Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast where we chat with people about their language learning stories. Right now we're focusing on Mandarin Chinese, but we'll be expanding out to other languages in the future. My name is Stephanie and I was an English language instructor for about 15 years, mostly in Asia. Also, last year I learned how to read very basic Mandarin Chinese through the HSK Chinese language test materials. I am currently on an indefinite language learning break, but I still enjoy talking to people about their language learning journeys. Fun fact, while I was studying Chinese last year, I documented the process on the Changing Scripts YouTube channel, so feel free to have a peek at those videos if you wish. In this episode, we talk with Angela, a Canadian who went to China for the first time in 2006, which is where she met her husband. She left China and returned as many expats do. Lucky for me, she came back to China in 2010 and worked at the same school that I did, where we were teaching academic English to students who were about to study abroad. Angela's relationship to languages and language learning is the complete opposite to mine. Before learning Mandarin Chinese, she fluently learned French, Spanish, and Finnish, with a strong emphasis on speaking the language. She is now a teacher in Canada and also is able to help international students from China and other countries adapt to their new learning and academic environment as well with smaller studied groups. A note to the sound sensitive. Angela's adorable baby boy, Morgan, joined us for some part of this conversation. I have edited out the vast majority of the sounds that overpowered Angela and my voice, but there are a few softer baby noises that I left in because Angela's story is so amazing, I didn't want to cut those parts of it out too. If you are someone who will be annoyed by such subtle baby sounds, please feel free to listen to the first 30 minutes of this podcast episode. That's before Morgan joined us, and then return next month for a different episode of Changing Scripts. If you have any questions or comments as you're listening to this episode, I welcome feedback, comments, questions, anything at all. On all social media platforms, I am Steph Fuccio, S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O. I respond to any and all feedback and I love knowing what you think of these conversations. Let's meet Angela and Morgan and find out about Angela's language learning stories. Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast, Angela. So happy to talk to you. Yes, it's lovely. At first I was like, no, I can't ask people I know for any of the podcasts because that's cheating. And now I'm like, wait, I can just use this as an excuse to get in contact with everybody I haven't talked to for a while. Right. It's actually kind of wonderful. Right? Full disclaimer, I have known Angela for quite when did we meet? 2010, 2011? Uh yeah, 2011. 2011. Well into your Mandarin experience. I remember hearing you for the like the first week you were at the school. The school, let's be vague, like chatting away with the locals, and I was like, damn, she's good. But let's let's backtrack to what how started. I have these theories about first languages, second languages, and I don't think that adults and children learn as different as some people do. So I like to dissect how people learn their first language just a little bit. So let's go back to Canada to baby Angela before you started school.
SPEAKER_04I know from stories and things like that, and and I kind of have a sense, I guess, of that. But my mom stayed at home with us, and so there was lots of reading together and talking. I'm from a pretty big family, so lots of interactions with somewhat same-age peers. But then also my mom was part of some different mom groups, I guess you could say, and I was present for those kinds of meetings as well, and apparently really liked to participate. Like book groups or what kinds of like parenting groups, kind of. Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, the other kids would play with each other and I would want to participate with the adult. I mean, I think I played with them too, or I'd like to think I played with them too. That was kind of the beginning. There was lots of reading. I don't know, not necessarily much in the way of writing. I was not at that point yet, but lots of encouragement to join in conversations when I think of myself now as a parent, and as I think about language acquisition with my son, who we're hoping will be bilingual with English and Mandarin. Just thinking about the use of kind of complete language when you're interacting with your child. And that was something that my parents really did with me in terms of modeling that, and then in terms of kind of engaging me in different things and talking through things we were doing together.
SPEAKER_06I see what you okay. What do you mean by complete language? Do you mean like like people sometimes talk to children like in in very simplified language? Do you mean not doing that?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so not doing that as much and using kind of the real words for things. Okay. Rather than using the child or baby words for things. My parents were intentional about kind of using real words for whatever it was that we were doing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Let's stay with your childhood and then we'll we'll loop back around because I'm very curious linguistically what's happening with your son. Yeah. When you were a kid at any point in elementary school or before then or whatnot, did you gravitate towards reading or writing or speaking? Or like most people seem to kind of have a comfort area in one of those, but not necessarily all of them.
SPEAKER_04I think that writing was probably the one I would say I gravitated to the least. I don't know if that has a relationship with kind of the order in which we tend to start to kind of do things as as we're beginning. So when I started kindergarten, I was in French immersion. And so started kind of with a second language. And I found a couple of books, and I know that my mom had kind of tried to introduce me a little bit to French, but really when I went to kindergarten, that was when it was like waffle on. The teacher that we had was French first language and spoke very little English. So it was a fully immersed kind of environment for French that way, which was a big transition, I think. I can't say that I remember a lot of it, but I do know that the focus was much more on you know the speaking and then working into the reading before we really got into the writing. So the writing wasn't emphasized as much that way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Okay, let's back up a second. Because I silly assumed that English was your first language. Was English your first, yes, yes. When you went to kindergarten or first grade is when you went into the French immersion school? Kindergarten. So I had half days in starting in kindergarten.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Wow. Can we tell the listeners the general area in Canada that you're in?
SPEAKER_04So I'm in central Canada. Um, I live in Winnipeg now. I grew up in a small town in northern Manitoba called Flynn Flon. So there are about 5,000 people. So it's a pretty big deal to have a French first language teacher teaching French immersion there. But we had someone running our French immersion program who is originally from Quebec, which is the French language province in Canada, and she brought who she kind of would go back every summer and recruit people to come up to Flynn Flon and teach.
SPEAKER_06Wow. Okay, that's why I was kind of surprised because I always assumed that it's like Quebec and whatnot that's going to be French immersion. Right. Okay, so you were in a French immersion school from when you were in kindergarten till what grade?
SPEAKER_04Till grade eight. Yeah. So kindergarten to grade eight was French immersion. And then when I went to high school, we didn't have the numbers to be able to maintain a full French immersion program. So we had, you know, maybe a couple of courses that you could do, but otherwise it switched then to being mostly English.
