:
上去！ - Go up! (Go-up away)
我上得去。 - I can go up. (I go-up ~DE away)
我上不去。 - I can't go up. (I go-up not away)
As a student of Spanish I am extremely grateful that the language has a single word "no" that can negate anything. For a person without that special sixth sense that Mandarin speakers possess by virtue of having grown up speaking the language, it probably has to be taught case by painstaking case.
I forgot to mention that despite not having tenses, Mandarin has a way of dealing with time:
我以前 来过这里。 - I've been here before (I in-the-past come ~GUO here)
我以后会去 那里。 - I will go there in the future (I in-the-future ~HUI go there)
The way one asks a yes/no question is also unique, but this is a less surprising thing for Mandarin as many languages seem to do so each in their own way.
English: You are a cat. Are you a cat? (Word order change)
French: Tu es un chat. Est-ce que tu es un chat? / Es-tu un chat? (Added phrase "est-ce que" in front to indicate a yes/no question. Alternatively, a word order change can also be used)
Spanish: Eres un gato. ¿Eres un gato? (Inflection change)
Finnish: Olet kissa. Oletko kissa? (Suffix -ko on verb to indicate yes/no question)
Mandarin: 你是猫。你是猫吗？/你是不是猫？(Literally: You are cat ~MA? You are are-not cat? The first one uses a particle, the second presents both yes and no options)
Scope of vocabulary: Basic action verbs, modals, positions, words specific to (Valerio's) everyday life, time (days of the week, months, date, time of day, relative time), numbers and quantifiers
Here, we treat knowledge of vocabulary as a repository of words to fill in the blanks in a grammatical scaffold. Here, some sense of priority is needed. One of the first verbs that I learned while learning French was "pendre la crémaillère", which means to throw a housewarming party. Having no occasion to ever pendre la crémaillère or to see someone else do it afterwards, this figure of speech fell into disuse. For want of efficiency, the most commonly-used and relevant vocabulary should be taught first.
I relate to my first attempt to learn Indonesian six years ago, when my army unit held an exchange with the Indonesians. We were given a crash course of two to three weeks in the language, and then sent into the country to talk to the locals. Our Indonesian buddies were supposedly also trained in English to prepare for our visit, but they gave up the moment we tried our Indonesian on them. The period of the exercise was slightly over one week, so we had to learn the language in a hurry. How I eventually did it was:
1. Go out and talk
2. Find something which I don't know the word for (e.g. I need the word for "sometimes")
3. Ask the Indonesians for the word (they say "kadang-kadang")
4. During rest time, read up on and learn all related terms (jarang = seldom; selalu = always; sering = often)
In this way, acquiring vocabulary became intimately coupled with what I needed in my day-to-day doings. Much of the vocabulary taught in Lesson 4 relied on the experience of trying to answer questions like these in small talk:
- Where are you going now? - - We are going outside (keluar) -
- What time is it? - - It is now 1 p.m. (jam satu) -
- When will you be going home? - - Next Tuesday (selasa depan) -
In the lesson notes, the diagrams that I used in the joint exercise were duly and accordingly revised to teach the Mandarin equivalents of the vocabulary.
As anyone who is learning a new language would know, learning words for communicating politeness and good intentions is a key component of not getting murdered by a mob in a foreign land. I think Valerio knows most of it already, but maybe he can learn them again in a future lesson. Meanwhile, I had better sign off before I get too carried away and try to write down every single topic in this update.
No comments:
Post a Comment