WEBVTT

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HAOHSIANG LIAO: American
people, they usually

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have the myth that Chinese
is a very difficult language

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to master which is true if
you want to learn the four

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skills altogether.

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We are talking about listening,
speaking, reading, and writing.

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Chinese is difficult in the
sense of Chinese characters.

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If you focus on just
listening and speaking,

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the structure of
Chinese language

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is the same as English.

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It's SVO language.

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So you say, I like you.

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As long as you know how do
you say, I, like, and you

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individually, and you put
together, it's, I like you.

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So it's not Japanese.

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Japanese is SOV.

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So you have to say, I
you like in Japanese.

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So again, if you
just want to focus

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on listening and
speaking, Chinese

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is not so difficult to master.

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Most of the Chinese textbooks,
they combine these four skills

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altogether.

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So a dialogue would
be represented

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in Chinese characters.

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And reading Chinese characters
is a big burden for beginners.

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And our curriculum here is our
speaking and listening class,

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they have different units.

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And that is one
of the reasons we

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would like to adopt these
new materials at MIT.

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And the material is called
Basic Spoken Chinese

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and Basic Written Chinese.

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So the idea is it
separates the speaking

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and listening from the
reading and writing.

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So for the first two
weeks, our curriculum

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here is that we focus on
the speaking and listening.

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So students, they get
a solid foundation

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of what Chinese sounds like.

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After two weeks, then we
slowly introduce the reading

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and the writing part.

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And our pace here is our
speaking and listening classes,

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they're always one week ahead
of the reading and writing.

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There are some good
purposes for doing that.

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One of them is reading and
writing will become review

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for the speaking and listening.

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So when students
read, the materials

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is something you already know
from speaking and listening.

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So their energy, their efforts,
can be put entirely focused

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on decoding the characters.

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So they don't need to go
through the process of,

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so what is meant by this
word and by that word

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because they already
learned this in the speaking

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and listening class.