SPEAKER_06Because four is pretty early. So did French feel like a fairly easy thing to slip into, or was it a struggle?
SPEAKER_04I mean, I think some parts of it were pretty easy to slip into in some ways, in the sense of like I think conversationally, by grade two or three, there was quite a bit that I could communicate. But I think it also coming back to that idea of writing as I think about it now, you know, writing is kind of that place where you can come back and notice what's wrong with the grammar or what's wrong with this or that or whatever. And so I think was also the place in my language acquisition kind of journey with French that was the most structured, but also maybe the least fun. Maybe because of that.
SPEAKER_06Because you see the mistakes in there.
SPEAKER_04Right. And it was about, you know, now you need to learn the grammar or the verb conjugation or the whatever rather than just a way of expressing myself. So if I was going to think about expressing myself in a written way, it would always be English. And you know, all the way through, no matter how proficient I felt, I still would rather do it in English. Whereas if I was speaking, I still certainly preferred English. The rest of my kind of language context was English all the time, right? It was just at school that it was French. And so I think I still kind of associated French with that environment. And despite my mom's best efforts, was not willing to chat with her in French ever.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_04So in a French immersion school, all subjects are in French, right? Growing up, it was everything except for our English class and then music and phys ed. Those were done in English because the special teachers that we had to teach those did not speak French. Then our classroom teacher did the science, social studies, math, all of that in French.
SPEAKER_06Now we have some friends who did a French immersion school further east, I don't remember exactly where in Canada. Ugh, because I suck with geography. They said when they started teaching not A levels, the IB program in an international school, they said they had to learn the English words for some things that they only had like French content words for. Did you ever have that kind of experience?
SPEAKER_04When I transitioned to high school and then all of my science, social studies, everything was in English. Science was the biggest one where I went, my goodness, okay. I remember grade nine science going, I have to relearn kind of all of this terminology. Like I think I know what they're talking about, but I don't know what word to pull from to talk about that. I wouldn't say that it was a hindrance, but it was an added level of kind of difficulty as we were transitioning to that program for sure.
SPEAKER_06Do you have conscious memories of having learned French at school? Or because you were so young, did it feel like it just kind of happened?
SPEAKER_04If I think back to kind of the very, you know, those early years, I don't have really strong memories of that. I have I have memories more of the songs that we would sing, I think. So I think a lot of it was done through music sometimes or different kinds of songs, as we even if we think of the way we kind of start that with young children in their first language often where we have those kinds of songs. A lot of that was used, I think, as we were learning French as well. But if I go into, you know, thinking about my time in kind of junior high and high school, it's funny because everything was in French except only French class, felt like that was the time we were learning French. Oh, that's interesting. When I think about myself as a teacher now, and especially working with international students who are English language learners, we spend a lot of time talking about how every teacher is a language teacher. You're teaching language through math, through science, through whatever, and you may have other content that you're teaching, but you're still teaching language. But as a student, I didn't think of it that way. I don't think I thought of, you know, French class was when we learned French, and that's when we worked on our grammar or whatever. And the big things I think, and for me, and I think generally the big kind of focus when learning French is that kind of verb conjugation. That's a huge part of it. And then masculine, feminine, differentiating that because we don't have that in English the same way. So that was a big part of the focus at that time was getting that kind of grammar straight. Working on vocabulary, of course. I don't know if maybe because we were immersed in French and our other subjects, that idea of growing our vocabulary super intentionally in that way wasn't as much a focus of our French class. Like our French class was kind of like a grammar class.
SPEAKER_06So it sounds like the French class wasn't terribly enjoyable experience.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, yeah, I I don't know if I if I if I think back, it's probably not one of the ones that we necessarily looked forward to. Although I did have some lovely French teachers who found ways to kind of keep things interesting as they could. But yeah, yeah, that's probably a fair statement.
SPEAKER_06Even just thinking about what you said within just an English language curriculum. It's also true. Yes. We had we had English class. I was at the end of in the US when they stopped explicitly making you diagram out sentences and do stuff like that in like elementary school and junior high. Like Evan didn't, but I did. And so I remember those classes is where I learned grammar, like English grammar and that kind of thing. But every single class we were in, we were learning vocabulary. We were learning things about vocabulary. You were learning.
SPEAKER_04It was always language used, yeah. Right. And it was it was modeling different types of language in different right, yeah, different registers or that kind of thing, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Oh man, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because the formality and different subjects and oh yeah. It's interesting though. This really, really brings up the idea of like explicitly doing kind of the the torturous analyzation of language. Does that move anything along versus just usage, yeah? Well, let's compare this to Mandarin then. Let's hop ahead. Well, well, hold on. Between between French and Mandarin Chinese, did you learn any other languages?
SPEAKER_04I was trying to get as many French credits as I could in high school. So I took Spanish and French because it was offered through distance education. Figure that out, but whatever, that's how it was. What? Distance education, Spanish class in French, which just meant that the book was written in French for me to learn Spanish, and then I had to like record tapes and send it back to wherever to for my tests and exams and those kinds of things. I continued and took a couple of Spanish courses in university as well, but between high school and university, I spent a year as an exchange student in Finland, and that really threw me for a loop because up until that point I had been doing English only and then French and then Spanish. And French and Spanish are both very similar in structure to English. And so it was very much just you know, you could almost guess words without having learned them necessarily. And I went to Finland and went like, okay, so this is a very different structure. Organize their language is really different, and they use like prepositions or suffixes rather than separate words, and you can put three of them together, and it just blew my mind. And you add the suffixes to the adjectives, not just to the nouns. So, you know, I I was thinking like in the small house would be like PNSA and then cutisa. So you add the SSA, which means in to small and house. So that was a whole different way of thinking about language. I think when I then went to China and started learning some Mandarin, prepared me maybe a little bit more for how different learning Mandarin is. You know, I I wasn't expecting to be able to rely on the same strategies necessarily that I had used in learning French or English or Spanish.
SPEAKER_06Is Finnish a glomerative language then?
