The Mandarin group lesson this week featured the Chinese name for Heathrow (Airport) in the Listening Comprehension exercise.
It is my style to ask “why?” all the time — as a teacher and in conversation.
For teaching, it is to train the students to think about what lies behind a word or language usage, not just to accept it as it comes. This is so as to provide them with the toolkit to work things out for themselves when they go out and use the language (actively or passively) in real life, without me by their side to help them. Especially since these students are OAPs (old age pensioners), who can benefit from the cerebral challenge on top of it, to exercise their brains, not just to learn the language.
It’s an online course, so I use a googledocs file as my blackboard. Students get an email invitation to join when I share the file with them, and everyone can see what’s happening on the file (/blackboard) in real time. My explanations or questions are typed up as I go along (if not pre-inserted), so that students can also see what I’m saying or asking should the sound connection fail a bit here and there.
For the Listening Comprehension exercise that mentioned Heathrow (希思罗 Xīsīluó), I asked (and typed up the text to go with it):
“The word Heathrow starts with the letter/sound ‘h’, yet the Mandarin version is Xisiluo, which starts with the letter/sound ‘x’ [pronounced more like an ’s’ sound]. So, how did the ‘h’ sound in English become an ‘x[/s]’ sound in Mandarin??”
The answer by one student (aged 81) was: “Because the Chinese cannot distinguish between the ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds.”
Huh??!!??
(London, 2025)
PS: This blog is not a name-and-shame exercise. I haven’t named her, anyway, and I’m not trying to shame her in any way.
Rather, I’m concerned that she came up with an answer that did not correspond to my question at all, which might mean she has dementia or Alzheimer’s, or is at least in the early stages of it. (Note I say “might”, as I’m no medical doctor, so I’m just guessing.)
I’d already noticed (and wish now that I’d thought of chronicling them) something very odd about some of her communications since back in March 2024, which was before the “I’ve muted myself” episodes.
This is the same student who’d announced, “I’ve muted myself now,” when I asked her to do so because her husband was making coffee in the background, and the clattering was jarring and disruptive to the lesson.
In spite of my pointing out to her the oxymoronic logic of announcing to the class that she had muted herself, she still went on to do it time and again in subsequent lessons (because the husband kept choosing to come in during the lesson and make his coffee in spite of my having identified the source of the disturbance), failing to see the strange logic of it.
Her mental confusion, which has been increasing in frequency since March 2024, is also leading me to worry about myself, as I’m not far behind her in age (nine years).
See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2023/07/oxymoronic-situation-london.html
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