Category Archives: Language

Beginning English

Posted on by

Teaching English as a Second Language is not new to me, but the class I’m starting this week kind of has me scared to death. In a good way.

I began teaching and tutoring ESL my last year of college, and my first student was a Taiwanese lady who owned the Taste of China buffet in Waco. It was a volunteer job that I got through the literacy center on campus at Baylor, and every week after our class at the restaurant I came back to the dorm with a take-out box stuffed full of enough dinner for both me and my roommate.

Later, I taught a volunteer class at UT Arlington and had students from several Asian countries, most of them working on advanced degrees or research in science or engineering and in need of help with conversational English. Two nursing students from Thailand and Beijing talked me into having a separate class for them on another night each week, so I then found myself answering questions like, “What’s a better way to say the word $#!+ when we’re talking to patients?” That wasn’t something they prepared me for in my graduate classes at UTA — how to explain the subtle differences in usage of the words bowel movement, feces, poop, and number two. (Side note: In another food-for-English exchange similar to the one in Waco, these nurses took me to a sushi bar in Dallas as a thank you, and also because they wanted to help me improve my poor chopstick skills before I moved to Asia.)

Fast forward several years worth of experience — teaching English camps in China, Thailand, and India, a year of high school English at a minority school in China, business English for hotel workers, and countless hours of conversational practice with friends. And now here I am in Washington, about to start a new class with Somali women who came here as refugees.

This class scares me because, for the most part, I’ve only ever taught conversational English to people with a high school education or higher. From what I’ve been told, none of the ladies in my class has any formal education. In addition to not speaking English, they don’t read in any language. They will be starting with the very basics — how to hold a pencil, how to write the alphabet, how to make the sounds for each letter. Very different from teaching a mechanical engineering post-doctoral researcher from Shanghai how to have a meaningful conversation with his American coworkers.

But I’m up for the challenge and very excited. Excited to be teaching a new level of content, as well as teaching students from Africa for the first time. Wish me luck!

 

Post to Twitter

Double Meaning

Posted on by

I was sitting in the café today, sipping a drink and pecking away at my laptop, when the cook stuck her head into the front room and yelled (in Chinese) after one of the waitresses, “Hey, come back in the kitchen and wipe your butt.”

Surely I misunderstood.  I turned to another waitress nearby and asked, “Did she just tell her to go wipe her butt in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” she barely paused in what she was doing as she answered, before realizing that the confusion still lingered in the expression on my face.  “But that’s not what it means.”

The next time someone you know makes a mess and doesn’t clean it up, remind him gently (or more strongly, depending on your mood and relationship to the person in question) to wipe his butt.

This may be the most useful Chinese slang I’ve learned in quite a while.

Post to Twitter

The Language Cafe

Posted on by

If nothing else, the café looks busy throughout each week day, with all of the language lessons going on under the big sun umbrellas at our sidewalk tables.  The kitchen manager teaches Chinese lessons at noon four days a week to an ex-pat couple.  Adam teaches me and two others his minority language—I love meeting for class under the dancing shadows of the leafy trees out front, partly because of the cool afternoon breeze and partly because of the distraction of people walking by on the sidewalk.

Everyone should learn a minority language if given a chance.  You can say whatever you want about pretty much anybody with little fear that you’ll be overheard by eavesdroppers.  At any given moment, there are probably less than ten people in JH who could understand us—and we’d give just about anything to know where the other six people are!

English lessons were officially added to the language menu this week when I began tutoring one of the waitresses.  She doesn’t have an English name, so of course that was one of the first things she wanted in our first lesson.  Luckily for her, I’m one of the more creative English-name-givers in Yunnan.  I once had to name 500 high school students in a one week period.  Seriously.  I made sure there were no typical Chinese-English names in my classes, no sir.  No Rose and Jack.  No Grace and Walter.  Those kids were all named after my friends and family members, favorite singers and actors, my team members.  There was one row in an 11th grade class named Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Ross, Joey, and Chandler.  Five hundred is a lot of names.

(to be continued…)


Post to Twitter

Another Form of Literacy

Posted on by

Adam doesn’t speak English, but there is one word he understands and speaks clearly:  e-mail.  Being a pre-computer culture, the B language doesn’t have its own word for e-mail, and I have somehow managed to never acquire the Chinese word in my vocabulary.  Many Chinese speakers, even if they don’t speak English, will understand that word.  Adam has been around us ex-pats long enough to have acquired it, too.

Not that he has ever sent or received an e-mail.  He’s never used a computer, and it wasn’t until recently that he learned to use a cell phone.  That thing is glued to his hand now, and he is constantly sending and receiving calls and texts.

