Under the language pledge at CET in Beijing with my limited experience with Chinese, completing simple tasks often felt like major successes. For example, in my first week I made a trip across the street to the local shop to pick up a pair of nail clippers, some shampoo, and a roll of tape. Before my trip I cha’d my zidian (查字典, chá zìdiǎn, looked up words in the dictionary) and headed over to the shop. I ended up getting all three of my items with minimal confusion, and even pulled off getting complimented on my Chinese by the shopkeeper. I returned to my 宿舍 (sùshè, dorm) feeling high on life. I was in the stage of learning Chinese where putting together a sentence for the first time sometimes made me feel like a poet, working with the bits and pieces of the language to construct new sentences.
Language immersion programs like CET are a popular choice these days for students of Chinese who want to learn a lot in a short amount of time. In these programs the students usually have to sign a 语言誓约 (yǔyán shìyuē, language pledge) promising that they will only speak Chinese for the duration of the program, both in and outside of the classroom. These programs have some definite benefits over traditional ones, but also have their fair share of drawbacks. I’ve had a couple of different experiences with language immersion programs: as a student at CET in Beijing during the ‘07 summer session and as an assistant Chinese language director this past summer at an MMLA program in Massachusetts.
So, first the pros:
1. You can learn a lot of Chinese really quickly. Every situation you find yourself in you have to figure out what to say and look up the words you don’t know. For example when I got to Beijing one of the first things that happened to me was the key to my dorm room broke in half when I turned it in the lock. I had to look up the words for key, lock, and broken before I could explain my situation in Chinese to the 师傅 (shīfu, respectful term for any professional person, in this case the building grounds keeper). The course was accelerated as well so we covered all of Integrated Chinese book 1 in 9 weeks.
2. Everyone is in it together so your level of nervousness goes down you gain confidence with speaking Chinese. At least during class, students tend to suck it up and try as hard as possible to speak only in Chinese. The vibe of communal suffering encourages students to speak up and not be afraid of making mistakes.
3. Chinese 同屋 (tóngwū, roommates). The CET program placed most all of the students in dorm rooms with Chinese roommates. This was an awesome step in the right direction. Having the Chinese roommates around provided lots of opportunities to talk, hang out, and become friends with Chinese people roughly my own age. It would have been tough to form friendships with Chinese people from outside of the school in such a short time (9 weeks).
And the cons:
1. Everything is 囧(jiǒng, awkward). Seriously, it is. I’ve had a lot of 囧 meals with people in immersion programs. During class time things are usually fairly structured and students tend to do better with the language pledge because they know what they are supposed to be doing. But once class is over and things are unstructured, it is harder to stay in the target language and things get 囧er and 囧er.
2. It doesn’t feel natural to be speaking Chinese with classmates and other people who share your native language. You might think that you could somehow suspend your knowledge that you could be speaking much more efficiently with your classmates in English. In theory this would work. The problem is that to do so is going directly against the natural forces at play and will ultimately always fail as a strategy. Check out John Pasden’s blog post about the language struggle for a more in depth analysis of the natural forces involved in the choice of what language to use. This is a real problem in immersion programs because the students will always break the pledge outside of the classroom and then it causes a chain reaction and eventually the whole idea of the pledge flies out the window.
3. Outside of class there are certain situations that just don’t make sense to speak Chinese in. For example, at CET we did a scavenger hunt at the 颐和园 (Yíhéyuán, Summer Palace in Beijing). Part of the activity involved talking to random people to ask about the history of the palace. I ended up talking to some tourists who looked like they were from China, but actually they were ABC and didn’t speak much Chinese. It seemed ridiculous to try to speak to them in Chinese when I knew full well that we shared English as our native language. Another similar situation was when I went to my foreign friend’s party outside of campus and I met a whole bunch of foreigners who were all studying Chinese, but not necessarily in language pledge programs.
4. Students create their own jokes, words, and phrases in the target language that are mutually understandable to them, but not necessarily to a native Chinese speaker. This was actually a lot of fun and was a creative way to use what little language we had at the time. One of the “jokes” which doesn’t seem all that funny in retrospect was every single day at lunch a bunch of 100 level jock types who sat at my table would say “吃饱了”, but they’d say it like “bawl’aaaaa!” while miming shooting a basketball. It was supposed to sound like the way that a teenage boy might yell “ball’a!” on the basketball courts in the US. Despite the fun of making stupid jokes that only native English speakers can pick up on, it doesn’t contribute much towards to goal of learning to speak Chinese in an authentic way.
During my experiences teaching English in Shanxi province and hanging out with Chinese people I learned that in most cases I didn’t need to speak only in Chinese. Most of the Chinese people I met were interested in having a bit of language exchange and switching between English and Chinese. I think the dual language programs cropping up around the US are a promising method for the future of language learning in the US. As I understand it, programs like the Shuangwen school in NYC generally enroll half and half native speakers of English and of Chinese. There is no language pledge but half of the classes are taught in English and the other half in Chinese. The students are encouraged to help each other out with the language learning so that everyone works towards the goal of becoming bilingual. This methodology seems to me to be a better reflection of the reality of language learning: that it is healthy and natural to have a certain amount of give and take between your native language and your target language.
Have any Skritter users tried out a Chinese immersion program? Can you add any pros/cons to my list? Any thoughts on dual language schools in the US?