Numbers are indispensable in every language and words meanings play a crucial part in language acquiring. When you learn Chinese in China, we have some techniques to improve both aspects. Various people feel like different methods to learn Chinese language, but there are some ways always efficient to improve the language skills.
There is a very good way to practice the speed and accuracy of counting when you attend to school in Kunming to study Chinese, named counting by adding and subtracting.
Teacher first writes”+3” on the blackboard and tells the students add 3 to count. The teacher can first say 1, then students will say “4, 7, 10” until 100, everybody will applaud to the student who can speak of 100. The teacher then writes”-4” on the blackboard, and first say 100, students will say”96, 92, 88” until 0, everybody will applaud to the student who can speak of 0.
If there are too many students in the class, the teacher may let them count in turn add 3 to 202 or 301, then from 200 or 300 minus 4 to 0.
Another method applied in most Chinese language school is counting keep off a certain number. Let’s take 7 as an example to show how people study Chinese by this way. Students begin to count from 1, when coming across the number with 7 or a multiple of 7, clap the hands without telling the number, the next one continues to count the following. The one who fails will be scored 1 point, and he will choose a new number to carry on the game till 100. In the end, the ones with high scores will play shows for others
When the number 69 appears, the following 10 students must continuously clap their hands till 80, then back to normal counting. Low level classes could do it simple, like keep off the number 5 or 9.
To improve students’ ability of analyzing, guessing and memorizing, teacher can ask students to tell the numbers before and after in the Mandarin learning courses. The teacher gives a number, the student tells the numbers before and after. Then the teacher repeats. It is a good idea to correct the mistakes in time when you learn Mandarin. So, if one makes a mistake, the teacher corrects it while repeating and all students need to repeat the numbers again. For larger numbers, the teacher could read the digit for students
As there are numbers, quantifiers appeared accordingly. If you attend school to study Mandarin, most teachers would teach by classifying cards into two piles: one with nouns, the other quantifiers. One card for one word and both piles of cards back on. Students are asked to choose one noun and one quantifier and speak one number arbitrarily to see whether they are matching or not. One point made if they are matching, zero point if wrong or doesn’t know. When finished, change another person.
Teacher should choose quantifiers and nuns according to students’ ability. What’s more, nouns that do not need a quantifier also can be chosen like “年” and “天”. Obviously it is a perfect way to teach Mandarin language.
Some students study Chinese by way of reciting, so it must be better to improve their ability and spoken language if they can understand and speak out by themselves. It is also a practical way to study in China. Ask the student to choose a new word and explain it through his understanding, but not allowed to speak the word. And then everybody else starts to guess the word. The student who got the right answer will start his explaining again.
It is better to make sure everyone has a chance to do explaining. If no one can find the right answer, the explainer should speak it out. The teacher should give a hint or make evaluations if there are any problems. And it is available to take a discussion between two students.
There are many synonyms in Chinese language, so teacher should take the responsibility to help students to make a distinction between them. To learn Chinese in China we often use the way of replacing synonyms to understand them accurately.
For example, the teacher can writes on the blackboard a sentence: “你回到美国以后，千万给我来信”. Then teacher underlying the words “千万”, and ask him to find one synonym. If possible, the class can be divided into two groups to practice. And of course, the teacher should encourage more answers to make students to be creative.