Yes, the title is slightly misleading as UWA doesn’t officially distinguish between majors and minors. However, one of the requirements for students studying any degree at UWA is that they must complete at least 4 broadening units. At least, that was how it was when I did my undergraduate from 2015 to 2017 (it is my understanding that the rules are now relaxed somewhat for science students by classifying Mathematics units as broadening). Now I could have chosen “mickey mouse” units to boost my WAM, but instead I realised an opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do; learn a language. Not just any language, though. Chinese Mandarin. So I decided to dedicate all four broadening units to Chinese.
I’m half-Chinese. My father’s side goes right back to free Irish settlers who settled Australia in the 1800s, but my mother’s side goes back to Hakka Chinese who emigrated to Malaysia. I do have a rudimentary understanding of the Hakka dialect, but it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. And, of course, Chinese characters were a significant barrier; even in my extended family there are few who can read fluently. In this post I will briefly review my experience learning Chinese at UWA as part of the broadening requirement. In the spirit of my previous posts evaluating my twin majors of Physics and Computer Science, let’s start with a description of the material I covered in my unofficial Chinese minor.
The Curriculum
Chinese at UWA has four streams: CHNSB (no prior experience), CHNSP (equivalent to WACE 2A/B), CHNSI (equivalent to WACE 3A/B) and CHNSA (equivalent to near-native). As expected, all students enrolling in Chinese undergo a proficiency test in order to confirm their placement in a given stream. Now, this is all well and good in theory, but when you look at how the course is structured there are some immediate problems.
| Stream | First Year | Second Year | Third Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| CHNSB | Chinese 1, Chinese 2 (equivalent to HSK 1/2) +1 Asian studies unit | Chinese 3, Chinese 3A and Chinese 4 (equivalent to HSK 2) | Chinese 5, Chinese 6 (equivalent to HSK 3) +1 Asian studies unit |
| CHNSP / CHNSI | Chinese 3, Chinese 3A (only for CHNSP), Chinese 4 | Chinese 5, Chinese 6 +1 Asian studies unit (only for CHNSI) | Chinese 7, Chinese 8 +1 Asian studies unit |
| CHNSA | Chinese 5, Chinese 6 | Chinese 7, Chinese 8 +1 Asian studies unit | Chinese 9, Chinese 10 +1 Asian studies unit |
Hawk-eyed viewers should be able to spot the problem. Some units are taken by first, second and third years. In particular, the units Chinese 5 and Chinese 6 are taken by third-year beginners, second-year proficient/intermediate students (I am guessing that is what the P and I mean) and first-year advanced students. That is a huge range of experience levels. As I only did 4 units, my journey ended with Chinese 3 and Chinese 3A, yet even there these units included first year students with prior experience with Chinese at high school.
It’s impossible to present any unit – let alone a language unit – at a perfectly level playing field for all students. Yet the issue with varying experience is especially acute with language learning. As anyone learning a language will know, the journey is a marathon, not a sprint. This is how spaced repetition a là Anki works. So those who have had exposure for many years are necessarily at an advantage, whether it’s simply being able to comfortably recognise characters like second nature, or being more proficient at using a dictionary’s radical index, or simply being more confident. So Chinese 3 and Chinese 3A were inherently divided into those that knew what they were doing and those that were still learning. I can only image the discrepancy at Chinese 5 and Chinese 6.
Did this translate into any major problems? Well, kind of. It becomes a problem when the tutor thinks that the entire class is at the level of the roughly 40% who are in the CHSNP/I stream. It becomes a problem when oral exams are pitched at said level. The problem with Chinese 3 is that it is, first and foremost, a unit for CHSNP students. It is simply assumed that CHNSB students will have reached that ability after having done Chinese 1 and Chinese 2.
Long way to the top
Is it feasible for a student to reach said proficiency in merely 6 months (3 months per semester) when Chinese 1 does not even teach characters? Yes, Chinese 1 did not teach characters. Okay, that’s not strictly true. Obviously the textbook had characters, but writing characters was optional in the tests and exams. Answers were exclusively in Pinyin; Mandarin’s phonetic Romanisation. If a teacher says you don’t have to jump off a cliff, then any sane person likely would not subject themselves to needless punishment. Alas hindsight is a wonderful thing.
