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Train Students’ Interests in Chinese Language Learning

When Chinese language teachers teach Mandarin language to the foreign learners, teachers they should take students’ receptiveness into consideration. The society needs elite education as well as universal education. Like other languages, Chinese language may be difficult and confusing for those second language learners. Therefore, how to train learners’ interest becomes the teaching point and difficult point.

Generally speaking, teachers are more knowledgeable than students. However, it is an art to teach the knowledge what they possess to the learners. For those who come to learn Chinese in China, Chinese language has unique language charm that is different from other foreign languages like English. The English words are made up of meaningless letters while every character in Chinese has specific meaning and origin.

For the foreign learners who just begin to study Chinese, learning basic components in Chinese language is undoubtedly helpful to decrease memorizing difficulty and gain much interest. The simple characters 日、月、水、火、人 are all pictographic characters. So they are easy to remember by associating. The associative characters like 众、明、鲜 are easy to understand from the formation.

In addition, some characters such as 请、清、晴、情、蜻、氰 obey the formation rules of the phonograms. If the foreigners who learn Mandarin in China can remember 青, they can understand the meanings with the help of character components. Seen from this view, Chinese language is easy and interesting to learn.

If we regard the 26 letters in English language as the components for English words, the Chinese characters should be the elements of Chinese language. For the purpose of dealing with the daily life and work, people should master less than 10 thousand English words. However, if the learners can master four thousand characters and relevant words after they learn Chinese language, they can handle the daily life and work and some professional knowledge easily.

We should know that if we use English as a tool to accept the high education, ten thousand words are far from enough. But Chinese language is different. For example, if foreigners who study in China understand the character 笑, they can learn a series of words describing different degree of happiness suc as 微笑、哈哈大笑、狂笑、傻笑、奸笑. If we describe in English, we need to learn irrelevant words like smile, laugh, guffaw, giggle and sinister smile.

One interesting thing that the students who study in Mandarin learning courses may notice is that when we change the character’s order of a certain word, they will form two words have relevant meanings such as 牛奶、奶牛, 花香、香花 and 色彩、彩色. It is different from English words for examples dog, god, deer, reed and loop, pool.

After Chinese language learners master certain number of words, they can express in Chinese. That is to say, we have solved the problem of what to say. However, foreigners who learn to speak Chinese want to speak it more beautiful and fluently, they need to master some frequently used set phrases, proverbs and the two-part allegorical sayings.

However, during the process when foreigners study Mandarin Chinese, they may say that the grammar in Chinese language is really difficult to learn. As a matter of fact, when comparing with the languages spoken by most people like English and Russian, the grammar of Chinese language is the simplest.

In Chinese language, the 我 and 她 in 我爱她 and 她爱我 are the same form. However, they are different in English and Russia. In these two languages, the form indicates the tense of past, present and future. But the students who are learning Mandarin Chinese can see that we can just add some adverbials of time to clearly express the tense. Therefore, the grammar in Chinese language is not difficult at all.

Learning interest is very important for foreigners to learn Chinese. Therefore, teachers should pay more attention to it. From all above, we can see that Chinese language is interesting and the grammar is easy to learn.

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