Last week for the Tuesday group lesson, I started a listening piece with the line, "我一九七五年到一九七六年在台北工作过两年 / I'd worked in Taipei for two years 1975 to 1976."
One of the students immediately challenged it: "That's not two years. That's a year and a half."
Huh?!?
I would've understood if she'd said it was one year, but how on earth had she arrived at the "half" bit when I didn't say which part of 1975 to which part of 1976? Did my primary school maths lessons miss out on something??
This being an anarchistic group (more in a separate blog), another student (who has trouble with numbers in Chinese even after 30 years of learning the language*) said, "It's most unhelpful to start a listening piece with a line mentioning numbers."
I had to point out to her that in real life, one cannot predict how the native speaker will conduct the conversation, so it's all good practice.
Over the decades of teaching Mandarin, I've had to point out to students that no native speaker will first ask them how much Chinese they'd learned and what textbook(s) they'd used, before entering into the conversation at the appropriate level.
This is why I try to expose them to real-life obstacles like unknowns (vocab, grammar, speed) -- to a reasonable degree, of course, or they'll be so disheartened they'll just give up.
(London, 2026)
* This is an observation, not a criticism. Numbers are always problematic for learners of any foreign language (myself included):
https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/learner-friendly-language-in-some-ways.html.
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