SPEAKER_04You kind of add stuff onto the main word to just You can add so much to the end of things, which is and words get very long. But it's also Finnish was the you know, in comparison to French and Spanish or English, there are so many exceptions that we have in these languages. And I think because there's such kind of a mismatch mix, you know, of all of these different languages, there's so many influences, and so depending on the influence, the rules maybe work a little differently, right? Like I remember when I was learning Spanish and we're going, but why is this the permanent verb to be instead of the temporary one? And they said, Well, you have to think about Catholicism, and you know, so to die is temporary, but to get married is permanent because that is how it works within the church, and so the verb to be that is associated with that is the temporary one for one and the permanent one for the other. So there's so many exceptions in those senses, and you need to understand so much about that to get that, right? Die is temporary, to get married is permanent, right?
SPEAKER_06Not the way we would think about it now. No, no, and in this realm of thinking, when you die, are you still married? I obviously the answer is yes. Yeah, I mean, if it's permanent, even if your life is temporary, wow, right, okay, yeah, just wow. You mentioned that your methods had to change. How did you say French and Spanish?
SPEAKER_04French and Spanish, I think a lot of it I could guess in terms of there being lots of vocabulary that kind of was consistent across English, French, French, Spanish. And then the big focus was on, like I was saying, kind of verb conjugation. And like the feminine masculine was the little things that would trip you up. And then the verb conjugation was the am I actually getting my meaning across here? You know, and and if you could get the verb conjugated fairly well, then you probably were gonna have people understand what you meant. But if you didn't, you were gonna be way off. And so, you know, there was still some things related maybe to pronunciation, but pronunciation was never something that I would, you know, sit and practice the sounds necessarily. Whereas if I think about when I was learning Mandarin, I was like, no, but how should my tongue be? Like, let me see your mouth. How are you doing that? There there weren't sounds in French and Spanish that were as foreign to me that my ear really couldn't even pick up as much. So maybe in Spanish I practiced that rolling R for a bit. But otherwise there there wasn't as much of that. Whereas when I learned Finnish, there was a bit more of that kind of pronunciation practice. And I I had a little pocket dictionary that I carried with me everywhere I went so that I could look up words and try and figure things out. And it took longer to get to a point where I felt like I kind of knew what was happening around me, which I would say is similar with Chinese, although the big difference with Chinese that I found was I couldn't use a dictionary anymore. And I didn't know how to cope with that. I didn't know what the alternative was supposed to be because when I first went to China and no smartphones.
SPEAKER_06That's what I was just gonna ask you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Oh, so none of that holding up Google Translate or whatever to things, right? And I remember going, okay, I mean, I can look up an English word and find it in Chinese, but I can't look up a Chinese word. How would I do that? You know, and I remember asking somebody, they said, Well, you, and I said, No, no, like I don't I don't know when I look at it how many strokes are in this character. I don't know how to identify that. Does the little dot thing count as a stroke? I don't know. Which way do I, you know? Like I was confused. So that was really different. And it became more sorry, I'm mixing all of them. I'm not doing any of this in any particular order.
SPEAKER_05I don't care. Okay. No, it's like languages are messy. We we just how things are, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So backtracking a little bit, I went to Finland as part of being an exchange student in Finland. I went through the Rotary International Exchange Program. And so the Rotary Club there that sponsored me, one of the things that they do for all of their exchange students is they enroll them in Finnish language classes. So I went to my class once a week. I was in, you know, a regular Finnish high school. Thankfully, people in Finland have excellent English. So your classes in the high school were in Finnish? Yes, yes. I took the Spanish class and the French class and the English class, and I took ours and I took them so that I could kind of participate without necessarily having as much language and do more of the watching and whatever. You know, because I had already graduated from high school, the courses I took didn't matter that much in terms of credits. I did take a health class, and I remember trying to take notes in that class, and it was just funny. You know, I said, like, this is just my chance to try and see what letters tend to go together in this language. Because unlike taking notes in English, yeah. Yeah, taking notes in English, you go, okay, you know, you see you see a phrase and you remember it and you write it down. But in in Finnish, I was going letter by letter.
SPEAKER_06What was your inspiration for wanting to go to Finland? Why did this happen?
SPEAKER_04Within the Rotary Exchange program, you kind of get to make a choice of you can kind of rank your top three countries that you would like to go to, but then they have a bit of a matching system because clubs that send students will receive students. So Finland hadn't actually been one of my choices, but it just ended up being where I was going, which worked out really well. Um, but yeah, I I hadn't necessarily ever considered Finland as an option or a place I really wanted to go, which when we passed forward to China, kind of a similar thing happened. So that's funny. Really? Yeah. I initially did my kind of EAL certification stuff with the idea of going to Brazil. And after I did it, I didn't have my I didn't have my university degree yet. I was taking a year off from university. And the summer after I took the program, Brazil changed its work visa rules. And you needed an undergrad to go teach there. So the company that I kind of did the certification through, they had some kind of teacher placement service that they offered as well. And I contacted them and said, Okay, so if I can't go to Brazil, you know, where can I go? And they said, Well, China's hiring. I said, Oh, well, I never thought of that, but okay. Um, what's that looks like? So that's how that happened. Also, kind of not necessarily by intention, but just by being flexible with what the circumstances were.
SPEAKER_06I guess I always thought that you studied Mandarin a lot before you went to work there, but you didn't. You went there and then learned it. With nothing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04When I first got to China, they I remember them taking us, they showed us how to do numbers with our hands so that we could buy things at the market. Initially, we had been promised kind of a weekly mandarin lesson, and I was very excited about that. And it never really materialized. And I think maybe we had one. You know, it was taught by just kind of someone who was in the office, and they went, Well, you know Mandarin, so teach these foreigners some Mandarin.
SPEAKER_06Oh God, yeah.
