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| Developing Mandarin learning strategies |
| "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" -- Chinese proverb |
Strategy is of military origin. The ancient Chinese philosopher
Sun Tzu was the first person who seriously examined military strategies
more than 2,500 years ago. Successful business people know how
to borrow these military strategies and apply them to business.
However, this is not necessarily the case when business people
learn a language like Mandarin.
When applied to language learning, strategies refer to a set of
plans and operations a learner uses to facilitate the learning
process and boost learning results. When learning a foreign language,
both teachers and students tend to focus more on the language
rather than on the actual learning of the language. This
is particularly true in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.
The overwhelming weight of emphasis in teaching Mandarin has been
on the tones, pronunciation and analysis of the language. Very
few people realise that the key to successful Mandarin learning
and teaching lies not in the analysis of the nature of the language,
but in the structure and process of the mind.
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| What are Mandarin learning strategies? |
| The way our minds process information has a big impact on our
learning efficiency. Learning strategies affect these mind processes,
which include attention, rehearsal, encoding and retrieval. New
Concept Mandarin's research team has identified 353 strategies
used by Western adults to learn Mandarin. These strategies are
acions or thoughts that students apply on their own to a challenging
learning task, such as listening, speaking, reading or writing.
Some typical strategies include predicting, making inferences,
classifying, identifying using association, summarising, note-taking,
using picture clues, co-operating with classmates, and asking
questions for clarification. For example, over 99 per cent of
Chinese characters can be classified into 214 basic meaning categories,
so the strategy of classifying the meaning of Chinese characters
is essential in mastering Chinese characters. |
| Developing Mandarin learning strategies |
If you are currently learning Mandarin, one question you may ask yourself is: "Has my teacher taught me any Mandarin learning strategies?" A good teacher knows not only the subject well, but also how to help students become better learners. Teachers should be an important resource on which students can draw learning strategies. Once learning strategies have been identified, whether by your teacher or yourself, select those that facilitate your learning result and practise them. Strategies can be practised with any learning task or activity. For example, reading skills and recognition of Chinese characters can be developed through the use of visual aids, while homophones (characters that sound the same) can be used to develop Chinese vocabulary.
Once you have developed effective Mandarin learning strategies and have used them regularly, you will definitely enjoy a better return on the time and money invested in learning Mandarin.
Find out more about our face to face learning mode, Interactive CD-ROM learning, and Mixed-code-way for Online learning.
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