Learning Chinese and Piano

When my daughter complains about her extra-curriculum work load, which she does occasionally but thankfully not too often, piano and Chinese are always the two main targets. Why can't they be as fun as the other activities, like soccer and swimming?

One reason I had been pondering about is that it really may be in the teaching philosophy. In youth sports, kids gather for practice sessions, which becomes more and more frequent as their skill levels increase. But they are never required to do "homework" on their own. The few kids who really love a certain sport would gladly do extras on their own, but not at the request of their coaches.

That is certainly not the case as in piano, where a teacher can require the kids to practice every day, on their own. Is that the only way to learn the skill?

I am experimenting in cutting back homework in our Chinese learning.

Incidentally, a new study published in New York Times today is getting some attention. It claims that learning piano early could help people master a tonal language like Chinese, and even perhaps vice versa:

Mandarin speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is presumably because in Mandarin and other Asian languages, pitch plays a central role. A single-syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned.

For this study, the researchers looked at 20 non-Chinese speaking volunteers, half with no musical background and half who had studied an instrument for at least six years.

As they were shown a movie, the volunteers also heard an audiotape of the Mandarin word “mi” in three of its meanings: squint, bewilder and rice. The researchers recorded activity in their brain stems to see how well they were processing the sounds.

Those with a music background showed much more brain activity in response to the Chinese sounds.

The lead author of the study, Patrick C. M. Wong, said it might work both ways. It appears that native speakers of tonal languages may do better at learning instruments, Dr. Wong said.

Sick Day

My daughter is under the weather today so we skip the week. It's nice to be able to do that thanks to the flexibility of home schooling.

Homework Reduction

My daughter has been acting up, or at least trying to, lately. Her main rebellion case is her Chinese homework and piano practice assignments. Can't blame her much on that. Her piano teacher requires practicing five days a week, at least half an hour each.

We are at the last lesson in the Book 1 of our Chinese text book. For book one, the homework assignment is four times a week. Depending how she handles it, each sitting could take anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes. She has been doing a great job finishing all of them so far, until last week, which I allowed her to skip some of them after a few minor episodes of parenting struggles.

Spring is also around us. We are coming into a two-week span that her swimming and soccer overlap, during which she has swimming classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and soccer practices on Tuesday and Thursday. (She will stop swimming after the two weeks and resume after the soccer season.) I am not sure if I could get any extra homework done if I got that kind of schedule myself!

So, something has to be done with the Chinese homework. The homework we have are seven parts:

1. CD-ROM (listen to the lesson on computer and play a character-scramble game)
   
2. Character writing (two characters at a time, writing 8 times each),
3. Read lesson aloud
4. Read reading materials (did not require her to read aloud)
5. Recognize Chinese characters with cards
6. Play a character scramble game with cards
7. Write a sentence using given phrases (This is only done once the whole week)

Other than no 2 and 7, the assignments are the same, repeated for four times. She likes to do the CD-ROM, character writing, and writing sentence part but hates the others.

I thought that the no. 6 is probably the most time-consuming and least-productive task of them all, especially that she is already doing a similar thing on CD-ROM. So, I dropped that from her assignment altogether. She could still play it at her leisure time, I suggested.

For the others, I require to finish all four settings for Nos 1, 2, and 7, the items she has been enjoying. and do the No. 3, 4, and 5 at least twice, preferably three times. This will reduce the homework time probably almost in half. She is happy about the arrangement. We will see how she works it out this couple of weeks.

The homework assignment structure will change slightly once we start Book 2. So, we will have to revisit this issue in the near future.

School Today, Ski Tomorrow

We plan to go ski tomorrow, so we had our class today, on a Saturday, instead. My daughter did a good job in finishing last week's homework yesterday. She had to rush it because of the schedule change. But ski is a powerful incentive too. :)

It turns out that we had a fairly short class, a little over an hour. We went through the lesson fairly quickly and skipped the explanation of the reading material all together. She claimed that she understood everything in the reading material already. It was an easy piece and her comprehension was indeed improving. So, why not cut the class short.

ChinesePod

ChinesePod is a nice podcast site helping English-speaking people learning daily conversational Chinese. The daily MP3 segment is a little over 10 minutes long, centered in a brief situational dialog. They have five different levels of lessons.

I played a "newbie" level lesson to my daughter. She found it interesting. But there is no question that the lessons are aimed at grownups. During the "newbie" lesson at least, the teachers spent a lot of time talking in English. But they explain the Chinese context and tones fairly well.

The other shortcoming of this site is that only the daily podcast itself is free. To access all other materials, including transcripts, you have to register and pay (after a week-long free trial period).

Adso: A Nice On-line Tool for Chinese Language

There are quite a few online language tools such as Babel Fish and Google. But they are no help if you happen upon a character that you don't know how to pronounce. Or if you, like me, need to find the exact Pinyin of a character for teaching purposes.

That is where Adso would come handy. I found this nice little site today, where you can input Chinese characters and phrases and it will provide their Pinyin and English translation right away. It seems to be a very decent job.

Now, most Chinese inputting method use Pinyin itself, so it would be really hard to input things without knowing the Pinyin first! But if you have the characters handy in a web page or document, you can just copy and paste them onto the site.

The site promises to do a lot more than this, such as textbooks, reading materials, and news in Chinese. But those features lag far behind the handy pinyin/translation tool. The site navigation also needs some work. But through some digging, I find they also have other projects, such as Chinese flash cards, online dictionary, and a Firefox plugin. I will have to find out more about those later.