It is feasible in theory to reach the proficiency of the CHNSP/I stream in just 6 months (eidetic memory, extraordinary talent, deliberately cheating the proficiency test) but almost entirely non-existent in practice. Hawk-eyed readers will be thinking “why didn’t you just learn the characters anyway; you’re in this for the long haul, right?” Indeed, it was only until characters were required in Chinese 2 that people suddenly got a move on. It would have been nice if Chinese 1 just mandated characters from the outset instead of treating them as optional.
Calligraphy
You might well wonder why calligraphy is so important, or why I’m complaining about this. Suppose you view a random Chinese character that you’ve never seen before, and are asked to write it as part of a test. Suppose also that this is your first attempt at writing a character. Where do you start? Let’s try 我 wǒ (me, I). Do you start from the left with 千 then join it with the 戈, or the other way around? What about writing 戈?
Chinese characters have something called a stroke order; a general set of principles that define how characters are written (top-to-bottom, left-to-right are the two main principles). For some reason, the class that teaches stroke order and that even has a calligraphy exam (Chinese 3A) comes after Chinese 1 and Chinese 2. Do you see the problem?
Imagine doing a writing test in primary school without ever being taught how to write the letters of the alphabet? Imagine writing a Chinese exam without knowing how to properly write the characters. This was essentially Chinese 2. Now, this wasn’t that much of a big deal in practice, merely that we developed bad habits (even now the way I write 我 is most definitely wrong) and the characters weren’t as neat as they could have been had we used the correct order. Granted, we could have simply researched it ourselves (again, hindsight is truly magnificent). But stroke order was never explicitly taught anywhere in Chinese 1 or Chinese 2. It would have made a lot more sense to have a calligraphy class at the start of the unit sequence (e.g. a Chinese 1A).
Good textbooks are hard to find
The textbook used for Chinese at UWA is the venerable New Practical Chinese Reader (NPCR) series, tailor-made for adult learners and published by the Beijing Language and Culture University. It is by no means the only textbook series (others include Integrated Chinese and the various textbooks in the Princeton Modern Chinese Language Program), but it is self-contained and includes your typical dialogue-study, grammar and sentence drills, reading comprehension and listening exercises (via the included MP3 audio CD). Volume 1 is used for Chinese 1 and 2, Volume 2 is used for Chinese 3 and 4, and my friends who continued on to third year happily informed me that Volume 3 is used for Chinese 5 and 6. Chinese 3A also required an additional grammar book, along with optional character books.
It’s ironic that I only came to really appreciate the textbook until after I had concluded my formal Chinese study at UWA. Once I started learning at my own pace, I saw the content in an entirely new light. Perhaps getting rid of the stress that accompanied studying for tests, weekly pop quizzes and reviewing flashcards provided the clarity I needed.
A lifelong endeavour
As the linguist Stephen Krashen says:
We acquire language in only one way; by understanding messages, or obtaining “comprehensible input” in a low-anxiety situation.
So why would anyone torture themselves learning a language at university? Well, every language has a certain initial “barrier” or “hill” that needs to be climbed. In the case of Chinese it’s dealing with its writing system and getting accustomed to its tonal phonology. Once you have that initial exposure, you can continue to coast along with relative ease.
Indeed, my plan was never to stop learning Chinese once I finished the broadening units. Whether it was simply buying all the remaining volumes of NPCR or sourcing some different textbooks and graded readers, I felt I had enough grounding in the fundamentals to be able to continue on at my own pace. I feel that this is the greatest benefit of having chosen to do languages for broadening; it literally opened up an entirely new world for me. So I encourage many people to consider learning an additional language to fulfil their broadening requirements. That doesn’t mean that my experience wasn’t perfect; and I still feel that the way that the Chinese units are structured at UWA is fundamentally flawed.
Placement tests aren’t foolproof
Okay, I’m being cynical here. But the way that the placement test was conducted leaves a lot to be desired. It was a written test, reviewed by one of the lecturers in-person who inspects your answers confirms your stream on the spot before you even leave the room. I won’t be so bold as to accuse people of deliberately downplaying their prior knowledge to get into an easier stream… but there is certainly nothing to stop someone from doing so.
