"Control" is Character of the Year in China

Interesting that the Chinese character for "control" is the word of the year in China. This seems to indicate a growing expectation that inflation and price hikes should be kept under control.

You can listen to the following piece at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/cdaudio/2011-12/16/content_14278789.htm

New character took control in 2011
[ 2011-12-16 15:43 ]


进入英语学习论坛下载音频

The Chinese character kong 控, a word that generally means control, has been selected as the 2011 character of the year in China.

The word was chosen after recommendations from Internet users, expert reviews and online polling that was jointly organized by the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center under the Ministry of Education, the State-run Commercial Press, and the China Youth Daily, a report in the newspaper said on Thursday.

Two million Internet users took part in the selection, the report said.

Kong, replacing the character zhang (meaning price hikes)from last year, symbolizes a logical consequence of the government launching proper macro-economic policy to keep the hikes under control, said a statement issued by the organizers.

A statement on Wednesday after a three-day central economic work conference attended by senior leaders said the country would maintain the steady macro-economic policy and measures to control inflation, stabilize prices and regulate the property market.

The selection of kong indicates the public's expectations and the government's efforts to respond to the expectations, the organizers' statement said.

Moreover, the use of kong as shorthand for a homophone of the English word "complex" to express a special liking, is also getting popular this year, which reflects a more diversified lifestyle of the Chinese people, the statement said.

In this respect, the word kong usually follows a noun or verb. For instance, weibo kong refers to those people who like to use micro blogs very much and spend a lot of time micro-blogging.

The phrase shang bu qi, which means too delicate to bear a blow, was chosen as the phrase of the year, revealing the public's sensitivity to personal and social problems, and their call for justice and equity.

Also, "debt" and "euro debt crisis" were voted the international word and phrase of the year, showing the public's growing awareness of a globalized world, the report said.

.....................................................

Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

· August 17, 2011, 8:00 AM ET

Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

Philip P. Pan

Tom Scocca

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. “The blue of cup,” he would say, meaning his blue cup.

This wasn’t a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: “of” was standing in for the Mandarin particle “de” to turn the noun “blue” into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying “this one” or “that one”–he was rendering the Chinese “zhege” and “neige” in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.

The usual arguments in favor of Mandarin education say that he should be on his way to conquering the world. An extra language, the theory goes, supplies extra brainpower, and Chinese in particular is a skill that will prepare young children to compete in the global 21st-century marketplace of talent.

Fun, right? If building an optimized little academic and economic performer were all there is to it, we’d have pulled him out of bilingual preschool long ago. Luckily, the reality of having a little Chinese learner underfoot is messier and more entertaining than that.

Our son’s head start in Chinese was mostly an accident. He was born in Beijing because my wife and I were living and working there, and he arrived before we could get back to New York for the delivery. So his first influences were Chinese nurses and the sound of Mandopop on the night-shift radio in the newborn unit.

He spent the first year and a half of his life in the Chinese capital, the seat of standard Mandarin. This is a point of pride for him now, at age four, though in fact he mostly was exposed to his second-generation Chinese-American mother’s lax Taiwan accent and the Sichuan countryside accent of our nanny, who amused him by chanting old schoolhouse rhymes about the glory of Mao.

That early input, followed by half-days of Chinese preschool in New York, hasn’t yet produced a junior trans-Pacific CEO. If you’re considering Mandarin as part of a program of intensive child-improvement, it’s worth remembering that children aren’t so easy to improve.

Adding a second language means a child can play dumb in two languages at once. Or play smart: “Daddy can’t speak Chinese,” he says sometimes, when Daddy speaks rudimentary Chinese to him. Then he demands to borrow my smartphone, so he can look up Chinese characters in the dictionary software.

Lately, he refuses to address his Chinese-born grandparents by their usual titles, insisting on “Grandma” and “Grandpa” in English. But he serenades them with Chinese songs from school, with flawless schoolteacher diction and a gusto that would startle his actual teachers if they heard it. And he is more obedient in Mandarin than in English–when an order comes in Chinese, he has learned, his parents are serious about it.

Mostly, though, Mandarin in the hands of a toddler is not a practical tool. Trying to justify it that way is a bit like the efforts to put a dollar value on liberal-arts education. Chinese is, like math or music, a distinct system of representation, another way to think about the world. You may learn a language because you need to, but you stick with it because it is interesting to think about.

