Growing Diversity Fuels Chinese School

The bi-lingual CAIS school in San Francisco uses many of the tools and teaching methods that are used at the Chinese Language School of Connecticut.

For more info on ways to engage your children in learning Chinese please visit: www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216613309652724.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook


By YUKARI IWATANI KANE

San Francisco's Chinese American International School has long had a reputation for strong academics, but it has grown more popular as a rising number of non-Chinese parents bank on Chinese-language skills for their children's future.

Lianne Milton for The Wall Street Journal
First-grader Martha Chessen gets help from instructor Xiu Geng in a math-in-Mandarin class at the Chinese American International School, where a growing number of students come from non-Chinese backgrounds.

When Christine Chessen decided to send her oldest child to CAIS eight years ago, her blond-haired daughter stood out among the sea of mostly Asian or half-Asian children. Her stock-trader husband opposed the idea, and friends thought she was crazy.

She went ahead and enrolled her daughter, because she wanted to expose her to a completely different culture. The move made sense to Ms. Chessen when she learned that there are more native speakers of Chinese in the world than those whose mother tongue is English or Spanish.

These days, her daughter isn't so unusual at CAIS, a private school that instructs in both Mandarin and English from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

"With the rise of Asia, people are finally jumping on the bandwagon," said Ms. Chessen, a stay-at-home mom who now has all three of her children—a first-, fourth- and sixth-grader—enrolled in the school. Her children, she said, are growing up singing Chinese songs, playing Chinese instruments and learning Chinese calligraphy, which she said she now considers all "part of our culture."

A recent survey by the school found that CAIS's non-Asian population has grown 42% over the past decade and currently makes up 27% of its 472 students. The remainder are children with partial or full Asian backgrounds, though most come from non-Chinese-speaking families.


Even though the school has increased its overall student population by 35% since 2000, it continues to be difficult to get into. More than 100 families vied for the 25 to 30 pre-K spots available next year. In the lower grades, instruction is half in Chinese, half in English; in middle school, which starts with grade six, 35% is in Chinese. The day school, in Hayes Valley, costs about $22,000 a year.

CAIS's growth is part of a nationwide trend as China's rise in the global economy prompts parents to seek Chinese-language instruction for their children—including President Barack Obama, whose daughter Sasha is learning Mandarin.

The San Francisco Unified Public School District said Chinese, including the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects, was the most requested language program by parents of kindergartners after Spanish for the next academic year. There are several public Chinese schools in San Francisco, and a new Chinese-language charter school is set to open in the Oakland area in the fall.

While there are no overall figures on how many students take Chinese-language classes nationwide, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages said it saw a threefold increase in the number of public-school students taking such classes to 60,000 in the 2007-08 academic year from three years earlier.

Programs like CAIS's carry little risk, said Marty Abbott, director of education at ACTFL, because even those students who spend their entire day in another language eventually catch up to and might even surpass their peers in English-language skills.

"The beauty of immersion programs, whether they're partial or full, is that students spend a considerable amount of time hearing the language and develop it and use it," Ms. Abbott said.

At CAIS one recent afternoon, a Chinese-speaking teacher led a kindergarten class in a game. The children sat in a circle around a collection of sea animal toys and tried to guess which were each other's favorites by asking questions in Mandarin.

On other floors, a fourth-grade class took an English spelling test while a group of seventh-graders practiced playing the Chinese yue qin guitar and the zither-like guzheng in a music class.

Tzara Geraghty, a tall, 13-year-old eighth-grader, plays the yangzin, a Chinese dulcimer, in a Chinese music ensemble, loves to eat tangyuan (dumplings made of rice flour with red bean, sesame and peanut butter fillings) and is looking forward to a coming school trip to Beijing.

Tzara, who has been at CAIS since pre-kindergarten, said she didn't realize she was Caucasian until she grew much taller than her classmates in fourth grade. "I never felt like I was different," said Tzara, who also plays volleyball, basketball and soccer.

