“Huh?!?” conversations: 02 (UK)

An octogenarian student says for learning Chinese characters, she writes the pinyin (/romanisation for the pronunciation) for the characters that she recognises in pencil on the text.

    Her approach to learning is commendable, but I'm not sure I understand the logic of it.

    Surely there's no need to write the pinyin on the text for the characters that one DOES recognise?  If one already recognises the character, I'd have thought one wouldn't need some/any form of mnemonic.

    Surely one only needs to provide annotation(s) (after looking up the pinyin, and writing it down against the relevant character[s]) for those characters that one does NOT recognise (/ will have trouble recognising subsequently, however many times)?

    Or am I missing something here??

(UK, 2026)

PS:  A while after posting this blog (yes, my brain's arrived on the slow train), I wonder if maybe she just needs to reassure herself that she knows the pinyin (/ romanised spelling) for the character(s)?

Learning Chinese: how to focus little boys’ minds (London)

Sean was always playing his computer games or watching cartoons on the television when I arrived to give him his Chinese lesson.  After all, he was only eleven, and it was 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning.  

One of the tasks was writing Chinese characters — either in the form of dictation or copying from a text.  (He’d started learning his Chinese in Hong Kong, and I’d been asked not to change the format as he’d be going back there after his mother’s year of secondment in London.)  

While he was putting his Chinese characters together, his eyes would constantly dart to the clock on the wall, willing it to move faster, making mistake after mistake in the process.  

After yet another batch of wrongly-written characters, I decided to try injecting some motivation: “Sean, if you make any more mistakes, I’ll stay another hour.  Would you like that?”  Magically, no mistakes after that!  (See also blog entry Trick or treat?)

I tried the same with Ben (another Sunday 9am Chinese lesson case) when he was ten and having difficulty focusing.  To my question, “Would you like me to stay another hour?” Ben’s answer was, “No.”  Then, he added, “Not that I’m asking you to leave, though.”  Sweet.  And what impeccable manners!

(London 2008/2009)