A Difficult Lesson -- Chinese May Be The World's Most Common Language, But As Area Students Are Finding, It's Not Easy To Learn

"As for Strangers, it is scarce credible how much (Chinese language) study disgusts them; it is a heavy Cross to be forced all a Man's life long to stuff his head with this horrible multitude of Figures and to be always occupied in deciphering imperfect Hieroglyphicks." -Daniel LeComte

missionary, 1697

Puget Sound-area children are taking up a challenge that has vexed language students around the world for more than three centuries.

The planet's most commonly spoken tongue, Mandarin Chinese, is taking root in classrooms here. At least 10 secondary schools and three grade schools offer it.

Mercer Island High School started a program this year, and efforts are under way to offer Chinese this fall at two Bellevue middle schools, Skyline High School in Issaquah and several Seattle grade schools.

The Mandarin Chinese dialect is taught because it is the official dialect and is spoken by about 90 percent of Chinese.

The push is based on a Pacific Rim mind-set: To sustain the Northwest's economic might through the 21st century, today's children should know Asian languages.

Like Japanese curricula in the 1980s, new Chinese classes owe their existence to that country's new clout. Washington state and China traded $8.7 billion worth of goods in 1996, making it our third-largest trading partner after Japan and Canada.

Chinese immigrants also represent a growing share of the state's population.

But close ties to Asia don't make language mastery any easier.

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimates that a diplomat must cram full time for 80 to 90 weeks to learn Chinese, compared with just 24 weeks for Spanish.

The institute considers Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean the four toughest languages.

Will students here rise to the occasion?

One obstacle is the late start U.S. schools give foreign-language studies.

Despite findings that early childhood is the brain's peak time to absorb grammar, sound and vocabulary, schools usually delay world-language training until older grades - a handicap with Chinese, which has characters that require more memorization than most languages.

"Middle school may already be too late. We ought to be teaching it in kindergarten," said Steve Miller, a Bellevue School Board member.

Wolfgang Hirsch, a German citizen who advises the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, is appalled that students here don't work six years on a language.

"Trying to start a language after puberty, to my mind, is a waste of time and money, because very few students will learn enough to gain proficiency," he said.

About 1 percent of American high schools offer Chinese, and only a few hundred state children study it, far fewer than the 60,000 learning Spanish or even the 4,000 in Japanese.

Chengdu-bound

Every day, Snohomish High School junior Nick Steele chats in Mandarin Chinese over lunch with an exchange teacher from China.

Steele and a few classmates will spend April at Snohomish's sister school, the ancient Shi Shi Middle School of Chengdu in western China.

"I feel pretty confident about it," said Steele. "I can read children's books, and if we watch Chinese movies, I understand about half to two-thirds of what they're saying."

Most Chinese characters consist of two parts: a meaning element or "radical," and a phonetic part that gives clues about sounds.

In the character ma for "mother," the left side is the radical for "woman," while the phonetic part on the right contains a symbol for a "horse," which is pronounced ma. (See chart.)

A 3,000-character vocabulary is needed to read newspapers fluently, but a high-schooler sees only about 900 in three years.

Still, Snohomish teacher Yang Bin insists that by combining characters, a student can write letters or essays at a sixth-grade level.

Snohomish senior Ben Emmil found Chinese easier than European languages because of its straightforward grammar.

"After the first semester of Latin, I could say two sentences," Emmil said. "In Chinese, I could do a lot better."

Snohomish High School's Chinese-language director, Dick Knutson, said his goal is not just for students to dabble, but to progress.

"It's true they won't become fluent here," he said.

"But several kids have gone on to advanced courses in college and become fluent, so they leave here with a good foundation."

A few persevere

The third-year Chinese class at Bellevue's Sammamish High School is conversing at last.

"Who likes to fish?" asks teacher Shu-shen Wu. "Have you ever caught salmon?"

A boy describes his family's squid-fishing trip. A classmate struggles to answer the question, "Are you fluent in English?" She mixes up shuo, to speak, xue, to study, and shu, book.

Only eight students have endured this long, less than a third of the 1995-'96 crop of beginning students. Despite the attrition, Wu likes her job.

"As a Chinese, I think it's a mission to teach Chinese," she said. "The world has become smaller and smaller. In the Chinese culture, there are a lot of beautiful elements we can share."

Students' photo collages of the Forbidden City and other landmarks line the walls. A red banner welcomes the Year of the Tiger.

Several students are already thinking about how Chinese can help their careers.

"If you speak Chinese, most of the Chinese people will come to you and ask for help," said David Shih, a third-year student who aspires to practice law.

A rebuilding year

Students at West Seattle High School are counting to 20 together. They mimic the sounds - "yi , er, san" - in rising and falling tones, to the delight of teacher Li Dan.

After eight days, her class could pronounce the vowel-consonant sounds, polite phrases and words for body parts.

A native of Liaoning Province in the northeast, Li is one of six teachers here through an exchange operated by the state.

West Seattle practically overlooks the Port of Seattle's new Terminal 5 container area, so the school jumped at the chance to offer Chinese three years ago, said department head Lauro Pizzuto.

But only 13 students take first-year courses now. Pizzuto expects a revival. "The teacher builds the program," he said. "The first year we taught it, we had over 45 students sign up. If we'd had Miss Li then, they'd still be in the program."

Making it fun

The Seattle School District is experimenting with ways to make foreign languages fun.

At Olympic View Elementary near Northgate, two teachers from China helped fourth- and fifth-graders in Nahnie Freemanson's class assemble a quilt that tells a Chinese story about a mouse. They sing rhymes about riding a donkey and about a tiger without a tail.

"This wouldn't work with older kids," admits exchange teacher Chen Mei.

Her partner, Guo Jia, tips her head and spreads her arms and legs to shape herself as the character for "head," which resembles a person. Using such memory tricks, they've taught the children 40 characters.

Chen and Guo are helping Seattle's world-language coordinator, Cynthia Rekdal, write lessons for an expected proliferation of grade-school Chinese courses.

"We want to get kids excited about the language. What we're trying to do now is build a curriculum more user-friendly to American kids," Rekdal said.

Freemanson doesn't know yet if her school will get funding to hire Chinese teachers again in 1998-99. She said that even a year's exposure is worthwhile.

The point is "to plant the seed," she said.

"Once you learn a language, you gain confidence. If you learn a language, you can learn anything."

Mike Lindblom's phone message number is 206-515-5631. His e-mail address is: mlin-new@seatimes.com