In Beijing, as China prepared for the 2008 Olympics, I used to visit an English class for senior citizens. Officially, the purpose was instrumental: to increase the number of English-speaking residents for the benefit of the foreign tourists during the Games. The students’ questions for me, however, were more esoteric: What was the English for an electrified bus? For saying thunderstorms were coming? For “hidden microphone”? When I came back two years after the Olympics, the class was still full.

So like his other bilingual friends, our son is capricious about how and when to use his own abilities. Have I toweled him off enough? “Chabuduo,” I say, meaning “close enough.” “Chabuduo!” he says, and keeps saying it off and on for days. Language is a playground. He calls up Mandopop videos on YouTube, and snubs American pop. He shakes down a Brazilian babysitter for bits of Portuguese, and asks for Dora the Explorer’s Spanish to be translated to English.

If he came from Boston, I tell him, his animated heroine would be Dor-er the Explorah. “I’m from Beijing,” he says, in English. “I pronounce things correctly.”

Tom Scocca is the author of “Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.” He is the managing editor of Deadspin and a columnist for Slate, and he lives in New York.

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Chinese Language School of Connecticut Elects New Board

Press Release

For immediate release


FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Susan Serven, Chinese Language School of Connecticut
203/918.8085
susan.serven@chineselanguageschool.org
please visit our web site: www.chineselanguageschool.org

Visit us on Facebook: facebook.com/ChineseLanguageSchoolofConnecticut


Chinese Language School of Connecticut Announces New Board

-- Professionals from Connecticut and Westchester to help expand program’s success in bringing Chinese to students --



“CLSC is entering it’s 10th year with an extremely competent, very dedicated Board of Directors, and we’re pleased to be helping the organization continue to develop its programs and expand its reach, ” Pelham resident and CLSC Board co-Chair, Jeffay Chang and Harrison resident and CLSC Board co-Chair Darwei Kung.


RIVERSIDE, CT, June 15, 2011 – The Chinese Language School of Connecticut (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org), the non-profit Riverside, CT-based provider of Chinese language programs to students, schools and corporations, has elected their new Board of Directors for the upcoming year.

Newly elected co-Chairs are Harrison resident Darwei Kung and Pelham resident Jeffay Chang.

Jeffay Chang (Co-Chairman) Jeffay serves as the East Coast Trust Strategist for the Goldman Sachs Trust Companies. He was named Executive Vice President with responsibility over national marketing and sales in 2008. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs in May 2004, Jeffay was a Corporate Vice President in the Private Wealth Services Group of UBS Financial Services where he provided counseling and planning services for ultra high net worth clients in such areas as wealth transfer and philanthropic planning, stock option exercise planning, and hedging and monetizing concentrated equity positions.
Prior to UBS Financial Services, Jeffay was a Financial Planner in the Financial Planning Group of US Trust and before that was a Trust Officer in the Trust Settlement Department of US Trust. Jeffay obtained his B.A. from Brandeis University and J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. He is a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, New York State Bar Association, New York Bankers Association, Estate Planning Council of New York City and the Westchester Estate Planning Council.

Darwei Kung (Co-Chairman) Darwei is a Portfolio Manager for fixed income and commodity investment funds for Deutsche Asset Management. Prior to his current career in investment management, Darwei spent over 10 years in the telecommunications industry in a variety of professional and management roles in engineering, product management, strategic planning, and business development. Darwei received his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle, and received his MBA and Masters in Computational Finance degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. Darwei lives in Harrison, New York with his wife and son.

Cynthia Chang Scanlan (Director) - Cynthia Chang was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to New York City at the age of six, learning English after Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and received a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked in real estate and banking in New York City. Her husband, Brian Scanlan, founded a software company, and Cynthia joined the company soon after to manage administrative operations and facilities. The company had an initial public offering in 2000 at which time, Cynthia left to concentrate on family and community service in Greenwich, having moved there in 1997. She has been a board member at the YMCA of Greenwich since 2001, serving as the annual campaign chairman, Facilities Committee chair, and currently as Secretary of the Board. She also served as the First Selectman's representative on the Board of Trustees of the Greenwich Library, and is active with her alma mater, chairing the University of Pennsylvania's Secondary School committee in Greenwich. Cynthia lives in Greenwich with her husband and two children, Kevin, 18, who recently graduated Brunswick School and will be attending the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and Paula, 11, who attends Greenwich Country Day School.

