The concept of Born in China

This document should give you an idea of how the BIC concept came about and how
its different from other courses presently offered in Australia. That way you have all
the information to talk about it when you start marketing the programme.

Mandarin Chinese

As you know, this course teachers Mandarin Chinese. China is much like India in the
sense that there are a lot of different peoples with different languages. Just like India,
it used to have different scripts or sets of characters as well. A big difference is that
India as we know it know was unified by the British, which is why English is one of
the main languages in India now. It is also the common language between Indians
with different languages, if Im not mistaken.

China unified itself however. Around 200 BCE, you had seven Chinese kingdoms.
They were the same ethnically and culturally, but politically they had always been
different states. It is important to keep in mind that these people are what we now
think of as Chinese, but they are not the only people who now live in China. You also
had Turks, Tatars, Mongols, Tibetans and such. Some of these ancient peoples later
assimilated with the Chinese, but some of them like the Tibetans are still there.

The people in the seven kingdoms all had different languages and scripts. After a
long war, one of the kings conquered all the others and crowned himself Emperor.
His kingdoms name was Qin pronounced as Chin which is why we now call the
country China. Chinese people themselves do not call it China, but Zhong Guo, the
realm of the middle. They see themselves as the middle, the center of civilization with
all the other people around them, Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese, Mongols,
Tibetans, Turks etc. being barbarians.

When the Qin unified China, he mandated that all people in his empire use the same
script. Chinese characters are symbols much like traffic signs or other pictograms. So
the script functions the same way as traffic sings or other pictograms. The traffic
signs are the same everywhere in the world, everyone knows what they mean, yet
everyone would pronounce them differently. This is how the script works. The scripts
allowed people with different spoken languages and dialects to still communicate with
each other.

So throughout Chinas history, every city, region and village had its own dialect.
People with different dialects were often not able to understand each other. People
would learn some of the more important or prestigious dialects to talk to one another.
Usually this was the language of the area where the emperor lived.

This is how Mandarin Chinese developed. The last dynasty of emperors lived in the
North of China. So most people who lived and worked at the palace spoke Northern
dialects. From a mix of these different northern dialects a new language was formed,
which was spoken by the officials at the court. This mix was called guanhua, or the
court-speak. When the Europeans came to China in the nineteenth century, they
called it Mandarin Chinese, because Mandarin was a name for court official.

Note that at this time, most people still spoke their own dialects. Foreigners who lived
in Shanghai or Canton would learn Shanghainese or Cantonese, not Mandarin.

In the twentieth century, when China became a modern country, the government
ordered that all people learn Mandarin in school. This way, everyone would have a
common language with which to communicate.

These days, essentially everyone in China speaks Mandarin. Most people still also
have a dialect, which they speak with family and friends from the same area.

All TV programs, news, public announcements and the like are in Mandarin. The
dialects are mostly just spoken at home. There is some music in local languages, but
this is mostly from Taiwan. Essentially all music from Mainland China is in Mandarin.

Pinyin
When the Portuguese came to China to trade, some of them stayed to live there.
They devised a system to display the sounds of Chinese with Western letters. This is
called Romanization, after the Roman alphabet, which we use in English today.

In the 50s, the Mainland Chinese government built on this system to create pinyin.
Pinyin is the Romanization we use today for Mandarin Chinese. There are other
Romanizations for the different dialects, and other Romanizations for Mandarin as
well but this one is the most commonly used. It is taught in Chinese primary school
before kids learn to write characters. It is also what people use to type on computers
and write text messages and the like.

NB: In our course, we will teach Mandarin using pinyin. We will not cover writing.

Hong Kong and Cantonese

China and Britain fought two wars in the mid nineteenth century called the Opium
Wars. Britain heavily defeated the Chinese, and took possession of Hong Kong
island, which was previously uninhabited. They turned it into a trade post.