SPEAKER_04You know? Yeah. And so they they did, you know, they picked a couple of characters. I think it was the like ma, whatever, you know, that contrast between them, and they had us practice our tones and wrote us the characters and whatever. But what I actually started doing is I went, okay, every time I take a taxi, they want to talk to me. And I know that there's probably, you know, five or six questions that they're choosing from to ask me. Like, where are you from? What are you doing here? Do you like it? Whatever. Right. So I went into one day when I was picking up my paycheck. I said, okay, I think these are the questions they're asking me. Can you write this out for me? What does the question sound like and what does the answer sound like? And we wrote it out in pinion, and then I wrote the English underneath and I carried it with me. And that was like my my beginning of going, I need to start learning something in this language just because it was awkward in taxis. Okay, so if I if I go back, let's go back to Finland because one of the things that I found, like I had taken I had taken some Spanish in high school and found it not super challenging necessarily. I went to Finland, came back, and Finnish words came out of my mouth. In the past, when I had been learning Spanish, if I didn't know the Spanish word, French word would pop out. That was kind of, I call it my default second language. But I had just spent a year in Finland. My new default second language was finished. So I was, you know, doing a role play or something with a partner in a class. They looked at me really confused. Took me a moment to realize that a Finnish word had come out of my mouth, not a Spanish or French word. And if you slip up with French, time is close enough that it's okay. But if you slip up with Finnish, there's not much in common there.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I didn't have many time words for months and months and months when I first started the studying Chinese last year. So I and I know like this much of Spanish, but verbs are primarily like, well, no, wait, for no, I knew okay. I didn't never really got inflections right in Spanish because I learned it mostly in person and with taxi drivers, funny enough. And very cute boys because I was single at the time and those kinds of things. And so I just ended up using time words with verbs, and people were way too friggin' for forgiving. So what happened is when I started learning Chinese last year, I was using Chinese like nouns and verbs because those were the primary vocabulary coming in HSK1 and two, and like Spanish time words would come into my head and be like, no, that's not working. Why is there a wall here? But it was very confusing because I never got to a decent level in Spanish. So I was like, How could you be showing up? Why isn't English showing up right now? I'm supposed to be speaking foreign right now, so I'm going to that language. Yeah. Go to the non-English, the best not English we have. Exactly. It cracked me up so much. I'm like, I don't have any real second language that I can communicate with, but y'all are gonna kind of just take turns going at the half-assed kind of way. Coming back to China, because we're gonna ping pong back and forth. You were talking to taxi drivers, or like, how did you keep going with that? I didn't take any classes.
SPEAKER_04I would say that I'm one of those kind of I don't know if it's abnormal or normal or what people, but when I travel, I like to go somewhere for a while and I like to kind of get to know the people there. Any chance I had to kind of get to know people and actually spend a bit more time with them and maybe learn a little bit from them, I tried to take that, but I I found actually a similar problem to when I was in Finland, where everyone would rather practice their English with me than help me to learn Chinese or Finnish necessarily, right? I just kind of kept plodding along and making my way through. My language in Mandarin consisted mostly of ordering lamia and saying that I didn't eat fish. Right. Do you like fish? I don't eat fish or seafood. So I'm not allergic, but I don't like them. What? Okay. It's shocking to most people I meet in China, especially because that's like the good food. So I always needed to eat before I went to a wedding because I knew that most of the food I wouldn't actually want to eat. I'd have my seafood beforehand, fill up a little first. Yes, that was kind of the beginning. I went on a trip in the summer. I must have been October. I think it was October. We went on a trip, and you know, that was when we're kind of in a new place and you need to be able to use your mandarin, right? All of a sudden the survival component of it becomes a little bit more important because it's not your familiar kind of space. So there were many, many things that I did not know, but I felt confident enough by that point to kind of go out on my own and figure things out. I was with a friend as well, you know, not I wasn't alone alone necessarily, I guess. I think my Mandarin was a bit stronger than hers at that point. I usually say that first year it was kind of your basic survival mandarin, yeah, was what I could do. And and there was little to no reading involved in that whatsoever. It would just be finding people and asking. And even now I say that I'm pretty much functionally illiterate. I can do some very easy things, but most things I just need to I need to ask. Um and if I'm at a restaurant and I want to order food, I'll say, Well, do you have this? Yeah, and they go, Yeah, you know, it's on page three, blah, blah, blah. And I go, Yeah.
SPEAKER_06It's a hell of a script. See, I'm the total opposite of you though. And I'm jealous because I feel like most ways that Mandarin or most languages are taught are vocal first, and people will focus on the conversation. And I think that's why one of the big reasons is I haven't learned a second language, is I need something to connect it to. I'm like hanging stuff all the characters right now, and it's working a lot better than any other time I've tried to learn a language. It's slow, it's super slow, but it's I'm still doing it a year and a half later, which I cannot say for any other language. I can't learn just from hearing. I can't, even if it's like repeated 200 times and somebody's asking me the same five questions, I'll just be like just going like straight away. But I'm not jealous because so many classes and so many people I meet are like you where they can pick it up by using it, by just hearing it. I'm just not on that page.
SPEAKER_02Hello, this is Tom. I hope you are enjoying Angela's language learning story. I wanted to take a minute of your time to tell you a little bit of my language story now. I'm French and I'm currently doing a master's degree in Chinese studies with a major in Chinese literature and translation. I fell in love with the Chinese language when I first started studying it at high school. It will be nine years ago already. I'm actually sharing my little journey on my Instagram account, where I also share the books that I'm reading, things that inspire me to stay productive, and many more while trying my best to keep everything aesthetically pleasing and motivating. I first found changing scripts through the YouTube channel. In fact, it was a video where Steph talked about a book reading series called Graded Chinese Readers. After watching it, I immediately bought the first volume and fell in love with it. The books contain abridged versions of short stories and novelas written by contemporary Chinese writers. So you get to read Chinese books and get exposed to Chinese literature. And let me tell you that learning Chinese while reading is truly amazing and encouraging at the same time. That's why I absolutely love credit readers' books. Self will have more information about these books in the show notes for you. I'm also excited to tell you that on July 9th, six days after my birthday, my episode of Chanji Scripts will be available then. Yes, you can come back and find out more about my language learning experiences. Until then, feel free to follow me on Instagram at Tom Reeds T-H-O-M-R-E-A-D-S. And now let's get back to Angela's language learning story.
