I have been doing several vocabulary exercises on mandarintools.com to increase my Chinese character recognition. Selecting the program is not difficult, considering all the instructions are in English. The program I chose is in a flashcard format--one character appears on screen for a selected length of time and the pinyin romanization or English meaning needs to be chosen by the learner. I surmised this would help me to increase my reading comprehension. After setting most of the parameters for the program, I decided that I could handle Level 10, the most advanced vocabulary. There were some characters that I was able to guess the meaning for based on ideographic roots, but identifying the correct written pronunciation required an extensive knowledge of the phonetic elements, which is well beyond my 2,200 character recognition range. (Incidentally, the government of Mainland China has published a list of the 2,000 most commonly used characters necessary for minimal literacy. A more substantial vocabulary would be five to seven thousand!)
The main problem with the program is that the characters do not appear in context. There are no options which allow a learner to see example sentences with the new vocabulary. Most of the time, Chinese words are in combinations of two or more. The characters in the program are presented in isolation. This might be acceptable at a beginning level but not at an intermediate or advanced one. Also, corrective feedback is not given until the end of the exercise. I found myself pausing the running list to write the characters that I had gotten wrong for immediate correction.
Given the fact that I am a visual learner, I can see a character one time and memorize it. So, a program like this can be somewhat helpful to a person like me. I am forced, however, to consider what would happen if I were not a visual learner. This program would be a very poor choice indeed. It also makes me wonder about Chinese and Japanese students who are learning English. What is it like for them to go from reading ideographically to alphabetically?
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2 comments:
Hi Larry,
2 points I want to address. The first is that you echo a more general theme that other teachers have brought up in this CALL experience: Context is SO important for ourselves and our students!
Second, I'd be curious to read something about differences in processing a foreign language between those coming from an ideographic to an alphabetic script to another? A rich topic indeed!
Larry,
You're a smart guy, and even for you, it was challenging. Trying to learn a language in a vacuum or with vocabulary in isolation, is next to impossible, especially for an average learner. We found in brain based learning indicates that people actually learn better when they have something to connect it to, or when it's related to something that they already know. I'm certain that I would have an extremely difficult time with that program, in that I find it difficult to memorize outside of a context or situation. Frankly, this basically sums up the difficulties that I 'm having with CALL.
Andre
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