For parents and teachers, it's a slightly different matter. Jeff Bissell, the head of the school, said the greater number of non-Asian families has prompted CAIS to adopt the more collaborative American educational approach along with the traditional top-down Chinese style.

Even then, there are challenges, because teachers are dealing with parents and students who are unfamiliar with Chinese teaching methods, such as the rote memorization required to learn the written script.

"Ten years ago, I could demonstrate how to write a character and make sure students got it, but now we have to break down the steps more," said Kevin Chang, the lower school's director.

Last year, the Parent Association took an extra step, holding a Mandarin 101 class for parents for the first time. The goal was not to teach Chinese but to familiarize parents with how the language works so they could understand what their children were learning.

Ms. Chessen said she values the school's lessons. "What my kids have learned about the Chinese culture they apply to the rest of the world," she said. "It makes us feel like we're part of a bigger community."

Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com

Chinese Language School of Connecticut Open House April 17

Nearly 25% of the world's population speaks Mandarin Chinese. Yet, very few American children study any foreign languages at all.

Please plan to join us on April 17. For more information, www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org


Chinese Language School of Connecticut Open House April 17

-- CLSC Welcomes Prospective New Families to View Classes and Meet Staff --


RIVERSIDE, March 25, 2010– The non-profit, fully accredited Chinese Language School of Connecticut (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org) will hold their annual Open House with guided tour and demo classes on Sunday, April 17, from 10:30-12:00 at their Riverside location: Eastern Middle School, 51 Hendrie Avenue, Riverside, CT. Registration for Fall 2010 programs begins May 1. This event is free, but spaces are limited and registration is required.

CLSC Principal Daisy Chen Laone, explained, “We are inviting any families or students who are interested in Chinese language or culture to visit us and find out more about our school and our programs. We offer weekday and weekend classes, Before and After School programs, cultural workshops, winter and spring break programs, summer classes, private tutoring, and AP Prep sessions.

“Anyone interested in attending our Open House should send an email to Principal@ChineseLanguageSchool.org to make an appointment,” she continued.

According to CLSC president, New Canaan resident Susan Serven, “CLSC offers our diverse student body a unique opportunity to explore Chinese language and culture through innovative, hands-on, age-appropriate programs. Students do not need to have prior experience in Chinese in order to attend. We offer interactive, engaging, customized programs with small classes, designed to teach Mandarin Chinese to non-Chinese-speaking students, using U.S. teaching methodologies.”

Serven continued, “CLSC faculty members are all native speaking teachers who are required to undergo a rigorous training process of a minimum of 75 hours per year, in order to make Chinese language learning fun for younger students, engaging and exciting for elementary school students, and fairly rigorous for older students wishing to take Chinese in high school and beyond. We have designed our curriculum to include benchmarks and measurable objectives which allow all students to become as proficient as possible within set timeframes, while engaging their interest in learning about a culture which is more than 4,000 years old.”

New Canaan resident and CLSC Parents Committee Chair, Janet Leung Fonss, noted, “Our daughter, Ava (age 6), loves learning Chinese at CLSC. She doesn't think of CLSC as going to ‘school’, but as a place to play while learning Chinese. Every Sunday is a new adventure - whether it is learning numbers and animals through playing board games or learning about the Silk Road by making paper tissue quilts in Culture class. The CLSC teachers always make learning Chinese fun through age appropriate FUN activities. We could not be happier with our experience so far at CLSC!!”

Old Greenwich resident Robyn Wasserman, parent of a child who is studying at CLSC, said, “"Our family's experience at the Chinese Language School of Connecticut has been wonderful. The teachers are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and highly educated. They have challenged our daughter to learn Mandarin and have made her experience quite enjoyable. We would definitely recommend the Chinese Language School of Connecticut."

Harrison resident, CLSC Board member Darwei Kung, explained, “[My wife] Terri and I have explored several alternatives for our son’s Chinese Education. After comparing different options, we decided CLSC’s communicative approach to language learning is best suited for our child to learn Chinese.

