Pinyin news

Cambridge University Press is due to release an interesting-sounding title in April 2006: The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Volume 1, Chinese. The editors are Ping Li of the University of Richmond, Virginia; Elizabeth Bates, of the University of California, San Diego; Li Hai Tan of the University of Hong Kong; and Ovid Tzeng, of National Yangming University, Taipei.

A second volume released at the same time will cover Japanese.

Here are the contents for the volume on Chinese:

1. Language Acquisition:
   • “Actions and results in the acquisition of Cantonese verbs” — Sik Lee Cheung and Eve V. Clark;
   • “Chinese children’s knowledge of binding principles” — Yu-Chin Chien and Barbara Lust;
   • “Chinese classifiers: their use and acquisition” — Mary Erbaugh;
   • “Child language acquisition of temporality in Mandarin Chinese” — Chiung-chih Huang;
   • “Second language acquisition by native Chinese speakers” — Gisela Jia;
   • “Making explicit children’s implicit epilanguage in learning to read Chinese” — Che Kan Leong;
   • “Emergent literacy skills in Chinese” — Catherine McBride-Chang and Yiping Zhong;
   • “Basic syntactic categories in early language development” — Rushen Shi;
   • “Growth of orthography-phonology knowledge in the Chinese writing system” — Hua Shu and Ningning Wu;
   • “Interaction of biological and environmental factors in phonological learning” — Stephanie Stokes;
   • “The importance of verbs in Chinese” — Twila Tardif;
   • “Grammar acquisition via parameter setting” — Charles Yang;
   • “Early bilingual acquisition in the Chinese context” — Virginia Yip;
2. Language Processing:
   • “Word form encoding in Chinese speech production” — Jenn-Yeu Chen and Gary S. Dell;
   • “Effects of semantic radical consistency and combinability on the Chinese character processing” — May Jane Chen, Brendan S Weekes, Danling Peng and Qin Lei;
   • “Eye movement in Chinese reading: basic processes and cross-linguistic differences” — Gary Feng;
   • “The Chinese character in psycholinguistic research: form, structure and the reader” — Douglas Honorof and Laurie Feldman;
   • “Perception and production of Chinese tones” — Allard Jongman, Yue Wang, Corinne B. Moore and Joan A. Sereno;
   • “Phonological mediation in visual word recognition in English and Chinese” — In-mao Liu, Jei-tun Wu, Iue-ruey Sue and Sau-chin Chen;
   • “Reading Chinese characters: orthography, phonology, meaning and the textual constituency model” — Charles A. Perfetti and Ying Liu;
   • “Processing of characters by native Chinese readers” — Marcus Taft;
   • “L2 acquisition and the processing of Mandarin tones” — Yue Wang, Joan A. Sereno and Allard Jongman;
   • “The comprehension of coreference in Chinese discourse” — Chin Lung Yang, Peter C. Gordon and Randall Hendrick;
   • “Lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese sentence processing” — Yaxu Zhang, Ningning Wu and Michael Yip;
3. Language and the Brain:
   • “The relationship between language and cognition” — Terry Kit-fong Au;
   • “Language processing in bilinguals as revealed by functional imaging: a contemporary synthesis” — Michael W. L. Chee;
   • “Specific language impairment in Chinese” — Paul Fletcher, Stephanie Stokes and Anita M.-Y. Wong;
   • “Brain mapping of Chinese speech prosody” — Jackson T. Gandour;
   • “Modelling language acquisition and representation in connectionist networks” — Ping Li;
   • “The manifestation of aphasia syndromes in Chinese” — Jerome L. Packard;
   • “Naming of Chinese phonograms: from cognitive science to cognitive neuroscience” — Dan-ling Peng and Hua Jiang;
   • “How the brain reads the Chinese language: recent neuroimaging findings” — Li Hai Tan and Wai Ting Siok;
4. Epilogue: A tribute to Elizabeth Bates.

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On July 16 Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou was elected KMT chairman by a wide margin. Ma was behind Taipei’s welcome switch from bastardized Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin.

Most advocates of Tongyong Pinyin, which Taiwan’s central government has adopted but not made mandatory throughout the country, like to tout the made-in-Taiwan aspect of their system. This is simply another way to oppose China. And perhaps the KMT of today, with its relatively cozy good relations with Beijing, would indeed generally favor Hanyu Pinyin. But it’s important to remember that the KMT in the past opposed Hanyu Pinyin. The KMT government’s decision back in 1986 to come up with a new romanization system was a direct result of the growing popularity of Hanyu Pinyin elsewhere and an increased understanding in Taiwan of the failure — at least in implementation — of Gwoyeu Romatzyh. So MPS2 was devised in reaction to Hanyu Pinyin. Predictably, it received little attention or support despite its nominally official status. In the end MPS2 was used basically nowhere but on some street signs. And so Tongyong Pinyin replaced another system that was already made in Taiwan.