I noticed not long ago that Adam has also picked up a habit of mine when saying the word e-mail or text message.  I find myself talking with my hands even more than usual when speaking a second language.  Just as you might make a fake phone out of your hand and hold it to your ear when you say, “Call me about the plans for tomorrow,” I will often type on a fake keyboard when I say something to Adam along the lines of, “I sent my friend an e-mail yesterday.”  Adam transferred this air typing to his newly found SMS habit, and more than once I’ve seen him wiggle his fingers over an imaginary keyboard when mentioning a text message he sent to someone.

One day I asked him if he would like to learn to use a computer—it will be useful for the development of his language if some speakers can begin to be computer literate as well.  He replied to my question that he knows that lots of people like to play on the computer, so it might be something fun for him to learn, too.  A bit puzzled, I asked if he thought people only play on the computer; equally puzzled, he admitted he wasn’t exactly sure what people did besides play games and listen to music.

Now, one of my goals over the next few months is to get him started learning to type and to have a basic understanding of the usefulness of computers in doing actual work.

Post to Twitter

Youngest Language Helper

Posted on by

Recently my best language practice has come from David and Julie’s young daughter.  She has been in alphabet class with us every morning, and I’ve seen her quite a bit at the café in the afternoons.  If I’m seated, she likes to be in my lap, regardless of what I’m doing.  She particularly likes to sit and watch my fingers as I type on the computer.  David saw her sitting with me while I was typing up a spelling worksheet one afternoon and asked her, “Are you bothering Yi Bei Cha?”

“No,” she replied, “I’m reading.”

At only three years old, she hasn’t been exposed to much Chinese yet, so we can only “converse” in B language.  Our conversations are, as you might expect, not particularly profound, since they are limited by the fact that she is three and I don’t really speak much B language.  But she is endlessly patient in repeating something over and over until I understand her; usually, she is motivated by wanting something from me.

Some phrases I now understand very well, thanks to her tutelage:

Hold me.

Put me down.

I want that.

That’s mine.

Play with me.

Can you open this for me?

Some phrases I can now say without thinking, due to high repetition:

Do you want this?

Don’t play with that.

No, that’s mine.

Be careful.

Come here.

You’re beautiful.

And she has very intuitively picked up a couple of words in English that need little explanation.  When I can’t find the B word quickly enough to get her to stop doing something she shouldn’t be doing (which happens often with 3-year-olds), she has no trouble understanding the English word no in the right tone of voice.

Her other English word surprised me one day when I walked in a room where she was seated, eating an orange.  She looked up and noticed me in the doorway, grinned and waved and gave me a sweet, baby-voiced “hello”.

(In the picture above, my little helper is sitting with me in front of my laptop at the café, while my favorite 5-year-old pops into the picture.)


Post to Twitter

Alphabet Class

Posted on by

The past couple of weeks I’ve had the sudden pleasure of teaching an alphabet class in the mornings at a co-worker’s house.  I didn’t know until a few days beforehand that we would be having this class, and I feel like I’m barely able to stay a step ahead of the students in preparing the lessons each day.  This is the first time I’ve taught anyone an alphabet—and I’m having to teach in my second language to speakers of a third language.  The learning curve has been fairly high for both students and teacher.

Our class should win some sort of award for having an exceptionally diverse classroom population.  The two main students are a B couple in their 20s; one has completed elementary school, the other junior high.  They have been endlessly merciful to me butchering the sounds of their language as I teach them the letters.

My third student is their 3 year old daughter.  She listens in and yells out the names of the animals and objects on my flashcards as the adults learn the letters.  She is learning and practicing the correct way to hold a pen—and she’s learning that pens are only for marking on certain paper and notebooks, not on the floor, wall, couch, or any other books she finds laying around the house.

The fourth and final student is a retired American who is starting to learn B language.  He is 57 years older than my youngest student.

All together, I would say this is the most highly motivated group of people I’ve ever taught.  And motivation makes all the difference in learning a subject, even if you’ve got a teacher with a horrible accent who is half making up the lessons as she goes.


Post to Twitter

Gecko vs. Lizard

Posted on by

One of my favorite distractions in language sessions is to get our language helpers talking about the animals you find in the rainforest or in the river.  Types of snakes or rodents or monkeys or large cats or bears—colors, sizes, whether they’re poisonous, whether they will attack humans or run from humans.  Most of these conversations take place in Chinese, not exactly improving my minority language skills—but I’m fascinated to know what’s out there.