Pelham resident, CLSC Board member Jeffay Chang, noted, “We have found CLSC to be an engaging and relaxed atmosphere for our children to learn Chinese. With two children already enrolled in the school and a third that will be attending in the fall, we look forward to working with the school to further expand our children's cultural experience.”

Wilton resident and CLSC Advisory Committee member Zheng Wang said, “I was a Board member at CLSC long before my daughter was born, because I believe in the idea of having a community where children with Chinese heritage can get exposure to the language and culture and form a bond among themselves, and I admire the entrepreneurial and can-do spirit of the parent founders, board members and school leadership. I enrolled my daughter last fall when she turned two, and have been going to classes with her ever since. We both enjoy the experience tremendously. My daughter asks every weekend - are we going to Chinese school? I'm impressed with the level of energy and creativity our teacher puts into every session. The 'low-fi' crayon, paper, scissor, glue format really gets the kids engaged.”

Orange resident Sue Chang, noted, "CLSC has continued to build a progressive language program in tune with technology, and is now launching an online-based homework help session that will enhance reinforcement. It's very exciting for this to evolve for our students as our teachers are dedicated to enriching their learning experience."

Manhattan resident, Wendy Feldman Wainapel, explained, "We have sampled other Chinese language learning options [private tutoring, after school programs, small local Chinese schools/classes] but the curriculum and educational goals were not well formulated and there was no continuity of staff..

CLSC has provided exactly what we were looking for: a formalized program; a well trained, committed, stable staff; and, a well-defined, engaging curriculum where each teaching level builds upon the previous one. An extra perk is that there are culture classes which add another dimension to her educational experience.

Our daughter loves learning Chinese! She has made great progress in speaking, reading and writing which has been extremely gratifying to both her and us."

Event Agenda:

• 10:30-10:40—Principal’s opening remarks

• 10:40-10:55—Demo I: For students 5 and under

• 10:55-11:10—Demo II: For students 5 and up

• 11:10-11:20—Registration process and policy

• 11:20-11:30—VP Art & Culture, Katy Chen Myers introduces CLSC Art class

• 11:30-11:50—Tour of the school and culture class observation

• 11:50-12:00—Q&A


To register to attend CLSC’s Open House, please email Principal@ChineseLanguageSchool.org.

The non-profit, fully accredited Chinese Language School of Connecticut (CLSC) (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org) teaches Mandarin Chinese as a second language to children and adults in their weekday and weekend classes, Before and After School programs, cultural workshops, winter and spring break programs, summer classes, private tutoring and AP Prep sessions. CLSC is the only fully-accredited supplemental Chinese language program in the U.S. which uses U.S. teaching methods in order to engage children in learning Chinese.

For information on the Chinese Language School of Connecticut’s language and cultural programs for children and adults, their Before– and After- School programs, special workshops, private tutoring, AP Prep, or corporate language programs, please visit www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org or email them at info@ChineseLanguageSchool.org.

* * *

China On Their Minds Language

China on their minds
Language, culture classes become more common in schools

(Does your school system offer Chinese? If not, please contact the Chinese Language School of Connecticut, www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org for information on how to introduce Chinese language and culture to your children.)

As the world shrinks and China continues to grow as an economic powerhouse, more area public school districts are embracing its language and culture in an effort to better prepare their students.

Last fall, Medfield High School freshman Katrina Simon and her family hosted an exchange student from China, immersing the young woman in American experiences ranging from apple picking to shopping at the Apple computer store.

Now, Simon hopes Melody — the student’s adopted American name — can return the favor and be her guide in China.

“After talking to her and learning more about Chinese culture, I thought it was really interesting,’’ Simon said. “I really wanted to go and see it for myself with my own eyes.’’

Medfield’s school district has partnered with a school in Bengbu, a city in China’s Anhui province, for an extensive exchange program. Medfield hosted the school’s principal two years ago, followed by a visit to China by Superintendent Robert Maguire.

The next step was an exchange of teachers, with two from Bengbu visiting Medfield while a local teacher spent six weeks at the school in China.

