Thursday 21 August 2008

Forign Language Teachers...

Currently one of my Chinese teacher, is... not Chinese, I don't have a problem with that as such. What I do have a problem with is that she isn't familiar with the Chinese that I have been taught by people in china. For example every week we have to hand in a small homework exercise, some translation, using some words in a sentence etc. My first week I had everything checked/ corrected by a native Chinese, Chinese speaker. I got 14/20... I believe that this is possibly not correct. I got deducted marks for using language that Chinese people use... I am not too happy with this teacher, one of the worst thing is that she is a great teacher, organized, clearly planned classes, pushes you to work in a productive manner etc, but she isn't too experienced with native colloquial Chinese. I imagine like a French speaking Canadian, it's just not the same.
This last weeks home work, one question asking us to use a particular structure I got half wrong, the comment that followed was "I am not sure what you're trying to say here" . The sentence was "how could you not have heard it, have you been to china?" I asked a native speaker and she had the same response. When I explained what I wanted to say which is "How could you not have heard this type of sentence, have you even been to china?" It made perfect sense... I guess I will have to cop that one...

1 comment:

Weekend_Viking said...

I've had similar problems in geology with people who've never actually done real field work