'Chinese is not that difficult to learn!'
Suli Poell on learning Chinese
When I tell people that I am a Chinese teacher, people often say: “Chinese is a very difficult language!” That is right, Chinese IS difficult. There are two reasons that make Chinese difficult. One is the pronunciation with four tones, which you don’t find in English. The second is the Chinese characters, which people have no idea how to read and write. Learning Chinese can seem like a daunting task.
But from my past experiences with my students, contrary to common belief, it is NOT that difficult to learn. For instance, Chinese grammar is relatively easy and straightforward. Chinese words are very transparent and logical and the more Chinese you learn, the easier it gets.
Whether it is a Chinese word or a character, it has certain rules, which when you start to learn it, is just like making a piece of a block. The more Chinese you learn, the more building blocks or language components in a word you will acquire, and then you can just put together the old pieces and make up new ones. And this is a lot of fun.
To solve the difficulties of learning Chinese, I have designed my course differently. People don’t have to learn Chinese characters to learn how to speak Chinese. In my opinion, trying to know all the characters, including reading and writing will seriously slow down your progress of speaking and listening. It can happen that you get so drained at the beginning by spending hours and hours on practising Chinese characters that you become discouraged and lose interest in the language at an early stage.
Therefore, instead of learning speaking, listening, reading and writing at the same time, in the ZH1 course, we focus on speaking and listening with the help of Pinyin. Pinyin is the Chinese phonetic system, it represents every single Chinese sound out there. Pinyin uses the roman letters and it is very easy to pronounce. We just need to put effort and time into practising the tones by doing lots of listening and speaking exercises. In the ZH2 course, we come back to learn the Chinese characters. By this time, you already have a foundation to build on. It makes the learning process easier and more interesting. With the explanation of the structure and rules of Chinese characters, students can quickly learn reading and writing. Besides the textbook, exercise book and listening materials, I also give out extra handouts according to the subject we are learning. All these handouts are based more on real daily life conversations.
The culture section is the most popular part of the lesson. Students can choose any topic about China to share or discuss freely in the class. Music, sport, food, environment, economy, politics, travel, study or living experience etc. This has always been an interesting and enjoyable part of the course and the students are very enthusiastic. Creating a pleasant, participatory atmosphere is very important and as a teacher, my passion can be very infectious, and I make sure that we create a cheerful and positive mood in the class.
Interested? Our new courses start in September. Please see our website for more information.
Suli Poell, came to the Netherlands for her study study in 2002 and since 2006 has been working as Chinese teacher at the Language Centre. Suli is kind, open and patient and good at creating a relaxing class atmosphere that makes that students enjoy attending her classes.