February 5, 2010
If you don’t know either language, you’ll probably feel that both Mandarin and Japanese are very similar in their look. And of course they are. When I was in Japan, I was amazed at how much I could understand just from the characters, even if I had no idea at all how to pronounce it. But where Chinese only has hanzi （汉字）, the Japanese operate three writing systems:
Kanji
These are what the hanzi are to the Chinese, and they are very common. This writing system was actually imported from the Chinese, but later the writings were made such that they could fit the Japanese word order. Unlike mainland China, there was no simplification in characters, so several differences have emerged, but they are still pretty easy to read for Chinese people.
Hiragana
Hiragana are used in cases where there is no original Chinese word, or when it is too complicated. They look like this: ひらがな and are a phonetic system.
Katakana
The short letters with short angles are called katakana. They are used most often to transcribe loanwords from foreign languages and look as follows: カタカナ.
Romanji
Romanji is the romanized form of Japanese, like Hanyu Pinyin is for the Chinese. You’d be surprised if you speak a European language at how easy it is in Japan to be understood if you just read the Romanji.
October 26, 2009
A few stops north of Jurong East interchange, in the northwest of Singapore, is Choa Chu Kang MRT station. Since a few years linked to the automated Light Rail Transit (LRT) with small rail cars running on elevated roads, it’s a station of much importance to the approximately 140,000 inhabitants of the area called Choa Chu Kang.
Choa Chu Kang or 蔡厝港 (càicuògǎng) in Mandarin stems from the Teochew dialect. In the early days, the area was a rural area where Chinese immigrants planted gambier (an herb used in Western and Chinese medicine, as well as for coloring) and pepper along the banks of the rivers.
‘Kang’ means ‘river’ in Teochew, ‘chu’ means ‘lord’. So it refers to the headman that was in charge of the plantations at the time.
‘Choa’ is the clan name of the first headman. So ‘Choa Chu Kang’ as a whole stands for ‘headman Choa’.
October 22, 2009
Sometimes people ask me whether learning Chinese will increase the chances for employment. My answer: while there are exceptions, in most cases learning a new language hardly increases your chances of employment.
I admit that this is nothing more than just an opinion, and one that I can prove isn’t true in all cases. Being Dutch, I could never have landed a job in Singapore if my English weren’t up to standard. And there are jobs where speaking Mandarin or Japanese are required in order to even be considered.
But here’s the catch: unless your proficiency in the required language is near-native, you will be considered a non-speaker. Imagine the job you are applying for involves selling in China. Who is going to trust a salesperson that has the language proficiency of a primary school kid? Sending someone with low or intermediate language proficiency to a country to do business reflects poorly on the company.
So if you know zero Mandarin at this time, and believe that taking up mandarin classes for a couple of months is going to help your employability, you will be disappointed. If you start at zero, be prepared to take your time to learn the language till fluency. Or learn for the love of language and keep working at it, for example in evening classes, for several years.
Of course there are other scenarios possible. You could be a Singaporean who has learnt Mandarin until O’levels, speaks mostly Mandarin at home, but is just a bit lacking in specific business vocabulary. Words like ‘profit’, ‘interest’ or ‘ratio’ may not come naturally to you. You might already be considered for jobs that require some interaction with China, but for jobs where China is the main focus, your Chinese may not be up to scratch.
In this scenario, a couple of months of effort can really benefit your employability. Beef up your language level and all of a sudden you would be a credible candidate for China-focused jobs. The BCT test is meant exactly to measure and certify your level of Mandarin if you already speak it quite well.
If you’re a beginner, it sure won’t do harm to your career to learn Mandarin. Having that language study on your resume shows a great learning attitude. Just don’t expect it to do wonders during your application unless you’ve become 100% fluent. Whatever your starting level, we have a Mandarin course for you.
Filed under Learning
Tags: BCT test, business chinese, business conversation, career, certification, Chinese, class, classes, course, education, learning chinese
October 20, 2009
As a discerning learning wanting to sign up for a good quality language class, you are saddled with a chicken-and-egg problem. Schools generally will ask you to pay in full before joining the class, but only by participating in a language class for a while can you know how good the school’s teaching really is.
There is a couple of things you can do to try and assure that you are signing up with a good school:
Check whether the school is CaseTrust accredited. CASE is the Consumer Association of Singapore and it runs a program that accredits educational institutions. In principle it is not difficult for schools to be accredited, but when you sign up with a CaseTrust certified institution, at least you are assured that the school has taken the commitment to be audited, has passed the audit, and has proper procedures in place should you ever need to complain.