Dr. Sue Chang, M.D. (Director) is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her B.S., followed by her M.D. degree at Michigan State University. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Nephrology at Yale University where she served as a research fellow in the genetics of hypertension. She is in private practice with Metabolism Associates of New Haven, CT.

Joab Tjiungwanara (Director) is a Risk Manager with General Electric and has worked extensively in the credit and market risk area at GE Corporate Treasury. He is a graduate of University of Bremen, Germany (Electrical Engineering) and University of Rochester (MBA in Finance). Joab is an overseas Chinese who was born in Indonesia, went to Germany after high school and came to the US for graduate school. He speaks fluent Mandarin, German, English and is conversant in Indonesian.

Susan Serven (Director) - Susan has been with CLSC since the school’s founding in May 2002. Susan is a graduate of Pace University (BBA, Marketing) and Fairfield University (MBA, Finance, International Business, 2011). She has held positions in global marketing at Lever Bros. Co., and Save the Children Federation, and as Special Events Director for the American Cancer Society. Susan founded the Chopstix program in 1998 so her daughters and other children could learn Chinese; all Chopstix proceeds were donated to help fund various non- profit groups working with Chinese orphanage programs. She continued running Chopstix until it joined CLSC in 2003. Susan and her husband Lawrence adopted their daughters Emily in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China in August 1996, and Becky in Gao Ming City, Guangdong Province, in October, 2000. They live in New Canaan, CT.

Thomas K. Myers, Jr., (Director) Tom is the Director of Sales and Marketing for FocusVision Worldwide based in Stamford, CT. A graduate of Bucknell University with a B.A. in Political Science, Tom spent his early career in account service with New York based advertising agencies. During this time he met his Taiwan born wife Katy. Since then Tom has held sales and marketing positions for several international companies. Tom’s interest in Chinese language increased quickly with the birth of his daughter, Emily. “I have always believed a second language to be a useful tool. But a second language with ties to one’s heritage is a gift that should not be missed. My goal is to help CLSC continue its efforts to make learning Chinese as enjoyable and satisfying as possible”. Tom lives in Redding, CT with his wife and daughter.

For information on the Chinese Language School of Connecticut’s weekday and weekend language programs, including their Before and After School programs, special workshops. lectures, events, private tutoring, online learning, and their corporate language program, please visit www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org. For interesting articles on Chinese language learning and Chinese culture, please visit http://GreenTeaPop.blogspot.com and on Facebook at facebook.com/ChineseLanguageSchoolofConnecticut


* * *

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S

You think your kids have it rough? Read the below to find out how Chinese students are preparing themselves for top U.S. universities.


Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/business/global/30college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

BEIJING — In December 2009, a rejection letter from Columbia University found its way to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. It was addressed to Lu Jingyu, a top student and member of her school’s student government. As she read the disheartening words, Ms. Lu immediately began to panic. Where had she gone wrong? How could she fix this?

For answers, she turned to ThinkTank Learning, a college admission consulting company from California that had recently opened an office in Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong.

“I wanted American professionals to look at my application and shed some new light on how I could make it better,” she said.

The price was steep: 100,000 renminbi, or $15,000. But it came with a 100 percent money-back guarantee — if Ms. Lu was rejected from the nine selective U.S. universities to which she applied, her family would get a full refund.

Ms. Lu brainstormed with a ThinkTank consultant on ways to redo her admissions essay, which had originally been about playing badminton. The new version she came up with focused on a cross-strait dialogue conference that Ms. Lu had organized with high schoolers in Taiwan.

Happily for Ms. Lu and for ThinkTank, the approach worked. She has just completed her first year at the University of Pennsylvania.

As a record number of students from outside the United States compete for a limited number of spots at the most selective American colleges, companies like ThinkTank are seeking to profit from their ambitions.

In the United States, students have long turned to independent college counselors, but in recent years, larger outfits have entered the market, offering full-service designer courses, extracurricular activities and focused application assistance. These services have spread to the fast-growing and lucrative market in China.

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

But students from China can find themselves ill-prepared for the admissions process at American colleges. The education system in mainland China focuses on assiduous preparation for the national university entrance exam, the gaokao, often at the expense of extracurricular activities.

About 400 overseas education agencies — including joint Chinese-foreign schools, language training centers and college application consulting agencies — are certified by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The ministry is affiliated with the two largest application consulting agencies in China, the China Center for International Education Exchange and Chivast Education International.

Some of these agencies offer to write their clients’ college essays from scratch, train them for alumni interviews and even modify student transcripts, consultants have said.