If the KMT had backed Hanyu Pinyin a long time ago, the romanization situation in Taiwan wouldn’t be such a mess.

I believe Ma’s support for Hanyu Pinyin is not the result of politics but a recognition that the system is what the majority of Taiwan’s foreign population wants.

A note here on Ma’s preferred spelling of his name. In hanzi it is 馬英九. In Hanyu Pinyin it would be Mǎ Yīngjiǔ. But the standard romanization of his name is “Ma Ying-jeou.” The “jeou” certainly evokes the Gwoyeu Romatzyh tonal spelling system. But in GR Ma’s name would be Maa Ingjeou. Very curious.

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SINGAPORE : 25 primary schools will introduce the new [Mandarin] Chinese language curriculum from January next year.

The pilot programme will involve all students in Primary 1 and 2.

Anglo-Chinese Junior (ACS) hopes to be among the first to try out the new approach to learning Mandarin where emphasis will be on character recognition and oral skills.

All students will take a core module which makes up about 70% of the curriculum, with bridging modules for weak students and enrichment classes for those with ability and interest.

But the majority will take on, what the Ministry calls, a school-based module.

“Teachers can use part of the enrichment or bridging modules provided. They can also design their own school-based materials. This helps bring about better customization,” said Yue Lip Sin, Deputy Director of the Education Ministry.

Schools can break up the classes, so students can attend a separate [Mandarin] Chinese class with those of the same abilities through the year.

They can also teach the core curriculum as per normal and put certain students in the add-on modules for certain lessons each week.

Primary 1 students will be banded by their teachers only after they have finished learning “Hanyu Pinyin”.

Teachers at ACS expect about 20% to take up the bridging module and 10% for the enrichment class.

They add that the concept of ability banding is not new to them.

“When we group the pupils of similar abilities together, the teachers are able to design lessons that cater to their needs. They will be able to spark their interest in the learning of [Mandarin] Chinese,” said Lye Choon Hwan, Head of the Mother Tongue Department at ACS

Students will be assessed based on the core syllabus and schools have the autonomy to decide on the methods of assessment.

But the ministry emphasized that what is more important is helping students develop a love for the language, without making it unchallenging.

The ministry will announce the schools in the pilot scheme later this year and implement the new curriculum in all primary schools by 2007.

source: Channel News Asia

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Japan’s Asahi Shimbun has an article that includes a discussion of the “Crazy English” (Fēngkuáng Yīngyǔ / 瘋狂英語 / 疯狂英语) movement: Chinese patriots burn with English fever. Like so much else in China, the movement is infused with patriotism (or scary nationalism, depending on your perspective) and cultural chauvinism (tricky to pull off when the subject is learning a foreign language).

“English is merely a tool for earning money. It’s an inferior language that relies on an alphabet with just 26 letters. How can it even compare to our language, with a sea of Chinese characters?”

So cackled a loudspeaker recently on the grounds of a junior high school in a tiny town in China’s southern Hebei province.

Wild applause broke out from the crowd of 8,000 junior and senior high school students. A red banner across the basketball court proclaimed: “Never let your country down.”

The rousing speaker was Li Yang, purveyor of a unique method of English study: shouting. Using Li’s “Crazy English” method, devised about 10 years ago, students spout short sentences loudly and at rapid-fire speed, over and over again.

The author of well over 100 books, the charismatic Li gives about 300 lectures a year around the country. About 30 million people have taken his courses.

His motivational secret is a single, yet simple principle: “Mastering English and thereby enriching our country is an act of patriotism.”

The sentiment has proved popular. The darling of China’s English-teaching world, Li considers himself a patriot, first and foremost.

“I promote the love-thy-country angle because I don’t want our people to forget China after they acquire English,” he explains. “I want them to use English and spread Chinese as a world language.”

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I’d like to mention Signese, which bills itself as “a daily look at Chinese characters, as seen by one man and a poorly treated camera.” This pleasantly minimalist site looks at the “public face” of Hanzi by displaying a wide variety of photos of Chinese characters, especially as used in signage. Have a look.

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