Advantages of being able to communicate in English with your teacher.

• Especially in the beginning, it’s a good thing to be able to ask questions. The teacher will be able to explain grammatical concepts and words more deeply and thoroughly
• By being able to clarify quickly, more time can be spent going over the main concepts, rather than back-and-forth between student and teacher

Disadvantages

• If the teacher is very comfortable in English, there is a tendency to spend most of the lesson speaking English and talking about the other language in theoretical sense. While this will be comfortable if you have a ’scientist’ learning style, it takes away valuable time that can be used to exercise and reinforce the language you are learning.
• Some concepts or words don’t have a direct translation. If the teacher instead manages to explain them in the language you are learning, it will prevent you from using these words incorrectly later.
• Just because your teacher speaks English fluently, it doesn’t mean that he speaks the target language fluently, or is a good teacher for that matter. In the past 10 years, I’ve been taught by 7 Mandarin teachers and 3 Spanish teachers, and I have found that there is no relation between English language skill and teaching skill. In fact, two of the best teachers I have had, one for Mandarin, one for Spanish, were fluent in English but managed the classes in such a way that they hardly made use of any of it; from the very start!

Some teaching techniques that can substitute for English explanation:

• Good teaching materials can help a lot, if they are accompanied by graphic representations for simple words, or have good English translations of new words.
• You will be amazed by how much can be clarified by hand signals, pointing and drawing. For example, instead of giving a translation of each type of family relation, when teaching Mandarin, it works much better to draw a family tree, as the Chinese have much more detailed naming conventions for all types of family members. Or let’s say you are learning about the different parts of a car. Why not draw a car on the board with arrows to the different components?

If you are going to learn a new language, would you insist on a teacher that speaks English fluently? Why (not)?

Right now, if you want to sign up for a course, you submit a form in which you can indicate your current level, when you’re available etc., and I will get back to you with available language courses from our partner school. If the course I propose for you works out, you can sign up for it and Yago gets a nominal referral fee from the partner school involved.

We are working hard to expand it and give you more choices. More languages, more schools, more different courses, at more locations in Singapore. This requires a major website revamp which we are currently working on in partnership with web development company Techsailor.

When our new website is finished, you will be able to surf the site and compare schools and courses until you have identified the course that works best for you. You can then book that language course directly with your credit card. At a later time, we will send you a request to rate your learning experience, so that fellow language learners can get a feel for the quality of the course before they sign up.

This way, we finally hope to give people in Singapore a way to find quality courses at a convenient time and place. Searching a language course in singapore will be just like booking your vacation online through zuji.com.sg.

They can be descriptions of the object:

Another category of Chinese words is very literal translations. In other languages you would often see that the English word is borrowed into the language. In Mandarin, what happens sometimes is that the words get translated in a very literal sense:

A last category I want to mention is the vocal transcriptions. These are made by putting totally unrelated characters together that sound a bit like the English word. The new combination is then adopted as a new word in the Chinese language. The literal translation makes no sense at all. Examples:

Do you have any other examples of how English words made their way into another language?

In December 2004, I went to visit my Chinese girlfriend Yiran at her home for the first time. Being a student, I was able to stay for a full month and visit many tourist attractions. Everything was very new to me. Having volunteered in Ghana, it was not that I became really shocked, maybe just overwhelmed from all the merchandise available, sometimes with price tags from European chain stores already on them. I didn’t have to do much, nor could I, as there was hardly any metro lines and my Chinese ability consisted of being able to counting to five. It was hard on Yiran, who had to translate everything, back and forth between me and her parents – and anyone else for that matter! And her mum of course had a lot of questions! I obviously had only the most vague clue of what was going on around me from observing their actions.

In October 2007, my fiancée Yiran and I went on another visit. By that time Yiran and I were living together in Singapore and both of us were working, so we could only afford to go for a week. I had been learning Mandarin for 5 months full-time and another 16 months part-time and things were starting to add up. I could follow some of what was on TV, and know the gist of conversations. I’d recognise characters on the road here and there.

But the last visit in February 2010 with my wife Yiran was an eye opener for me. A had three weeks to spend, as I am now a full-time entrepreneur and can answer e-mails as well in China as I can in Singapore. Still not fluent, I can now understand conversations as they happen on the street, which gives an entirely different perspective on life in China. Having a direct link to speaking with people you just meet in the train or on the street just makes you realize that despite the language barrier, we are all citizens of the world and share the same interests and worries on many issues.

A train journey from Dalian to Qinhuangdao was the biggest eye opener. In our carriage a lively conversation evolved with our fellow travellers from all generations, starting from the fifties (my mother-in-law) to the nineties (the son of a couple born in the sixties) about lots of the daily living issues all of us face: career, raising children, family ties, priorities in life. I felt really priviliged to be part of the conversation; I guess to them I didn’t feel as alien any more, since I was able to speak their language and relate how these things affect people from the Netherlands.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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?

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.