Capitalizing on the increasingly globalized education system, ThinkTank Learning has tapped into the market in the United States and China.

The founder of the company is Steven Ma, 32, a former Wall Street analyst who started the company as a business for preparing students for college entrance tests in 2002 before expanding into application consulting in 2006, starting with seven students. In 2010, that number had risen to 300, including 75 from China. The company said it made about $7 million last year, with 50 percent from admission consulting.

ThinkTank said it was able to distill the college admissions process into an exact science, which Mr. Ma compared with genetic engineering. “We make unnatural stuff happen,” he said.

Students, whose parents often pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, are molded by ThinkTank into well-rounded, socially conscious overachievers through a regimen often beginning as early as the year before entering high school. The company designs extracurricular activities for the students; guides them in essay writing; tutors them for the SAT, the U.S. college admission exam; and helps them with meet-and-greet sessions with alumni.

“There’s a system built by colleges designed to pick out future stars and we are here to crack that system,” Mr. Ma said.

LuShuang Xu provides an example of that approach. Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives.

ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University.

ThinkTank’s success with students in California’s Asian-American community, which accounts for 90 percent of the company’s American clients, has drawn interest from wealthy parents in China. Mr. Ma opened an office in Shenzhen in 2009 and another in Beijing last year.

The company entered China at a time when the college consulting industry on the mainland was booming, with numerous agencies promising to make Chinese student’s academic dreams come true, often through questionable practices.

One company, Best Education, has offices across China and charges clients an average of 500,000 renminbi for writing clients’ essays, training them for the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and providing career guidance.

“The students just supply their information and we do all the work,” said one representative, who requested anonymity to protect his job. Best Education offers a 50 percent refund if an applicant is rejected by the student’s chosen schools.

Chinese agencies may not want to alert colleges to their involvement, because applications that clearly appear to come from agencies are rejected by U.S. colleges, but the agencies promote their success in Mandarin. The Future Boshi Overseas Education Agency in Beijing gives a tally on its Web site of clients admitted by each university, including two to Harvard in 2010 and one in 2011.

Reached by telephone, an agency representative said the company did a lot more than just polish résumés. “If a client’s English is poor, our trained professionals can write the essay to make sure it looks perfect,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions from her employer.

The industry’s aggressive practices have been condemned by many American colleges, which say they disapprove of students’ families hiring consultants.

“Students have a responsibility to identify their own path toward future goals, rather than keying in how to get into a certain school,” said Barbara Knuth, the vice provost at Cornell University in New York State, who oversees undergraduate admissions.

Harvard said in an e-mail that it “reviews every application individually and has no interaction” with college admission consulting firms, “though we are certainly aware of their existence.” The University of Pennsylvania, which accepted Ms. Lu from Shenzhen, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the universities’ unease with these practices, application consulting has proved too profitable to ignore.

Mr. Ma said that out of 110 mainland students, only one has needed a refund, though two clients have been granted admission only if they pay full tuition.

Helping students from China clear the college entry hurdles has presented ThinkTank with a fresh set of challenges. Often they have poor English language skills and have done little with their free time beyond homework. Yet their parents often demand the Ivy League.

“We really have to hold their hand and do everything along with them,” Mr. Ma said, including deliberately leaving spelling mistakes on college essays so they look authentic, training them for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and building extracurricular activities from the ground up.

ThinkTank has founded Model United Nations groups, built a Web site for a Shanghai student’s photography project to get news media coverage and helped another obtain funding to build a hydroelectric generator. For ambitious Chinese parents, ThinkTank’s sales pitch is difficult to resist. Li Manhong, a homemaker from Beijing, has planned for years to send her 17-year-old son to an American college, going so far as to enroll him in a private high school in Portland, Oregon, for the past two years to improve his English and his résumé.

After learning about ThinkTank from a neighbor, Ms. Li persuaded her husband to sign a contract for 90,000 renminbi, which focuses on nine selective U.S. schools. ThinkTank will train her son for the SAT and help him pick internships and even college courses once he becomes a freshman. Ms. Li sees the cost as an investment in her son’s future.

“Whatever it takes to reach his maximum potential,” she said. “It’s worth it.”

NY Times: Going Global Stateside

Looking to expand your company's business prospects in Asia?

