Another then-student in the 1990s told me about her bereavement therapy.
Part 1: write a letter to the dead person, then actually post the letter (to one's own address).
Part 2: when the letter arrives, the grieving party sits down to write a reply as the dead person.
Again, like the visualisation workshop exercise, I can see how Part 1 might or can work, as it's cathartic, but I can't visualise Part 2 somehow.
(From googling)
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Confront means to face, meet, or deal with a person or situation directly, often in a challenging, hostile, or defiant manner. It involves presenting evidence, addressing an unpleasant issue, or standing face-to-face with someone. It commonly means tackling problems head-on rather than avoiding them.
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I first heard about this in the mid-90s from a student who went on a holiday in Greece and attended some kind of imaging workshop. (I think that was the word: imaging. Or maybe it was "visualisation"?)
This is how she'd described it to me, but in my own words as I can't remember her precise wording now.
(Her imaging workshop experience, in my own words)
We were given two chairs: one for us to sit in, the other for the dead person.
Part 1: We'd start by telling the dead person how we'd been feeling about their death: anything that came to our heads, just let it all out.
Part 2: We'd then go and sit in the other chair, and play the role of the dead person, responding to what we'd just told them.
(End of her story, in my own words)
Now, I can see how Part 1 might or can work, as it's cathartic, but I can't visualise Part 2 somehow.
It is true, as pointed out by reader Valerio, that the Chinese script offers no help visually, with no indications of where words are broken up or clustered.
A consolation for the modern-day learner / reader of Chinese is that he's not having to read Chinese presented the traditional way -- with no punctuation marks, leaving one to rely on, e.g., markers like sentence-final particles (working like full stops).
Punctuation marks are a borrowing from the Western practice, formally introduced and standardised during the New Culture Movement (which was closely tied to the 1919 May Fourth Movement).
One finds, down the ages, footnotes by commentators offering their various and varying interpretations of a chunk of classical Chinese text, e.g.,
* Commentator A in Year X would say the text should be broken up at a certain point and parsed as Version.1,
* Commentator B in Year Y (could be a few hundred years on) would say the same text should be broken up at a different point and parsed as Version 2,
and so on. Sometimes the footnotes are longer than the source text. Luckily, this doesn't happen all the time...
There is a famous cluster that's often used to illustrate how many variant interpretations there can be to a piece of text with no punctuation. I shall share it in a separate blog as it's longish.
I used to work with someone (John B. at Sino-British Trade Council / SBTC) who'd done his degree in Chinese at Cambridge in the early 70s. Back then, the Oxbridge degree courses in Chinese only taught classical Chinese. Like at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), there was an exam at the end of Year One. If you passed that exam, you were deemed good enough to survive the rigours of the next three years, with no exam until the Final Year.
The passage for John's Year One exam was the proper style for a classical Chinese text, with no punctuation at all. The problem, he said, was that it was presented in a square, i.e., with as many characters down as there were across.
He didn't know if it was to be read:
(i) the traditional way (vertically down, starting with the extreme right hand line, then across the page, vertical line by vertical line);
or
(ii) the modern way (horizontally, moving from left to right, then down the page, horizontal line by horizontal line, just like a text in the English script).
He said, "After the exam, I found out that I'd read it the wrong direction -- but I passed anyway!"
Even with gaps provided between English words, one still needs a certain level of basic knowledge of where to break or cluster within a word for the sense to emerge or to help the learner remember. An English-equivalent example (cited in blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html) is the word "disappear", where one does need to know how the language behaves so that one doesn't end up breaking it up into "disap" and "pear", on the basis that one knows "pear" does exist as a word.
So, if you look at it like that, Chinese is not unique (or impossible) after all. It's just a matter of having a basic set of tools to start with, then building up further strategies based on that knowledge -- and gaining confidence in the process (if not fun as well by treating it as a game).
I have three Advanced Level private students who've been with me now for 26 years (not continuously) for one of them, and 18 years (not continuously) for the other two. Over their years with me, they've been drilled so much by my teaching of strategies that they're able to cope with unseen text (no time for prepping beforehand) by applying the Guessology (my coinage) skills I teach them, and arriving at the right analysis a lot of the time.
(From googling)
Quote
The New Culture Movement: an intellectual and cultural reform movement in China, generally active from 1915 to 1921. It aimed to modernize Chinese society by promoting Western science and democracy while rejecting traditional Confucian values, culminating in the political May Fourth Movement of 1919.