Most recently, Medfield hosted two teachers and 10 students, including Melody. Next fall, Medfield will send students to Bengbu, and Simon has applied to be among them.

Melody’s family has already agreed to host Simon if she is selected. “She was thrilled that I wanted to come,’’ Simon said.

All of the trips are paid for with grants and private funds, Maguire said.

Medfield started teaching Mandarin in its high school three years ago, and expanded course offerings into the middle school this year. Educators say a growing number of schools are offering the language, with the local list including Belmont, Brookline, Concord-Carlisle Regional, Dover-Sherborn, Hopkinton, Lexington, Marlborough, Needham, Newton, and Weston.

“Most of them, 80 or 90 percent, they added it in the past five or 10 years,’’ said Wanli Hu, director of the China Program Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which offers conferences for Chinese language teachers.

Maguire said the Chinese language instruction is helping to prepare students for an increasingly global workplace.

“We’re in a different world,’’ he said. “Making students aware of the rest of the world, having them become cognizant of other languages and cultures, is going to be critical in the future.’’

Medfield is one of 60 districts across the country given Confucius Classroom status by the Asia Society, in recognition of exemplary Chinese language and culture programs. The honor has brought at least $30,000 in grants into the district, with the possibility of more to come.

Simon traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this year for an event focused on school exchange programs, where she met the president’s wife, Michelle Obama, and Medfield’s school district contributed to the official state gift given to the president of China, Hu Jintao, during his visit to the United States.

Simon said she was surprised to learn how much more Melody knew about American society than she knows about other cultures. Simon was unable to name any Chinese music artists, while Melody was “totally obsessed’’ with Michael Jackson.


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And when she asked Melody, a talented singer and dancer, to perform, Simon said, “We thought she would sing a traditional Chinese song, and she sang the ‘Titanic’ song.’’

Medfield social studies teacher Richard DeSorgher, who spent six weeks in Bengbu, said the differences between the two systems are stark. He said students in China spend long hours at school, and extra time being tutored on nights and weekends for college entrance exams. Class sizes of up to 60 students mean rote learning is common, he said.

DeSorgher said he asked a Chinese-born student living in Medfield for advice before the trip. “He said, ‘Make it fun. The more you can make it fun, the more they’ll want to continue to learn English.’ So I went over there armed with a ton of American candy.

“I think I was kind of an oddity there,’’ DeSorgher added. “I put them in groups, I had them standing and sitting. It was just very different, I think.’’

Medfield’s burgeoning relationship with the Chinese language started when Spanish teacher Maura Batts took a one-year sabbatical to learn a new language.

“I was deciding between Chinese and Italian,’’ Batts said. “My heart wanted Italian, but Chinese is so up and coming, and I thought it would kind of rock my language world a little bit, because it’s so different.’’

Students are signing up for Chinese instead of French or Spanish for a variety of reasons, she said.

“One boy in the seventh-grade class was really into kung fu, and he just really loves watching Jackie Chan movies,’’ Batts said. “Other parents have told their children, ‘This is a new opportunity, it would be great for you to try this.’ A lot of those parents understand the global perspective.’’

DeSorgher said that, in addition to being potentially useful to students later in life, the Chinese exchange exposes them to diversity, something he said the district otherwise lacks.

“With this exchange, it brings in a different culture, a different language, different thought patterns,’’ DeSorgher said.

Maguire, who adopted the Chinese name Ma Bao Bo when he visited Bengbu, said he hopes his district will eventually be able to offer a full slate of Chinese classes, from middle school through high school.

The superintendent said the Chinese program is helping Medfield students make important personal connections across continents.

He told a story of sixth-graders participating in a video conference with their Chinese pen pals. One of the Chinese students became especially excited seeing her American counterpart, Maguire said.

“The Chinese kid looks at the American girl and says, ‘You are so beautiful.’ And she looked back and said, ‘You’re beautiful too,’ ’’ Maguire said. “And they’re doing this in front of 100 other sixth-graders.

“That’s been a very powerful piece for me. They’re getting a fundamental understanding that, as people, they’re not much different from each other.’’