Call the school, or come down personally and ask questions. While it has its limits, there are some questions that you can ask before signing up:
- What is emphasized most on during the course (verbal or written language)
- What is the class size?
- What are the qualifications of the teacher?
- Which materials are use for teaching? Can you see them?
This doesn’t protect you from schools that ‘talk nice but don’t deliver’ but still helps you get a feel for whether the particular school and course you plan to sign up with will be a good fit for you. Most of all, it can raise a ‘red flag’ when the school doesn’t provide professional answers to you questions. So I would say this method is rather a way to disqualify bad schools than a way to find the best school.
Ask your friends. It’s no wonder that the majority of learners actually find their school through friends. If you know someone that is already taking the course, you can get a candid and useful perspective on how the classes are really being taught. You’d be amazed by how many replies you may get by just posting a simple message on Facebook, saying that you’re looking for a suitable school to learn Mandarin / Japanese / German – or whatever you want to learn.
How we can help
To make it easier for you to find suitable language schools in Singapore, I have earlier posted the Singapore language school map which plots Singapore’s most important language schools on a map. That’ll help you to locate a language school that’s close to your home or work place.
Soon we will provide you with another option to get an idea of language school’s quality. We are currently working on bringing more language schools on to our main website and include the possibility to leave feedback. That way you’ll be able to find out from a broader group of people whether the school you are considering is actually going to offer you good teaching.
Filed under Learning, Singapore
Tags: certification, class, classes, course, education, language, Learning, learning chinese, quality, school, Singapore, teaching methods
October 14, 2009
In my view, learning a language isn’t so much about intelligence, or understanding of the subject matter, as it is a matter of just doing it and persisting. I won’t deny that some people ‘get’ grammar a whole lot faster than others, but even they won’t become fluent until they have put in a lot of hours practicing and using the language in reality.
So how do you make sure you get enough exercise? To get a good picture of how you are currently learning, take a critical look at your personal learning network. Does it only include academic resources, such as study books, teacher led instruction, dictionaries and software tools? Then I can surely tell you that you don’t have enough reinforcement to keep on the winning track.
To be sure, all of the above things are essential to push your understanding of the language forward, but whatever you take in through these means needs reinforcement in real life. Reality is that you are not going to have the chance to study the language academically until perfection and will only start using it after you have perfected your ability. Make sure you NEED to learn what you WANT to learn.
I’m personally in the lucky situation that my wife is from China. While her English is impeccable, most of my in-laws speak only limited English, if any. When I meet them (and increasingly when talking with my wife) I’ll have to pull anything out of my brain that I learnt in the classroom or picked up from a book. And by using and reusing the words, I engrave them ever deeper into my conscience.
If you have no reinforcement from having to speak to anyone who speaks the language, try to find people to speak with, or even to communicate with in writing. Writing characters on your computer isn’t as difficult as it seems, as I covered in this post.
If you can’t find anyone to communicate in Chinese with (or in any other language you’re learning), ask yourself: what use is it going to be to know this language?
October 9, 2009
If you don’t happen to live in the Northeast, you may not have been there, but Hougang MRT is a pretty busy station in the heartlands (main residential areas) of Singapore. Its name, written as 后港 (Hòu găng) in Mandarin, stems from the Hokkien/Teochew “Aū-káng” which means “river end”. There used to be a well at what is now Hougang Street 21; which explains the name “river end”.
Not that long ago, the area that now has some 40,000 housing units used to be an area of forested land, where pig farming was one of the main activities. Many of the inhabitants of present day Hougang are Teochew Chinese, since most of the inhabitants used to live in the village Kampong Punggol, which was mainly a Teochew community.
October 7, 2009
A while ago a wrote about the Business Chinese Test (BCT) that I took in August. The results took about a month to come in, but here here they are:
Chinese Numeracy Test
Score: 6 out of 8
Interpretation: Can interpret routine charts and graphs; interpret a payroll stub; complete an order form and do calculations; compute tips; reconcile a bank statement.
My comments: A relatively good score, but I believe it is accurate since a lot of the number language (tables, graphs, statistics) is universal. Having had a good schooling in business statistics, I needed to understand only a little Chinese to do well with routine tasks. Where things get too far beyond routine, my vocabulary isn’t sufficient to interpret the charts – think of words as penetration rate, gross revenue, profit margin.