The May Fourth Movement: an intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917–21.
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This series is prompted by reader Valerio's comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.
I've raised some English-equivalent examples of this in the blog covering German (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html), so what's here are further instances of how one does need some basic knowledge of how the language works.
I wish I'd been directed more at school to look at English and Mandarin in this way, which would've made it much more illuminating, not to mention fun. Knowledge of how a language works, to a certain extent, is very useful, something not every learner is taught, from what I've seen (mainly in students who'd done their Beginner level elsewhere before coming to me, either privately or my evening programme classes when I was teaching them).
Further to the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example in the blog on German, here's something to illustrate how it could be done.
There was a phone company advert on TV in the 80s featuring a grandma talking to her grandson on the phone, asking about his exam results. He was not particularly pleased, saying he'd only passed one subject: Sociology. The grandma said proudly, something like, "He's got a pass in an ology and he's not happy."
That was clever, I thought as a language teacher, guiding the learner of English to look at the language from the angle of patterns in the language, something I use a lot in my teaching of both Mandarin and English. Some examples:
* It would help the learner enormously in delineating the reference if s/he knew that words that end in ology denote "the study of", e.g., zoology, biology, psychology, sociology.
* Like -ology words, those ending in -ment, -tion, -ness, e.g., are abstract (development, contentment, entertainment; irritation, agitation, imagination; happiness, weariness, dizziness).
Once you start applying these principles and learning the vocabulary in groups of related words, the burden will be lightened. You can even begin playing the game of looking out for the next -ology / -ment / -tion / -ness words, to see if the general rule applies, thus making the learning more fun than sheer memorising without seeing some kind of pattern to help identify future unknowns that crop up.
Remember: rules are never 100%, just use them to your advantage, and forget about the irregulars for now.
In the mainland Chinese drama series that I'm currently watching on YouTube, the woman reads bedtime stories to her six-year-old son. There's one about a mole, which turns out to be a famous Czech cartoon made in 1957 (I discovered by googling it).
This reminds me of an Eastern European whacky cartoon I saw on telly in the 1980s (when I had a TV) about a banquet.
The whole cartoon leading up to the punch-line scene enacts the preparation for the banquet, with the staff setting out the long table in an opulent setting, then the guests (at least 20) arriving in chauffeured limousines, all dressed to the nines, one after another. After the guests sit down, the waiting staff, who are all in formal gear, serve up the food in cloches.
The punch-line scene: the cloches are removed to reveal what's underneath -- lobsters, suckling pig, whole roast chicken, etc., who then leap up and eat the guests.
The cartoon then starts all over again with the beginning -- the prepping of the food, the laying of the table, the guests arriving in limousines, leaving us to know what is going to happen...
Talk about a perverse sense of humour, hahaha.
The only one that I can find whose description seems to match it is Zofia Oraczewska's “The Banquet / Bankiet” (1976), but what I've found (as a rubbish researcher) does not tell me what happens at the end.
(From googling) Quote Diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that after a certain point, adding more of a single production input (like labor or capital) while keeping others constant leads to smaller incremental increases in output. Essentially, it is a point where extra effort or investment yields progressively smaller results. Unquote
Valerio's comment on my "Marking homework" blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2017/04/marking-homework-london.html):
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... I must disagree with the main assumption: that if somebody turns in perfect homework, then they are not learning anything new. If someone did not know how to write, then they attend your class, and then turn in perfectly written sentences as homework, I would conclude that they learned something new perfectly well from your class.
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My response: This comment of yours is good massage for my ego, as it implies (if not actually says so in so many words) that I'm able to mould students who come in at zero-Chinese level (your "did not know how to write") into students who can "turn in perfectly written sentences as homework". Yes, looked at from that angle (haha, couldn't resist a maths word play for a maths professor), it does make me look a bit like a miracle worker...
However, the only students who joined my evening programme classes at zero-Chinese level were Grade 1 (Beginner) students. (As the years went by, there were fewer and fewer of such students because more and more of them would've dipped into a bit of Chinese before they came to do the lessons, but yes, those wouldn't have done any written Chinese, it's true, mostly just basic Chinese on the romanisation / pinyin-spelling system.)
Grade 1 (Beginner) students on the evening programme would've done about 150 characters (I think) by the end of the academic year (approx. 70 tuition hours), if my memory is not wrong -- I was on that programme 1985–2011, so details are starting to fade a bit in colour...