More than one language helper has told me there are “crocodiles” in the river—they aren’t technically a crocodile, but they’re some sort of large, long, four-legged reptile with a tail and long snout.  Adam told me he and his father found one in the river a while back.  I asked him how long it was, and he spread his arms out to their full span.  I asked him if he ran when he saw it.  He said, no, they got a stick and killed it.  “Why?” I asked, “are they dangerous?”  “No, they taste good,”  he answered.

I also asked him about bears.  He personally hasn’t seen one, but people in the area have found them in the forest before.  Tigers?  Those are all gone, long ago poached.

He named more types of rodents than I have categories for in my brain.  Ones that live in trees, ones that live under ground, ones that live in rice fields, and the ubiquitous house rat.  Basically, all of these rodents can be divided into two categories:  those you eat and those you don’t.  House rats and field rats, according to Adam, are disgusting and never eaten.  Bamboo rats, gophers, squirrels…tasty.

Adam and I also spent several minutes one day debating over the words for “gecko” and “lizard.”  Neither one of us could remember the Chinese words (and Adam doesn’t know English), so we couldn’t verify that the minority language words I had written down were used correctly in our new dictionary.  So we began describing the differences between the two creatures to see if we were both talking about the same thing—one is small, one is a bit bigger—one is pale in color, one is darker—one lives on the walls inside a house, one lives under rocks outside.  And then Adam said something I couldn’t confirm—one you can eat, one you can’t.  I told him I’d never eaten either one, so that description didn’t help me.  Once we’d determined which was which, he assured me lizards are delicious, but you should never eat a gecko.

Post to Twitter

Words, words, words

Posted on by

I can get sidetracked rather easily during language sessions.  I try to let my rabbit trails lead to new cultural discoveries about the people or their world view or history or background.  But sometimes I pursue the distractions purely out of fascination with how much language and words reveal about how different day-to-day life is in a village from where I grew up in America.

Take the words for colors, for example.  In English, we have words like turquoise, aquamarine, teal, bluish-green, and greenish-blue to distinguish subtleties in shade.  Present a villager with two pieces of paper, one true blue and one true green, and you’re likely to get one word as the name of the color for both pieces of paper.  In their eyes, in their mind, there isn’t a difference between blue and green.

(Now, what I cannot begin to understand is when a non-colorblind person can’t give me two separate words for blue and red.  I have my limits to what I can accept.)

I’ve never tried to explain to a villager that in English we have dozens of words for colors that are only very slightly different.  I’m rather certain if I did, they would think we’re ridiculous for having so many unnecessary and unimportant words.  They would probably also be baffled to know that our one English word basket is sufficient for us, while they have separate words sa, ga loong, song, deng (to name a few) to distinguish between baskets of different shapes and sizes, baskets with or without handles, baskets carried by hand versus those strapped on the back versus those carried across the shoulder on two poles.

They’re all baskets to me.  But sa, ga loong, and song to me are the basket equivalents of beige, khaki, and ecru to a villager.


Post to Twitter

Part 12

Posted on by

After lunch at the aunt’s house, we went back to visit with the grandparents again, and I tried out one of my conversation starters in B language with the grandmother, a woman in her 70s:  “Have you ever been to JH?”  I was shocked to hear her answer.  Not only has she never been to JH, she’s never been any further away than the tiny market town at the bottom of the mountain road.  In over 70 years of life, she’s never traveled more than a 90 minute drive from her home.  She told me that when she was younger, she was in a tractor wreck, and she never got in another moving vehicle again after that.  Amazing.

She asked me if JH was my hometown—to her (and many others) a Chinese person from JH is just as much an outsider on the mountain as a foreigner is.  I told her no, I’m from America.  She asked how far away that is.  I told her it’s very far.  She asked if you could get there in three or four days by driving a car.  I told her no, it’s much further than that, and you have to fly in an airplane to get there.  She asked, well, if you were to drive a car, how many days do you think it would take?  I told her I guessed it would be at least more than thirty days, but there’s an ocean, so it’s really impossible.  I think the concept of an ocean was more than she could comprehend, having never seen more water than the small river that runs by the New Village.  So I just decided to leave it at that:  America is at least more than thirty days’ drive from B Mountain.

I continue to be astounded by the fact that I can now communicate with this incredible woman who raised ten children in this small wood home.  In over 70 years she’s never been off the mountain where she was born and raised, in what we would consider the middle of nowhere in SE Asia, and for the first time in over five years of living here, I had a conversation with someone like her without a translator.  In the past, I would have just sat and smiled at her, and she probably would have patted her hand on my knee, and we would have taken a picture together, and I would have looked back and thought, “What a sweet little old grandmother.  Wish I could talk to her.”  And now I can!  Only by the grace of God.