SPEAKER_04Now I think maybe one of the regrets that I have when I think of what you're saying is that I relied so heavily on pinyin that I didn't have that kind of built-in necessity trying to figure out the characters. So I just skipped them. And now it's like a slowing down to have to go back and learn them, which is frustrating and yet something that I think would be useful. So I now joke that I'll learn them along with Morgan as he learns them. But you know, we'll see if that happens or not. But hopefully, we'll be able to kind of do that. At one point, I had an app for learning Mandarin characters, you know, and you draw them before bed and blah blah blah. But once you get up to 70, how many can you draw? How many can you, you know, like a lot. The app stopped loading on my phone because there were too many things to load, I think.
SPEAKER_06For months I was doing this app that would have like it would have it in HSB categories, which I didn't even think I was gonna start taking the test at that point, but it would have it like drop down. It was like this game where the character would drop down, you have to trace it in the right order before it hit the bottom. Yes, were there were there little snowflakes on it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we used the same one. Yes, I love that thing, but it was fun. And I was doing it on the metro sometimes in Shanghai, and like Chinese people would look at me and be like, ooh, they're like, you can do that well. I'm like, I'm tracing, I'm not even actually writing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And that was why it was okay for me because I could just trace it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I thought this will this will give me a sense, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll tell you what, I a lot of people really insist that you have to hand write stuff. And I handmark my paper flashcards for a number of reasons that are not important. But honestly, if I write in the future, I'm going to be typing on my phone or on my computer. So I made a decision a while ago. I'm not going to hand write the characters. It doesn't make any sense. I can type now on my phone. I haven't set it up on my computer yet, but I can if I can recognize the character, I'm good because I do the you know pinion input thing and I find it and and it works. I can send messages doing that with like 300 words that I know. But I it's possible. No, yes. That's what I see happening. I don't see myself writing out stuff like letters and things and exactly.
SPEAKER_04It's almost learning the writing as a as a way of supporting the reading. Yeah. Right? Just what you're kind of familiarizing yourself with the dip the the smaller differences between the characters.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. And this this may come to bite me in the ass as I get more vocabulary under my belt, but right now it seems to be okay.
unknownYeah, good.
SPEAKER_06So who knows? Who knows? Yeah. It's interesting though, because you said figuring out the characters instead of just learning the characters. And I think that's really interesting because I had this conversation with a gentleman who grew up with English and Chinese a couple of weeks ago. And he was kind of giggling at, yeah, yeah, no, when you grow up with Mandarin, you don't really play with them, you don't envision what they look like, you just learn them. You just roll memorize them, and that's what you do, and then you use them to get meaning, or you use it to convey meaning. He's like, We don't really do that stuff with them. And I was like, Oh, I do.
SPEAKER_04The way that we try to kind of make it fun and interesting for adult Mandarin language learners or whatever is not necessarily what they actually do. And yeah, no, when you have to learn, you know, 300 a week rather than 300 a year or whatever it is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06No, it's so true. It's so true. And I don't don't think that there's anything necessarily bad with that. It is kind of fun historical linguistic wise, it's kind of interesting. But I think you can get lost in it and forget to keep going with more words because you have to have a certain amount to get some meaning in some work. But it's interesting. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, if the ultimate goal is communication, that that can't be the only focus, right? Yeah. And you also said that you draw, not write characters.
SPEAKER_06And I say that all the time because I'm like, it feels like an art form to me.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. And I've and I've actually said to my husband who is Chinese before my family came for our wedding, I said, We need to put together a little thing that has some of the common phrases that they may need to say that they can just point to because they can't look things up. And he said, Well, what do you mean they can't look things up? And I said, No, it because you have pictures. And he goes, Well, we don't have I said, I know they're not pictures, but to me they're pictures. To me, there's nothing about that. That and I I mean that that's why I guess they're called characters and not words, and and all of these other things, right? And there's more to that maybe to unpack than just that, right? But I said, No, it's to me they are pictures, they are art forms. There's there's I I associate it much more with like the beautiful Chinese calligraphy than I do with actual words almost, you know, and and maybe that comes from my over-reliance on pinion, where I still kind of I can see the pinion is related to the word because it's related to the sound and it's how English works. Oh but when I see the character, that's related to something else.
SPEAKER_06This is so interesting. This is so interesting. This is really highlighting the reading like centric versus the sound-centric, which I think is where you're coming from. Because you you seem to pick up language when you hear it, and I pick it up when I can see it. Yeah, and read it. And for me, I there's still a lot I don't know, but there's certain things that are so repetitive at this point that I need to see the characters to see the meaning in them because there's, you know, there's only like 200 some radicals, and everything's based on that. It's just different versions of them. They could be squished, whatever, combined, all that kind of stuff. I'll have like my first layer of flashcards is like the Hansa character, the word and just Hanza characters, and then the the opinion, and I'll try to and the English together, and I'll try to match it. And the first time I'm doing the matching, I'm staring at the characters, looking for meaning clues without looking at anything else. And it's kind of fun. And it's not like it looks like it necessarily, but certain words, certain characters tend to mean like there's one that tends to mean some sort of movement. There's another one that tends to mean some sort of cleaning or you know, those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_04There are cues within the character as to the meaning. Yeah. And because I've never focused on them, I've never had I I don't see it when I look at them.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um, and that's something that I would like to be able to see or would like to be able to develop. But I know that unless I actually sit down and put a lot of time into it, it won't happen. It's a ton of time. Um, whereas just kind of muddling my way through now that I kind of have the amount that I have is easier.
SPEAKER_06So I'm still floored. You've never taken classes, you've never like you. So okay, so that's not true.
SPEAKER_04Okay. So my first year there, I did not take any classes. But then James and I started dating. I came back to Canada. Well, I came back to Canada and then we started dating. Not that that's relevant to this. Because long distance relationships are stupid, don't you know?