Contact CLSC for info on their Corporate Chinese programs at President@ChineseLanguageSchool.org

Going Global, Stateside
By TANYA MOHN
Published: March 8, 2010

Training to communicate across cultures has long been part of the preparation for executives moving overseas to work. But now, the training is increasingly for employees who may never leave the country, yet will work closely with companies and people around the world.

“Whether a multinational or a start-up business out of a garage, everybody is global these days,” said Dean Foster, president of Dean Foster Associates, an intercultural consultancy in New York. “In today’s economy, there is no room for failure. Companies have to understand the culture they are working in from Day 1.”

Mr. Foster recounted how an American businessman recently gave four antique clocks wrapped in white paper to a prospective client in China. What the man did not realize, he said, was that the words in Mandarin for clock and the number four are similar to the word for death, and white is a funeral color in many Asian countries. “The symbolism was so powerful,” Mr. Foster said, that the man lost the deal.

Cross-cultural training has steadily grown since its start about 35 years ago when large numbers of Americans returned from the Peace Corps with increased awareness of cultural differences and a new understanding of the importance of intercultural communication.

The military and foreign service have a tradition of preparing personnel and their families, but corporations “are really the newcomers,” said Anne P. Copeland, executive director of the Interchange Institute, a research and consulting organization in Brookline, Mass.

Jill Kristal, a psychologist in Larchmont, N.Y., said inadequate preparation “puts undue stress on the family.” She saw so much need when she was an expatriate in London in the 1990s that she began incorporating cross-cultural training into her practice. She also started a company, Transitional Learning Curves, which creates products — interactive books, calendars and card games — to help families communicate during their time abroad. “Very often stuff goes unspoken. That’s when problems begin,” Dr. Kristal said.

The adjustment when Americans move to other Western countries may be the most challenging because people do not anticipate differences and there is often less preparation, said Geoffrey W. Latta, executive vice president of ORC Worldwide, a human resources consulting firm.

Sometimes smaller companies, new to the global workplace, are unaware that training exists or how it can help. And when companies do offer the training, employees, particularly business travelers who may have worked or lived internationally before, often do not feel they need it, Mr. Latta said.

On a recent afternoon, a group of American employees of Hollister Inc., a medical device company, prepared for a business trip to Japan. In a five-hour session that included a traditional Japanese meal, a trainer from Dean Foster Associates briefed them on cultural dining etiquette, business customs, socializing and developing a “global mind-set” when working with colleagues abroad and after returning home.

Mary Lucas, who oversees global human resources for the health benefits company Aetna, said teams at service centers in Ireland and Dubai had similar training that helped identify major differences, like a sense of urgency, that were impeding cooperation between the two centers. Supervisors in Ireland would ask staff members in Dubai to pay claims, but unless directions were explicitly prioritized, claims were not necessarily paid right away, Ms. Lucas said. Training “immediately raised awareness, which helped the teams be much more successful,” she said.

Mr. Foster recently introduced a series of online tools for employees who might not have time for formal cross-cultural training. “Culture Guides-to-Go” offer strategies for running successful meetings, conducting negotiations or brushing up on dining protocol in more than 120 countries.

Andrew P. Walker, vice president of global mobility for Thomson Reuters, said online training was easier, quicker and cheaper than in-person training. Thomson Reuters uses CultureWizard, a Web-based tool created by the company RW 3 , for its employees in 93 countries for what he said was “a fraction of the cost” of formal training.

Mr. Walker said he also used it himself. “Without the course, I think I would have made a lot of mistakes,” said Mr. Walker, who moved back to the United States in July after five years in London. He said his low-key, light-hearted manner was fine on business trips, but when he was working there full time, “I wouldn’t be able to get away with it forever.” He said the program helped speed the transition.

Michael S. Schell, chief executive of RW 3, recounted how a mining and exploration company in Britain contacted his firm because the mining company was unsuccessful in winning business from an American company. “During the training, we pointed out that the proposal turned off the Americans,” Mr. Schell said, because it began with 10 pages detailing all the risks of the venture and how much failure would cost.

Americans tend to view failure as a learning experience that inspires creativity, Mr. Schell said, so the American company considered the proposal negative and unenthusiastic. The British tend to be risk-averse culturally, he said, and perceived the Americans as unrealistic. When the British company redid the proposal with a positive spin, they got the deal the next day, he said.

“Differences got overlooked because we speak English,” Mr. Schell said. “They look like us, wear the same jeans and use the same cellphones.

“The assumption is that we’re all the same, but we’re not all the same.”