We said our goodbyes to the grandparents and headed back down the path to the main road to the New Village and Colleen’s home.  She and her sister collected leaves off of vines along the way to make in a soup for dinner.  She asked me if I’d ever eaten so many wild plants in my life; I assured her that no, I had never eaten as many wild berries, fruit, mushrooms, and leaves as I had at her house.

I spent the evening sitting on the porch outside her family’s home, enjoying the coolness of the air and resting my feet and my mind after the long but enjoyable day on the mountain.  YGS came skipping down the road, looking up at the balcony as she approached the house and waving both her arms as she saw me sitting there.  She ran up the stairs and flung herself at me in a great hug.  I asked her where she was going.  She said, “I came here to look for you!”  She sat in my lap and told me about her day, and I tried to tell her what all we had done that day.  The same as Colleen’s grandmother, YGS is another person who I had never been able to communicate with in the past on my trips to B villages.  Children who haven’t been to school and can’t speak Chinese are usually very shy around me, but just being able to speak a few halting sentences in B language opened wide the door for me to have a new little friend in YGS.  Throughout my two days there, I often prayed silently for her as she sat in my lap or as she led me by the hand down the village path.

Part 13

Post to Twitter

Part 10

Posted on by

We traipsed through a couple more paths of mud/manure to get to the youngest aunt’s house, and she welcomed us into the main room.  Her three young sons were there too, playing and coming in and out of the front door the whole time we were there.  Eventually they got over their shyness and would approach us to talk.  Ben handed out candy all around, which helped a great deal with the kids overcoming their shyness.  The aunt began boiling water for more tea, and this time we were seated long enough at their house for me to be able to drink the entire cup.

As soon as Ben had an attentive audience, he pulled out a photo album that we had been using in our language learning sessions back in JH and began methodically going through the album and practicing every sentence and all the vocabulary he could remember.  The aunt sat patiently listening to him, correcting his pronunciation, and asking him questions for close to an hour.  Once he had pulled out the album, the little boys quickly stopped playing or watching TV and gathered around to see the pictures.  It worked out really well as a time of language practice; everyone was interested in seeing photos of any sort, a book of any sort, and they really didn’t find it boring to sit and listen to Ben practicing sentences like, “This man is driving a tractor.  That lady is working in the field.”  I was amazed at their patience and interest, and I believe that they were truly fascinated with a book (which they have so few of) and that they were touched that someone was even trying to speak B language with them instead of Chinese.

I sat on a nearby stool throughout Ben’s whole practice time, adding a comment every now and then to his conversation, and passed the time talking with Colleen.  I think she was mostly bored and slightly amused by the photo album conversation; she had taught us to say all of those sentences and had heard them a hundred times before.

Once all the pictures in the album had been exhausted, everyone prepared to go out in search of mushrooms.  Colleen and her sisters had been telling us that there were lots of good mushrooms growing in the forest since it was rainy season, and her aunt wanted to take us out to find some for lunch.  The boys also wanted to take us to find this one particular tree that had a fruit on it that no one seemed to know the name for in Chinese.  We trooped out of the house and down the manure path towards the edge of the village and the nearby tea trees in a procession made up of me, Ben, Colleen, her sister, their aunt, and the three little boys.  The boys were running back and forth, up and down the path, off the path, in and out of the tea trees, all the way to the edge of the field where the tea trees met the rainforest sloping down the mountain.  There, among the bamboo and bananas and numerous other tropical trees I couldn’t begin to describe, was the tree we were in search of, tall and with branches reaching out just like any other tree.  The difference was this tree was covered with dangling clusters of bright, bright red fruit the size of small plums.  It was quite a sight, the clusters of red in contrast with all the green of the forest around it.  Colleen and a couple of the boys were quickly scampering up the trunk and out along the limbs in search of what they thought might be the ripest, sweetest clusters of fruit.  At first they dropped down individual pieces for us to try, and after they decided the fruit was ripe enough, Colleen began tossing down entire clusters for me to catch with the basket we had carried along.

It wasn’t long before they decided that the fruit was sweet, but not the sweetest to be found in the village.  So we left that spot and circled around to the opposite edge of the village and another tree draped with the red garland of fruit, all the while eating samples of our find from the basket and dropping the peels on the forest trail behind us.  The children—including Colleen, who by this point had completely reverted back to her inner village child—tossed more of the fruit down into the basket, until it was sufficiently full for us to proceed to our next task:  collecting mushrooms for lunch.

Part 11

Post to Twitter