New Practical Chinese Reader by Liu Xun

DH is learning Chinese. He recently completed the Mandarin II course at UC Berkeley Extension, and during those twelve weeks, I felt like I was in elementary school again: Chinese Homework. Only his experience was much worse than mine because he was sitting at the kitchen table every single night working on his assignments. When I was little, Chinese school was on Saturday mornings, so it was only Friday nights that were tortuous. Now I was on the helping side of the homework, and it was constant.

The New Practical Chinese Reader was their textbook. Language textbooks are always a bit funny when you look through them. They consist of silly dialogues that would never occur in real life (“How was yesterday’s Beijing opera?” “It was very interesting. Today the weather is very good, why don’t we go swimming?”[p. 62]).

One of the first lessons taught a grammatical structure involving a subject and a predicate adjective, i.e. “I am well.” Naturally, the students needed some vocabulary to complete the sentence. They were taught, “I am busy.”

This was hilarious to me. Here they were, beginning Mandarin students who didn’t even know the words for big, small, up, down, or “to be” yet, and all they could do was helplessly express the truly American concept of responding to every inquiry, “I am very busy.” They were, in fact, very busy. Busy doing Chinese homework.

This reminds me of an article I read by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker several years ago, where he recounts his amazement (and concern) at his daughter’s imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli. Using her toy cell phone, she would call Mr. Ravioli frequently, but he was always too busy to play with her. Gopnik wondered exactly what she had picked up from watching the adults in her life.

Now that the class has ended and Mandarin III has not begun yet, DH worries that he will start to forget everything he’s learned. I suggested creating a blog entirely in Chinese. He’s no expert, but a sentence or two a day might be just right to keep the brain moving. Now we sit at the kitchen table every night working on Chinese again, but it’s a fairly painless two sentences. And, as it turns out, the minimalist blogs are zen-like in their simplicity. In fact, they’re almost poetry.

New Practical Chinese Reader by Liu Xun

tags: books book reviews learning chinese mandarin Adam Gopnik chinese textbook