Other foreign nations also took cities from China. Shanghai was built as a trade post
by a coalition of eight foreigner powers. Before it had only been a fishing village.

The British took a 150-year lease of Hong Kong Island and the neighboring area.
People from the nearby province came over to live in Hong Kong to work. Most of
these people came from the area of Canton. Canton is the old English name for the
Chinese city of Guangzhou. These people spoke their own dialect Cantonese. This
is what people in Hong Kong still speak. Because Hong Kong was British until 1997
they were never ordered by the Chinese government to learn Mandarin. The same
goes for Macao, which was a Portuguese colony until 2000. Its population also
mostly speaks Cantonese.
Traditional and Simplified Chinese

Again in the 50s, the Mainland Chinese government wanted to increase literacy. Like
having Mandarin as a common language, this would make it easier for people around
China to communicate.

That is why the Chinese government created a new set of characters, which were
simpler to write. These are called the Simplified Chinese characters. These
characters are now used in Mainland China and Singapore, which also adopted
them.

The old characters were kept in the parts that werent under the control of the
communist Chinese government. This includes Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan and
overseas Chinese communities like the ones in South East Asia and Western
countries. The one exception, like mentioned, is Singapore, which chose to adopt
these characters instead.

Taiwan

Taiwan is an island off the coast of south China. It was first inhabited by aboriginals,
who are much like the Australians aboriginals. Dutch colonists first settled the island.
Around that time, the first Chinese came to live there in the colony. The Dutch were
later kicked out by Chinese pirates and rebels at the end of the Ming dynasty
[seventeenth century]. The next dynasty, the Qing, later took the island from the
rebels. Taiwan was only part of China for a short period of time. In the nineteenth
century, Taiwan was taken from China by Japan. It was a Japanese colony until the
end of World War II.

During and after World War II, there was a civil war in China. China had become a
republic in 1912 after the last emperor abdicated. The republic was run by the
National Party or Guomindang. It was fighting a civil war with the Chinese
Communist party led by Mao Zedong. The Americans backed the Guomindang, the
Soviets backed Mao Zedong.

The Guomindang was defeated by Mao Zedong in 1949. The army and the officials
then fled to Taiwan. Taiwan was returned to China by Japan in 1945 and the only
place the communists hadnt gotten to yet. The entire Guomindang government
moved to Taiwan, where it has since been protected by the Americans.

The local Taiwanese people mostly spoke Hokkien, but the new immigrants from the
Mainland mostly spoke Mandarin. The government made Mandarin official. Local
Taiwanese now had to learn Mandarin.

Because of this, Mandarin is also the most widely spoken language in Taiwan.
Taiwan still uses Traditional characters, as it was never ruled by the communist
party.

This short introduction should give you a good idea of the Chinese languages.
The method

The traditional way language is taught is not very effective. By traditional I mean
memorizing word lists and studying grammar rules. I first noticed this when I began
studying Mandarin by myself. I was able to surpass my level of French in months,
whereas I had had French in school for several years. I also started noticing specific
little things which werent very effective or helpful.

I only became more aware of this when I started working with a Chinese school in
Shanghai. I learnt a lot from their method and theories, and my own experiences
started to fall into place.

Traditional language learning studies the language, but is less focused on training
you to use it. You may learn to recognize certain grammar forms on a test, but that is
a different skill entirely from being able to form correct sentences in conversation.

If you learn grammar by studying and remembering the rule, youll need to do a lot of
thinking and mental analyzing with every two or three words you say.

Speaking a language is more a matter of habit-forming than knowledge. You do not
need to understand the grammar rule, which is talk about the language. It is external
to it. Instead, all you need is the habit of saying it right. Learn to speak the language,
instead of speaking about the language. This is exactly what native language ability
looks like. Most natives cant explain their own language to you. Yet they speak it
perfectly, it comes naturally to them. Just like you know how to swim or walk, yet you
cant explain how.