CNBC Says Chinese Year of the Rabbit is "Lucky"

Burrowing for Wealth in the Year of Rabbit
Published: Sunday, 6 Feb 2011 | 9:54 PM ET Text Size By: Geraldine Tan
CNBC Asia Pacific

Perhaps it's time to whip the bunny out of the hat. After the volatility that marked the year of the Golden Tiger in 2010, the incoming Metal Rabbit may be what's needed bring some calm back to the markets.

The Rabbit is said to be the luckiest sign in Chinese astrology; and according to CLSA's annual Feng Shui Index, the new Lunar Year will bring plenty of luck and material gains for investors.

The report combines the traditional Chinese practice of predicting fortunes through dates — or feng shui — and current market trends to see what 2011 holds for equities, commodities and property.

"The year of the Metal Rabbit provides great opportunity for investors to reap the rewards of astute investing," said the report. "But they should be forewarned: those who chase two rabbits will not catch one."

That means staying focused in whatever you invest in, as market movements will remain choppy this year, though less than what was experienced the year before, the report says.

And the best way to get richer this year, according to CLSA, is to accumulate indirect wealth, in the form of dividends paid from stocks.

In terms of asset classes, metals will do well this year, especially gold, said CLSA. The yellow metal could very well break above $2,000 per ounce; while silver and rare metals like gadolinium will also fare well.


Still, it's looking to be a volatile year for stocks. CLSA says the year will start slow, with rallies expected in the months of July, August, October and November. But investors should brace for market corrections in September and October.

Remember to mark 4 August on your calendar — according to the CLSA's Feng Shui Index, this will be a particularly profitable day.

So which animal signs are expected to profit this year? Those born under the Cow, Sheep, Dog and Pig signs.

But it will be a bumpy ride for Tigers and Roosters.

That said, CLSA maintains that the feng shui predictions are just, well, predictions. Investors will still need to do their homework and apply good judgement in investing.

NY Times: Forbidden City Treasure at the Met

From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04emperor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Art%20Review:%20A%20Man%20of%20Contradictions,%20With%20a%20Collection%20to%20Match&st=cse,
where you can see a slideshow of the treasures on exhibition.

February 3, 2011
A Man of Contradictions, With a Collection to MatchBy HOLLAND
COTTER

When China’s last emperor finally left the premises in 1924, the Forbidden
City was renamed the Palace Museum, and a labyrinthine complex of ceremonial
and domestic spaces, off limits to all but a few for centuries, was suddenly
open to the world.

Still, it kept some secrets. Few visitors, for example, knew of the
existence of a self-contained suite of small pavilions and gardens tucked
away at the Forbidden City’s northeast corner, echoing its shape.

They made up the Tranquillity and Longevity Palace, which, in the mid-18th
century, had been remodeled as a potential retirement home by the adamantly
unretiring and design-obsessed Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong.

He lavished attention on the palace — covered its walls with trompe l’oeil
paintings, fitted it out with false doors, see-through partitions, Buddhist
shrines and clocks — to make it a place that reflected his adventurous
tastes, a place where he might want to live. But in the end, he spent little
time there. And the palace, often referred to now as the Qianlong Garden,
had only a handful of imperial tenants after he died in 1799.

For most of the 20th century it stayed empty. The Chinese government had no
cash to spare for its upkeep, and conserving Qing culture was on no one’s
list of priorities. The building exteriors were maintained, but the
interiors, with their frozen-in-time ensembles of furniture, painting,
textiles and luxury objects, were left to fend for themselves.

Things have changed. China, now (and not for the first time) a global power
in need of an agreeable self-image to sell, has seen the wisdom of
preserving its visual heritage — all of it. And international scholars of
that heritage, once separated by distance, are now thoroughly networked. A
concrete result of this new one-worldism is a collaboration, now in
progress, between the Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund to restore
the Qianlong Garden to its former splendor.