SPEAKER_06Nobody would want to be in one of those. But you left China and then you started dating long distance. Okay, that's a whole different podcast. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So uh so then I went back the summer after I left. So I left in December 2016. I went back in the summer 2017, stayed with him and his family. And his parents don't speak any English. So James's English is quite good. But all of a sudden, I was living with people who didn't speak English. And I went from the kind of pretty self-conscious, uncomfortable, I always learned language in a school setting, and I don't want to say it unless it's perfect, to well, my Chinese is better than your English, so I guess that's what we've got to work with. And James's mom is a very talkative, patient person. And so she just kept trying. And we would James would come home from work and say, Okay, can you just tell me how that conversation happened? Like, how did you guys figure this out together? Because, and you know, I say, Well, you know, one thing takes us a long time, but we get there. It it reminded me of there's this TED talk on like grandmothers in the cloud and this like video learning with kids with I can't remember the name of the person, but anyway, and they said really they just need somebody to kind of be encouraging and patient. Yeah, and that was so much what James's mom was for me. She gave me a good model of that and then was just interested in talking. So that kind of happened, and then I went, Okay, I need to be a little bit more intentional about this now. And I found a a website or I guess, you know, I guess now, now looking back, I guess it was a podcast, and I just didn't really know anything about podcasts then. The big thing that they are now right now, yeah, exactly come full circle. Um was called Chinese pod, it was all free. They had lessons and then they had these recordings that you could listen to, and so I was going to university at the time, and on the bus on the way to university and on the way home, I would listen to these Chinese pod podcasts. And that helped me to focus in and start to, I think, kind of train my ear a little bit more because they would break it down and and slow things down and kind of explain the different parts of things. I remember frequently stopping for a moment and looking down on myself from outside of myself and going, You're walking down the street muttering in Mandarin, trying to copy whatever you hear on this podcast as I was working on pronouncing different things.
SPEAKER_06You were shadowing, yay!
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I thought, you know, I must look insane right now. But that's what I was doing. So that was kind of how that would how how that went. So I did that for a little while and really enjoyed those. And then and then after that, I went and our university had Mandarin classes. And I talked to the professor and said, Look, I'm I don't have time in my schedule and I'm not really interested in paying for class. Like, could I attend the labs where you just where people practice and you're doing some of the work with it? Like if you know, if there's space, would it be okay if I sat in and just kind of audited that part of it? That was lovely. I didn't have to do anything for Mark, but that didn't matter for me. I just wanted a chance to kind of not lose the little bit that I had. That was probably the first time that I was interacting with the characters in a more formal way. Because all of a sudden we had a textbook and were to look at that and you know, make sense of it, make meaning from from what was written there. Those were kind of the two extra things that I did.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Um, so in those auditory experiences, did was the content very different than the conversations that you were having?
SPEAKER_04I still remember one of the one of the Chinese pod podcasts. So the phrase that they were teaching was something about like frying the shrimp or cooking the and what it meant was that somebody had been fired. And I've never needed to actually know that in real life, but clearly it stuck with me. I still remember it because I thought it was an interesting idiom and kind of weird. So I would listen to them during the day, right? And then because of the time change between Canada and China, usually James and I would talk in the evening, and so in the evening, then I would say, This is what I learned today. Do you say this? Yeah, or how is it different or how is it not, or whatever. So I wouldn't say that all of the things were consistent with actual regular kind of spoken language, and certainly when I started that class at the university, it was a much more formal register than I was familiar with. And so learning about you know, Mr. and Mrs. and blah blah blah blah blah, and I was going, No, like I didn't even know these words before, and I've never used them, although maybe I was not terribly polite sometimes looking back, uh, but I was forgiven because of my lack of proficiency. Taking the university class was the first time when I kind of had some exposure to that more formal register, and that was not necessarily in line with my day-to-day kind of experience and and times when I might need to use Mandarin, but I think it helped to round it out a bit.
SPEAKER_06Gotcha. So, how long did you do those for, those two things?
SPEAKER_04The Chinese pot stuff I think I did for about a year, maybe two, and the and the Mandarin I did the Mandarin classes that I would just kind of go sit in on for the practice. Yeah, I think it was two semesters. Let's say I think it was two semesters.
SPEAKER_06So cool. Like you practiced during the day and then you got to practice on the phone at night. So you got to Right. And then I got to say, Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I got that application opportunity there. There you go. So our university had a language partner program for really It was designed for learning English, but I went to them and said, Hey, I just came back from China. Do you have any people who speak Chinese who you could pair me with? I'm interested in maintaining my Chinese. And what they ended up doing was rather than pair me with students at the university, they paired me with two of the partners of professors who were new to the university who were Chinese. And so it ended up being two women who were there just kind of accompanying their husbands and had some time to meet. And so rather than meeting at the university necessarily, we would go out for coffee or they would come to my house or I would go to their house. And we got to do a little bit of a mix of English and Chinese so that I could learn a little bit and also just try to hold on to the little bit that I had.
SPEAKER_06With all the languages that you're describing, it sounds like you knew what you wanted to do with it and you sought out the opportunities to like practice those things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think when I when it kind of came time to, you know, when I decided, hey, Mandarin's gonna be a priority somewhat now, and I'm not going to formally commit to it. In all of these other ways, I'm gonna try to make sure that I can hold on to it however I can. And that kind of took me then to when I met you. I actually often credit that school with making a huge difference in my Mandarin language learning because all of a sudden I was working in an office that was mixed. There were local Chinese people and there were foreign teachers, and the local Chinese people had very strong English. So I could speak Mandarin and throw English words in the middle of my sentences wherever I didn't know them, and they would understand. But I also had that environment where they were speaking to one another about things I knew something about because I was familiar with the context or the students or or what was happening. And so even if it was kind of, you know, we're having a conversation all together as an office, and then they have their little side conversation, I know what led to that. So I can't I have more opportunity to kind of figure out, you know, get meaning from it. That made a huge difference, both in building up my confidence in terms of speaking, but then also in broadening my vocabulary and and all of that.
