Benign paper tiger: 03 (The stronger students) (London)

One of the things the fearsome cardiology head's underlings said of him ("The promising students, you will tick off", in https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/paper-tiger-01-china.html) found resonance with me for how I'd treated (and still do) my stronger students. I'd challenge them more because they were (/are) good enough to stand up to it.

    (See also https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/benign-paper-tiger-02-weaker-students.html for how I'd treat weaker students.)

    Some of my efforts with the stronger students, however, didn't always get understood either (which I only discovered later). (The "either" here refers to the weaker students not appreciating my efforts to make them feel included, being given easier sentences to do in class.)

    My teaching is delivered on a three-prong basis:

(i) exam-geared -- therefore must follow the brief and deliver whatever is being tested, e.g., grammar or vocab / usage of language;

(ii) classroom exercise -- I'd give them as many variations as they can take, because they might come across different versions in real life (different accents / usage of language by people from different parts of China, not to mention what I call "the other regions", i.e., Taiwan, Hong Kong, S.E.Asia, just to name three);

(iii) real life -- I'd teach them coping techniques, e.g., if they don't know the precise Chinese for X, try to put something together, even if it's long-winded. ("Silence = no communication / no message conveyed" is what I drill into them.)

    For the stronger students, therefore, and for what I call "the classroom exercise", if they were to give me the correct answer X, I'd throw them as many alternatives as there might be for X (or as many as I can think of).

    This didn't go down well with one of them, however, but luckily she did come out and tell me about it -- only two years later, though. (It gave me a chance to clear my "wicked witch" label.)

    I'd taught her when she was in Year 2. I was a part-time teacher on the evening programme but given her (full time degree programme) class to teach for a translation module.

    She then went away for her Year Abroad, and I ran into her when she came back for her final year (Year 4).

    Being always around, working the longest hours though only a half-post / half-salary teacher (yes, stupid me), I saw her outside the Section Head's office across the corridor from mine, but the latter was not in. After she'd hung around for a while, I thought I'd say hello and help her kill some time, asking how her Year Abroad had been, etc.

    Then, for some reason, she blurted out, "You didn't like me when you were teaching my class [in Year 2]."

    Huh?!? How on earth had she got that impression? She'd been the best student in her class. (I know, I know, it doesn't logically / automatically follow that one should like the best student, because they could be obnoxious, e.g., arrogant or something.)

    She said, "Because every time I gave you a version in the translation exercise, you'd give me another rendition. I could never get it right, it seemed. You were never satisfied with my offering."

    Oh my goodness. Poor girl, carrying it around for the whole of Year 2, then the whole of the Year Abroad, thinking that this teacher didn't like her and kept picking on her. What a burden to be carrying around for so long, poor girl.

    I said, "Oh dear, poor you!" and explained the principle behind how I treat students of different ability levels.

    I added, "It was because you were the best in class that I always threw alternatives your way. You were good enough in your language ability to absorb the variations and alternatives. I wouldn't do that with a weaker student, because they won't be able to take it."

    The look on her face was amazing to witness, as the significance of my treatment of her translation efforts in Year 2 dawned on her.

    A look of gratified enlightenment came into her eyes as the new perspective was pointed out to her. It then spread to her mouth in the form of a smile of self-approbation, being told that she'd been treated differently because she was deemed capable of taking the extra load as she was the best student in the class.

    A bit after that conversation in the corridor, she asked me for help with her revision (I wasn't given hours to teach her class, so I had nothing to do with her assessments and exams). I teach a lot of the application of strategies and tricks, so my guidance gave her a good grounding for what I call "Guessology" (my coinage). It's a particularly useful skill for Chinese as it's so different from European languages.

    When she got a job after graduation in an organisation dealing with the Chinese market, she asked me to give her private tuition for her professional language needs.

    I was very relieved to have had the chance to clear my "wicked witch" image.

(London, 1990s)

Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (Chinese)

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).

     Chinese 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)  

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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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