It was quite awkward for me, with no prior exposure to the language, presenting a blank piece of paper, only to be told, “Ah, yes, beginner.” Surely the placement test should only need to be taken by those with prior study or language background, or perhaps the placement tests should be replaced with an individual interview so it’s less arbitrary. Curiously, native speakers are exempt from the placement test.
Battle of the Three Streams
I heard from a friend that Chinese 6 was the most horrible time of his journey at university.
As aforementioned, Chinese 5 and 6 pits third-year beginners (with merely 12 months exposure) up against first-years with near-native proficiency. If you had to bet on who’d do better, who would you choose? Now, ceteris paribus, the near-native CHSNA stream will outperform the CHNSB stream. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that according to my friend the marks distribution was not one broad bell curve but rather one tall, thin bell curve centred at about 65-70% and another smaller one at 50-55% (for the astrophysicists in the room, think of a double-peaked, redshifted Lyman-α emission). To make things worse for my friend, the CHSNA stream set the pace; they were the loudest to complain that things were too easy while the CHNSB all found the content too hard. Where’s the happy medium? Can there ever be a happy medium? The solution is actually quite straightforward, at least on paper. But it will never happen.
Each stream should have its own classes
But, of course, who’s going to shoulder the extra teaching hours and deal with the additional scheduling? Let’s focus on the benefits instead. Smaller class sizes promote more discussion, heck you could even pull a flipped classroom and have much more workshop-style engagement at tutorials. I vividly recall wasting an entire Chinese 1 tutorial as 30 or so students all went round in a circle saying 我叫[Insert Name]. That was it: the entire tutorial was basically everyone saying their name. Imagine if that time was instead spent on one-on-one conversation practice, or translating short paragraphs as a group such that each group’s translation forms a complete story.
Notice I said classes and not units. Chinese 3, for example, can still be taught as a single unit where everyone gathers for lectures, tests and the like. But the Chinese 3 tutorials could be restricted to streams; CHNSB students break off into their own tutorial; CHSNP/I break off into their own, and so on. Thus, instead of the tutor trying to cater for up to 3 streams at once, they can provide tailored teaching in one class per stream. This also means it’s possible for the CHNSB beginners to be given longer tutorials or extra tutorial sessions to catch up to the CHSNP/I students and help level the playing field. Some food for thought, at least.
Exams
The bulk of the marks in Chinese 1 and 2 come from tests and exams. From Chinese 3 onwards, the marks are exclusively from three exams (usually two written and one oral, or calligraphy in the case of Chinese 3A). Tests in Chinese 1 and 2 are standard affairs, and there are also marks for attendance and completing the NPCR workbook exercises. Chinese 3 allows the use of up to 2 dictionaries (that is, if you’re lucky to have enough space in those poky lecture theatres with barely an economy-class backseat-tray to write on). The larger the dictionary, the longer it takes to sift through. So definitely go with a pocket or mini-sized (or, you know, memorise everything).
Oral exams were interesting; generally it’s around 10-15 minutes with a pre-prepared speech followed by Q&A. But the highlight was definitely the calligraphy exam. In that exam, we had a proper calligraphy brush, water bowl and a water cloth (not quite the 文房四宝 or “Four Treasures of the Study”; brush, ink, paper, ink-stone). The assessor stands in front of you as you freely draw any characters you wish (at least 5); you are assessed on your grip (including elbow position), stroke execution (particularly performing various flicks at the end of strokes), aesthetics (has to be neat) and proportion (each character should be perfectly square – Chinese characters are the world’s oldest monospaced type). The calligraphy exam also included a section where we had to group characters by their common radical.
When all is said and done
I nevertheless enjoyed my Chinese study at UWA. I am one of the lucky few people who can genuinely say I learned a lifelong skill from my broadening units. A lot of people complain about broadening units, not understand why we should be forced to study something outside of our chosen major(s). But I personally treated broadening as an opportunity to explore something that genuinely interested me. What better way to learn a lifelong skill than picking up a language.