SPEAKER_06I'm so shocked to hear all of this because I honestly just saw you as being fearless. You just walked in and you just started talking, and I was like, look at her go. Yeah, and I walked in and I was like, This is my chance. That was amazing. And I don't even remember hearing you doing any blends at all with I didn't hear any English. Oh no. Like, oh my god. You were probably probably when you got to the English, it was in the middle of the sentence, so there was like a little bit of pr Mandarin pronunciation in it or something. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Have you ever dreamed in Chinese? Yes.
SPEAKER_04I don't know the rhyme or reason. I haven't noticed a pattern, and it hasn't happened very frequently. I used to say, like, if you if you're dreaming in the target language, you've made it. It's like all of a sudden your brain is actually kind of thinking in that language. You're not just translating back and forth. Does it happen? So and I I don't know. Now, I'm maybe not a good candidate to check that with. I rarely remember my dreams. So I rarely have a sense of my dreams, even in English. I don't think very often. I think there's the language that I'm dreaming in, it's English. And that's still the majority of my day as well. I'm not sure if I went back to China and live there for a year again, if that would shift.
SPEAKER_06Well, let's talk about Morgan because he keeps coming into the conversation. I've heard so many different methods that uh multilingual households on how they handle growing up bilingually. What is your guys' plan of attack on this?
SPEAKER_04Influence from school and peers and this whole idea of the English environment that they're in, wanting to fit in and wanting to be a part of that ends up overpowering it. And it's I think often it's not until you know they're 18 or they're in their 20s and they go, God, I wish I had done this when I was a kid, right? Um all of a sudden there's other priorities in life. And so my hope is that although I have an accent when I speak Mandarin, and it's certainly not perfect by any means, and I am still learning that the fact that I want to speak Mandarin and that we kind of validate that language in that sense in our home with me not being Chinese but still wanting to speak it, will help to give him more of an example of it being something desirable, and then just giving him more of that environment. So this past summer, James's parents actually came to visit for two months, and that was huge for him, and and we hope that that will be able to happen again so that he get because they don't speak English, he can have that that really rich language. Yeah, we're talking about you. So the other side of that is that I still speak to him a lot in English, and certainly in things where I want to be specific and clear, yeah. I use English. Right now, he has a couple of words, but it's decent, and it definitely got a lot stronger this summer with James's parents being here. You know, right now he's learning like nose and eyes and mouth, and he'll touch them when you say them, and he'll do that in English and in Mandarin. Remind me, is he two, two and a half? He's 19 months, so he's one and a half. This summer we spent a lot of time going outside, and he started to say go, like let's go. And he's go, go, go, go. But then after James's parents arrived, I realized whenever he saw a dog, he also said go because go is dog, right? And so but he wouldn't say them differently, he would say it the same. Oh I'm still breastfeeding, and if he wants to nurse, he'll ask in Chinese. So he'll say, Nae, China. He's like China, the nah, yeah. He's not gonna say it now. He's like, No, just let me nurse.
SPEAKER_06He's like, forget this recording pressure. I'm done with it.
SPEAKER_04Um, and when James's parents were here, he would say sometimes he would say mayo. Like when he couldn't find anything, he would go mayo. That's so cute. That's the extent of his Mandarin and English so far. He's got a few body parts and then a couple other. But I was really actually relieved when there were a couple of Mandarin words that came through because it is kind of an experiment and you never know how it's gonna go, right?
SPEAKER_06Let's wrap up by talking about your teaching. What's happening? What are you doing? What are you teaching right now?
SPEAKER_04I work mostly doing English language support with international students at an all-girls boarding school here in Winnipeg. In any year, we tend to have between 50 and 60 international students who board at the school. I do mostly English language support with them, and I'm lucky to be able to do that most of the time in fairly small groups, so often like groups of five to 10. And we do a lot of work with kind of the productive side of things because they're all quite strong students and do a lot of reading and listening in their classes all day because they're immersed in English in that sense. But because they are immersed with a whole bunch of other students who are very strong English language users, they don't always necessarily have the confidence to join in. So our time together is often used to give them opportunities to kind of develop their ideas around things, and we usually focus on some of the academic topics that they're doing in their other classes and just use that as a jumping off point for our focus on language. So when they're doing their labs for biology, they need to use passive voice. So then we talk about passive voice and kind of why they would need to use it then and how it would be useful, and then we take a look at their labs and do some work around that. That's fun. Just this year for the first year, I'm teaching microeconomics, which is not as much of a language focus. There are only three people in my class of 13 who are not Chinese. Obviously, I teach the class in English, but when I'm working one-on-one with students, we're able to have conversations in Mandarin as well to make sure that they get that depth of understanding of the content area. And then we work on the making sure that they can communicate that in English for a test or an assignment or whatever.
SPEAKER_06So your finance Chinese must be pretty high for to be able to. Well, I am a muddler, as we've established.
SPEAKER_04There is lots of language in in terms of economics that I am not familiar with, but they are somewhat familiar with it. So they use those words and I use my words, and we kind of find a way that works. And and so it's fun for me because I'm learning new words in Mandarin as a product of teaching this course to students from China. When I came back to Canada, I thought, I don't know how I'm going to keep up my Mandarin. I kind of happened into this job and I went, I I think I might be okay. And so they're supportive. I mean, obviously, I don't speak in Mandarin with them all the time, but again, just in terms of kind of validating that language and when when the purpose is communicating, not learning English, that we have an opportunity to do that as well.
SPEAKER_06They are bilingual, they don't have to pretend to just speak one language when they're there. Exactly. That's what worries me about the at the university level. I understand international students need to be fluent in the local language in order to do the content classes, but they don't have to pretend they don't have the other languages that used to frustrate. Right.
