"English people don't go for rote learning."
The above is my paraphrase of what an English student of Mandarin said in response to my offering her a learning strategy -- pick a particular problematic sentence (whether it's the word order or the pronunciation), and go through the rest of the week repeating it.
I've been using my own experience with French numbers to show my students how it's worked for me: when I go up/down the stairs in my block of flats, I count the steps in French, aloud.
Only problem is: one flight is seven steps, the other is 11, so I'm fluent only up to 11, but I can now do it without having to think.
The other (and potentially serious) problem is: being extremely clumsy, I'll trip over / walk into / stub my toes on anything, so there's always the risk factor to consider -- don't end up having an accident while trying to practise a problematic sentence.
This student has been saying, increasingly over the months, how she's unable to get the Chinese language right.
This is someone who's been doing Mandarin since the 90s (not all of those years, though), used to teach English, is learning Russian at the moment, and already knows French and Spanish. It just goes to show how difficult Mandarin must be for a non-Oriental. I totally sympathise.
One issue is numbers, especially in listening exercises, which is another of her weaknesses (and of most learners of a foreign language -- from my own experience and from what I've heard).
One week, she said she couldn't get her head around 十二 / shí èr / "ten two" (for 12) and 二十 / èr shí / "two ten" (for 20) in a listening exercise.
Another week, she said it was most unhelpful starting the listening exercise with a sentence involving numbers because it fazed her. (The sentence was: "I'd worked in Taipei for two years 1975–1976.") I said one can't tell native speakers in real life how they should start the conversation, so one needs to learn how to cope, which was the point of these exercises.
When she gave Chinese sentences mirroring the English way of saying things, I said she had to leave her English hat behind and go round repeating Chinese sentences aloud, rather like with songs or tunes. That was when she said, "English people don't go for rote learning."
I then presented the following to her:
- English irregular verbs and nouns, e.g., "eat ate eaten" instead of "eat, eated, eated"; "drink drank drunk" instead of "drink drinked drinked"; "child children" instead of "child childs"; "woman women" instead of "woman womans"; "goose geese" instead of "goose gooses" --> she would've had to learn them by rote, I'm sure;
- song lyrics and tunes --> she would've had to learn them by rote as well, unless she had a photographic memory and could remember a tune and the lyrics after hearing them just once.
So, my "huh?!?" is about why she says English people don't go for rote learning. How else had she herself remembered English irregular verbs and nouns, and song lyrics and tunes? (Yes, she said she does sing.)
I've checked with another English person (in her early 70s) who used to be a teacher as well. She said this student might've meant "English people are not taught rote learning at school".
Hmmm... Even if the student had meant that, it's still the wrong attitude to take when it comes to learning another language (or anything foreign, e.g., cooking), but I shall leave that for another blog, or this one will get too long.
My ultimate question is still: how did she remember irregular verbs and nouns in English, and song lyrics and tunes, if not by rote learning? It's a puzzle I'd like to find out the answer for. (I'm not going into things like historical dates and mathematical formulae, because she might say she'd always been bad at those.)
(London, 2026)