BCT 1: Listening and speaking
Score: 3 out of 5
Interpretation: Capable of fairly effective communication in Chinese business environment
My comments: I did better in speaking and listening than in reading and writing, which may have to do with the fact that I haven’t been following formal lessons for a while, while I’m still speaking Chinese regularly.
BCT 2: Reading
Score: 2 out of 5
Interpretation: Capable of basic communication in Chinese business environment.
My comments: Seems a fair score. My reading level isn’t enough to read ‘my paper‘, the most basic Chinese newspaper in Singapore, without an enormous amount of effort. It’s probably comparable to a Chinese primary school kid. Still I’m glad that I scored 2 and not 1, which would have meant I’d be considered totally incapable of communication in Chinese business environments.
BCT 3: Writing
Score: 2 out of 5
Interpretation: Capable of basic communication in Chinese business environment.
My comments: Like the score for the reading test, this seems accurate. I can write very simple e-mails, but my vocab is so limited that if you read them out loud, they would sound like a little child talking to Chinese.
October 2, 2009
Until recently, Bishan was an MRT station like any other. But recently, with the opening of the first segment of the Circle Line, it became an interchange and it’s now possible to connect to Serangoon station on the North-East line. So where does the name Bishan come from? It stems from the Cantonese burial ground that was established in the area by Cantonese immigrants in 1870, named Peck San Theng in Cantonese, written as 碧山亭 (bìshántīng) meaning “pavilions on the green”. So the name Bishan (碧山/Bìshān) is the Mandarin transcription of the Cantonese name of a burial ground. Makes you look with at the area with different eyes, doesn’t it?
There is a village in China that is also called Bishan (碧山), situated just outside of the metropolis of Chongqing in central China.
By the way, we work together with a language school in Bishan, Singapore. See here for a listing of the Chinese courses that you can take at this school.
September 30, 2009
Call me old-fashioned, but I find it hard to imagine learning a language without taking face-to-face classes. I have tried it several times, where I just bought a book with CD’s such as ‘teach yourself’, and I have seen some results, but not the type of lasting result where you really cross the border from knowing a couple of phrases to being able to speak the language to some extent.
I guess it has to do with the way I have been conditioned to learn language. The Dutch school system emphasises language learning a lot; in such a way that it is impossible to leave secondary school without at least having studied (besides Dutch) English and another modern language, usually either French or German. The teaching came with a chapter structure, homework assignments, tests and peer pressure.
Always wanting to be a good student, I wouldn’t want to score an insufficient grade. Traditional-style teaching breaks up the material in clearly defined ‘blocks’ and tests provide a clear milestones. I knew that by the date of the test you need to be proficient in a certain sentence structure or know a defined vocabulary.
It’s true that online or do-it-yourself learning methods provide similar structure and some also have tests included, but the results aren’t as public as in a school and you can set the date yourself. With school-style teaching there is no excuse, you have to learn until you’re proficient, and in the run-up to your test, that test becomes your top priority. The flexibility that web or purely book-based methods offer has its down side too.
I’m not saying that I’m not seeing the value of all types of electronic tools that can now help in the learning process. They can provide great support in gaining an understanding more quickly and reinforcing what has been learnt. But in the end it’s the discipline and continuous effort that pushes a learner from a non-speaker to a speaker. And to me, classes are indispensible to maintain that discipline.
How about you? Do you think it’s necessary to take classes in order to learn a new language?
September 28, 2009
The district and MRT station name Ang Mo Kio stems from Hokkien. It’s written as 宏茂桥 (hóngmàoqiáo in Mandarin). As most Westerners in Singapore will know, a common way to refer to Caucasians is “Ang Mo”, a Hokkien term that is written as 红毛 (hóngmáo in Mandarin), hóng/Ang meaning ‘red’ and máo/mo meaning ‘hair’ – for some reason Caucasians have the reputation of having red hair. 桥 (qiáo / kio) means ‘bridge’.
Some Caucasians don’t like to be called ‘Ang Mo’. Personally I don’t mind and I don’t think it is always derogatory, but it can be. Hence the writing was changed to 宏茂桥 (hóngmàoqiáo – bridge of expansiveness and prosperity).
In actual fact, the name ‘Ang Mo’ in this case does not refer to a Westerner but to rambutans which is written exactly the same way (红毛）. The rambutan is a local fruit that has a red surface and is covered by hair. It looks like the picture next to this text.
So the name of Ang Mo Kio litterally means “bridge where there are rambutans”, as it was indicated on old maps in the time that there were only kampungs (villages) in the area.