SPEAKER_04One of the things that is kind of a focus of mine within this kind of school community conversations, whatever with my colleagues, is really thinking about a more additive approach to language, right? Rather than having that kind of deficiency model. It's not that they don't have English, it's that they are fully fluent in one language and now they're also learning how to communicate in this other one, and we're working on that, but this is in addition to it's we don't pretend that the the rest doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, there was kind of a stigma when we were teaching in university. The the local the heritage students, which was a polite word for nobody wants to teach them because they came in with bilingual like Spanish and English usually. They were super interesting kids who had had multiple life experiences, they were really honest and and interesting and they had seen things, you know, they weren't sheltered at all. And I love teaching them, but people were just like, Oh, just I can't handle it. Oh, they just you know, they're they're so their language is so bad. And I'm like, what, because they express themselves too much? Like, yeah. It was because you're actually getting language from them, right? Yeah. So the more language you get, I guess you would notice more mistakes and sit your super quiet native speakers who only have one language and are very critical to never use it. Yeah, you wouldn't hear any mistakes. All the teachers that complained were monolingual, and I'm like, wait, wait, wait. So these kids who come in with two languages, both strong but not perfect to you, and you're sitting there as a monolingual judging them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, that idea of kind of especially within English language learning environments of that primacy of English over everything else, rather than seeing it as just one of many ways of communicating. Yes, is yeah, it's a very ethnocentric perspective on learning and life. I think I used to have that perspective and think of it in a fairly positive way, or at least benevolent way. I don't know. But but now I'm starting to get more critical of it and thinking that in some ways it's also a way of preserving our sense of ourselves as authority figures. But I think that a lot of teachers, rather than allowing themselves to be vulnerable or acknowledging that it's because they're uncomfortable and they feel vulnerable, they want to say it's a problem with the student.
SPEAKER_06I think there is a vulnerability, and I think there is for especially for folks who may have never really been lost in a culture that they don't know the language of, it's their first time of I don't know what's happening right now. With their students in a classroom where they may already feel like I don't know if I have control of this class, but you never really do. Yeah. So I mean, that's problem number one without any language. But yeah, yeah, I think it's definitely their issues because honestly, I just I thought it was cool. Like I'd ask, like I'd have them like I finally was able to teach the international student section the second year of grad school, and I was like, this is awesome. I have kids from like six or seven different countries in the same fascinating. So I'd say, How is this like in Kazakhstan? What is this like in in Yemen? Like, tell me the da da da. And they're like, Well, can I use a little bit of language to tell you this? And I'm like, Of course you can. You're gonna need to explain it to the rest of us. But using that word for that thing that you're talking about, that's important. But they were so used to that being just pushed aside. No, no, tell us in English, but it doesn't exist in English. Exactly. So, how could they?
SPEAKER_04So use the word, let's all learn and appreciate and hear that word, yeah. And then explain to us what it means, the closest approximation you can in English, right?
SPEAKER_06Exactly. They were seriously like, can I do that in a classroom? And I'm like, heck yeah. You don't in your others, your other classrooms, you should probably be pushing it a little bit more because this is this is ridiculous. This is a university. We're supposed to be learning here.
SPEAKER_04Yes, this should be an environment for learning and then for pushing these boundaries, right? And being more open-minded about things.
SPEAKER_06I mean, if that's what we want to say that we do there. So wait, that one microeconomics class, which you said it was 10 Chinese students and three non-Chinese students, is the is that like a representation of the school as a whole? No.
SPEAKER_04Normally it would be, let's say, maybe 20 students, and maybe five of them would be international. We're less than 50% international, far less than 50% international. Okay. I think because many of our Chinese international students are interested in taking business and so are wanting to take this AP micro course. It's one that is perceived to be less language focused. Our international students from China, not always, but overall tend to kind of fit that stereotype of being more comfortable in math.
SPEAKER_06On this podcast, I interview two different populations, I suppose we should say. Folks that either learned or are learning Mandarin Chinese as adults or teenagers, adults, whatever age they are. And the other group is folks that grew up with the language and they learned other languages, specifically English, because uh that's the group that I asked them questions in. So with those two populations in mind, are there any questions you can think of that I haven't asked you that might be interesting to ask other people in the future? Hey, this is Future Steph. So Angela wanted some time to think about her question and she sent me her reply via WeChat, which is the messaging app in China. Well, it's the app in China. So the sound is a little bit different, but I think you'll find the question that she adds to the changing scripts interview question to be rather interesting. So here you go.
SPEAKER_03But I guess my question would be what the attitudes towards language learning were of the people around them. So their families or friends or whatever. Was language learning something, you know, were were the other people in their lives also language learners, or were they just completely monolingual? Did they think that it was interesting or important for them to learn another language? Or was it just kind of viewed as something extra and not really that big a deal? I'm curious about how kind of the perceptions of language learning from the people around them or people close to them may have impacted their language learning journey.
SPEAKER_05Thank you so much, Anna, and Morgan, for joining us on Changing Scripts Podcast. Thank you. It was fun.
SPEAKER_00Okay, hi everyone. My name is Dill, and I'm an avid Mandarin Chinese language learner, and of course, a big fan of the show. Now I'll be a future guest on the Changing Scripts Podcast. I'm currently studying HSK 5, so I hopefully represent what you two can achieve in the short to midterm of your language learning journey. Now, Steph has asked me to help out with a few quick thank yous. So firstly, I'd like to thank our guest Angela, and a special thank you to Tom, the Tom Reads Instagram feed for his amazing podcast break. Now, the music in this podcast is from Damon Castillo and his album Mess of Me, which you can find all of his music at DamonCastillo.com. And finally, a massive thank you to you guys, the listeners. It's because of you and your interest in language stories that Steph and her guests continue to record these conversations. She looks forward to all of your feedback at Steph Fuccio on any of the social media platforms and of course Gmail. And be sure to keep an eye out for my episode on season four of the Changing Scripts podcast starting on July 2019.
SPEAKER_01Membership Ease apply after free trial. Cancel anytime. You know what's wrong with health and fitness? You weaponize it against yourself. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. Ah, why did you eat that? You have no self control. Stop it. At Beachbody, we think training and caring for your body in a way that works best for you should be about loving yourself. Let us help you without all the judgment. Here's how.com to claim your free membership and start feeling great.