The whole time I've been studying Chinese, I have been wondering what it's like for Chinese students of English to learn our writing system. Learning Chinese characters seems hard to me, but at least they look like pictures of what they mean. Whenever linguists in my graduate program have talked about English orthography, we have commiserated about how much harder it is than languages like Spanish or French. People don't have weekly spelling tests in their native tongues all around the world.
So I asked Min about that, and she said that Chinese students tend to find the English writing system easier than Chinese--at least English has an alphabet! She began learning English at twelve years old, but most Chinese people today begin at four or five. They start learning grammar around age twelve. Min added that she is writing two articles about teaching for publication, and she is getting help from a professor that we both had, so she can write in the American English style. I hope I can see her original version, in a more Chinese writing style, as well as the revised, American one. That would be a window into Chinese culture for me.
So I asked Min about that, and she said that Chinese students tend to find the English writing system easier than Chinese--at least English has an alphabet! She began learning English at twelve years old, but most Chinese people today begin at four or five. They start learning grammar around age twelve. Min added that she is writing two articles about teaching for publication, and she is getting help from a professor that we both had, so she can write in the American English style. I hope I can see her original version, in a more Chinese writing style, as well as the revised, American one. That would be a window into Chinese culture for me.
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