When Born in China was at its first stage, we wanted to have a method based
entirely on guessing. By showing things, mimicking, and the like, you would learn
words and concepts in Mandarin without resorting to translation and explanation in
English. Its important to stay away from translating to your mother language,
because this will damage your language ability a lot. A lot of mistakes are made this
way. Furthermore, words often dont translate very well. They may only partially
cover the same ideas, or they could be used in different ways.

The whole point of this method was to not base your Chinese on a translation of
English, which is by definition skewed. It is all an attempt to explain Chinese in terms
of English, which will never work because they are not the same things. Instead, this
method approaches the language directly, much like a child learns its first language.
It has no other languages to base on, so it works not from an understanding of the
other language, but an understanding of situations, of the world around it.

I wrote my first syllabus in Australia and tested it on two people Sam and a
Japanese girl I knew from work. It worked reasonably well, but I found I still needed
to give a lot of instruction in English, and the guessing of words (which is at the core
of the method) took a lot of effort from my two students. It didnt appear to be as
effective as I had hoped.
When I started working as an English teacher in Shanghai, I got some more hands-
on experience teaching, and learnt a little more on teaching methods for children.
These are very interesting, because they dont use traditional grammar instruction
and word memorization. Instead, we mostly use games to learn words and grammar.
I noticed that some of the games were quite effective.

During this time I studied language learning a lot. I watched the Youtube channels of
famous internet polyglots people who learnt to speak several languages fluently
to distill the methods that they had in common. One commonality is that they all
strongly disliked traditional classes and lessons styles. The reason they could speak
several languages was because they didnt take traditional classes.

One of the people I read about a lot is the linguist Stephen Krashen, who has
pioneered a new method which has been gaining popularity. One of the things he
proved, was that learning essentially happens at what he calls Understanding + 1.
You understand the information, and then you learn one new thing. Its essentially
learning from context.

E.g. A person is eating an apple. Someone says: He xxx an apple.
xxx is the new word, you understand the other words. At this stage, youll understand
that xxx means is eating in this situation.

To learn to use the word xxx itself, youll first need to hear the word used again
several times. So if you hear someone say He xxx a pear shortly after, this will
reinforce your understanding that xxx means is eating.

The last step will be using the word eating yourself and seeing that a native speaker
understands what youre trying to say. Your communication is effective. You now
understand what eating means.

I applied this method when I began teaching English to a Chinese boy aged 2,5 at
the time. In the few months that I have been teaching him (he is now 3) he has learnt
more and is able to do more than the 6 year olds I teach at the English school who
have had more hours of English lessons than he has so far. At the school, the kids
learn words through playing games, according to a lesson plan. With the little boy, we
go about his daily activities and games, and I use the occasions that arise to insert
new words in the way described above.

Im now adding this element to the course.

The difference with the method I used before in Australia, is that the entire course is
now based on the situation that you are in, rather than following a lesson plan and
teaching pre-set words.

So in the new course, all the learning will be done through role-play and activities.

The content

I made a selection of the most important words and grammar topics to teach in the
beginners course.

Now, with every course you take, book you read, movie you watch etc. you will forget
something. So how to ensure our students will remember what we want them to
remember, and get the value out of their course?

I designed the course in such a way that we give our students some words which
they are allowed to forget in a sense. With every new grammar point and word that
we introduce, we give students several activities to practice. In every activity, the
core we repeat the core words, but give people some extra words to do the activity
with.

E.g. when we teach the word want, the first activity may be I want a train ticket;
plane ticket; bus ticket, the next one is I want coffee; tea; beer. Because I want is
repeated every time, it gets hammered into the brain more. The other words receive
less exposure and are more likely to be forgotten. If you were to give want and
beer equal exposure, theyd have an equal chance of being remembered or
forgotten. This way we shift the chances in favour of want, or any other word we
want our students to learn.

Having students exposed a host of different words in a short amount of time is also
good pronunciation and listening practice.