A total of 150 characters is not a huge burden really at the end of a school year. For homework, they had time to think / draft (unlike in a timed exam), so perfectly delivered homework (even a test paper) is not that difficult to achieve.
This in itself turned out to be a problem, though, for higher grades. As the workload got heavier (more characters, more vocab, more complex grammar), their grades would slide downwards as they climbed higher on the learning ladder.
I'd get students saying to me, "I got a distinction for Grade 1 -- a mark of 72 or 75, but for Grade 2, I got a B grade [a mark in the 60–69 range]; and a low B or a C grade for Grade 3. I'm getting worse and worse."
I had to tell them that it's the nature of the beast, especially since:
(i) they were learning the language in a country where it was not used a lot outside the classroom (no internet in those days), unless they specifically joined Chinese-speaking groups (who wouldn't have covered the written script anyway);
(ii) being evening programme students, they had full-time jobs and probably even full-time family commitments, without too much spare time to devote to the constant revision that the Chinese language demands of them.
(London)
Devising strategies for learning is not new to anyone, so this series is not trying to re-invent the wheel, just adding my own perspective and experience to it. My perspective as in how I learn a language as a student, and how I teach my students of Mandarin and English. My experience as in what works for me and them.
Reader Valerio posted a comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.
An English-equivalent example I use in my teaching for demonstrating to students how breaking up or clustering wrongly in Chinese might confuse the listener, when they read something aloud and pause in the wrong places, is rendering Jonathan Smith as Jon Athansmith. Of course, one will need to know that there's no such English surname as Athansmith, otherwise Jon Athansmith will work as well, so it comes down to some form of pragmatics -- with other factors that are beyond the literal words playing a role too.
The most striking impression of German text is how long a word can be: what is one to make of it, e.g., is there a pause somewhere for breath and, if so, where; where to break / cluster, if at all.
Take "kindergarten" for example, although it is not that long (by the standards of some German words).
Is it:
(i) "kin der gar ten" (four different single-syllable words with four individual meanings),
or is it:
(ii) "kin-der-gar ten" (a three-syllable word, then a single-syllable word),
or is it:
(iii) "kin der-gar-ten" (a single-syllable word, then a three-syllable word),
etc?
I only knew it as a six-year-old because I went to one but not what it meant. At that time, in Singapore, we weren't told the provenance; we just learned words by rote -- Chinese or English or Malay (presumably Tamil, too). Later, when I'd learned more English words, I'd even thought it might've been a mis-spelling and should've been kinter garden, whatever "kinter" was supposed to mean.
Most Brits would know that it's a German word, and that kinder means "child" and garten means "garden". That would be the same kind of background knowledge expected of a Chinese person / learner of Chinese when looking at a sentence or paragraph of Chinese characters: where to break, where to cluster.
Like the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example for a certain level of basic background knowledge of how the language works, the person reading the English word "disappear" would not break it up as "disap" and "pear", because s/he would've been taught the basics (e.g., adding prefix dis- to words like "appear", even though "pear" does exist as a word).
A lecturer in the Linguistics Department of SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) showed me a trick for decoding German words when I told her they were so dauntingly long. Of course this doesn't apply right across the board, it's only to illustrate one solution. She said a lot of long German words are a few concepts glued together (like the kindergarten example, which is actually two words put together), so one way to unravel them is to look for clues like suffixes, e.g., the strasse at the end of a long string of letters is just a generic / category word to mark the name of a street.
My English-equivalent example would be Oxford Street being presented, German style, as one word "Oxfordstreet", or Tottenham Court Road as one word "Tottenhamcourtroad".
One would have to know the basics:
* if it was presented as Oxfordstreet for some reason, that "Oxford" is one word and "street" is the category word;
* Oxford is one word, not two (Ox and Ford);
* if it was presented as Tottenhamcourtroad for some reason, that "court" and "road" are two standalone words;
* Tottenham is one word, not three (Tot and Ten and Ham);
* Cambridge is one word, not two (Cam and Bridge).
Once you look at it like that, it isn't so unfathomable after all -- up to a point.
(From googling)
Quote
Pragmatics in linguistics is the study of how context influences the interpretation of meaning, focusing on what speakers imply rather than just the literal words spoken. It bridges the gap between sentence structure (semantics) and situational, social, and intentional context, allowing listeners to understand intended meaning behind indirect language, tone, and shared assumptions.
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