Among the art historians acting as consultants to the project is Nancy
Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Mass. By 2003, the year the restoration got under way, Ms. Berliner had
already scored a Qing-related coup of her own by overseeing the transfer,
from China to the Salem museum, of an intact house dating to the dynasty.
And last fall she scored a second one with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise:
Treasures From the Forbidden City,” an exhibition she organized for the
Peabody Essex, and which now appears, in a different form, at the Metropolitan
Museum of
Art
.

The show is made up primarily of freshly conserved Qing objects — thrones,
cabinets, screens, religious sculptures, paintings — from the collection of
the Palace Museum, many specifically from Qianlong Garden buildings.
Qianlong himself probably commissioned some of the items. Certainly his
sensibility is written all over them.

Born in Beijing in 1711, Qianlong (pronounced Chee-en lohng) descended from
non-Chinese-speaking northerners who called themselves Manchu and ruled
China as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1911. Self-confident and adventurous,
he was a ceaseless mover and doer, constantly making inspection tours of a
country that during his reign was the largest and richest in the world.

Largeness, in fact, was his calling card. His cultural initiatives seem
conceived precisely to generate preposterous statistics. He commissioned and
participated in the creation of an anthology of 2,000 years of Chinese
literature: it appeared in the form of 36,000 handwritten volumes, which he
ordered to be copied several times.

A writer himself, he left more than 40,000 poems behind when he died. When
he was 50, he published a compendium of his calligraphy. He acquired art of
all kinds in record-breaking quantities. At one point he cataloged a
collection of some 10,000 of his paintings, then went on to collect more.

He was a knot of contradictions. He preserved thousand of books in his
anthology, but also destroyed thousands, some of them legendary classics,
that he considered politically subversive. As an art connoisseur, he had an
uncannily sensitive eye, yet he insisted on incising his name into precious
ceramics and writing it repeatedly on priceless paintings, effectively
defacing them.

Although he had many self-portraits made, no cohesive reading of his
personality can be drawn from them. In one painting he is an imposing
Confucian ancestor figure; in another, a humble young Daoist scholar. In a
third piece we find him floating at the center of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala
as the embodiment of the bodhisattva of wisdom, which he believed himself to
be.

As a highly self-aware performer, he exploited the public relations uses of
shape-shifting, offering alternate versions of himself to different
audiences, Manchu, Han Chinese and European.

He was wary of Europe politically, but entranced by vision-tickling aspects
of its art, like vanishing-point perspective and trompe l’oeil realism.
Christianity left him cold — why should he worship a supreme being when he
was one? — but he treasured Jesuit missionary artists like Giuseppe
Castiglione and kept them on his payroll.

Contradiction is also the animating dynamic of the art in the Met show
created to adorn the various buildings — reception halls, studios,
libraries, Buddhist shrines — in the Qianlong Garden.

In the circular portrait of the young Qianlong in scholar robes in the first
gallery, the pictorial space is pancake-flat, depthless. But in a
Western-style mural painting on silk nearby, life-size figures of woman and
child beckon us into a three-dimensional hall. (Several such murals cover
walls in the one Qianlong Garden building that was fully restored in 2008
and can be digitally toured in another Met gallery.)

Realism in Qing art, however, often veers into the surreal, as is evident in
a mesmerizingly bizarre furniture ensemble. Like some version of rustic
Victoriana, all three units — chair, couch bed, foot stool — appear to be
woven from roots and vines, though in this case the interwoven strands look
freakishly alive, writhing and twisting like nests of snakes. Only when you
inspect the furniture closely do you see that this organicism run riot is
strictly an illusion. The roots and vines have been painstakingly puzzled
together from many small pieces of wood, in a design meant to evoke a Daoist
immersion in nature.

This kind of interplay between opposites — the unnatural and the natural,
the grotesque and the spiritual — powers the show. Qianlong went for art and
design that pushed such contrasts to the limit and beyond, short-circuiting
received notions of good taste and bad taste to deliver little shocks of
pleasure.

You can feel such zaps radiating from one work in particular: a 16-panel
wood-and-lacquer screen carrying portraits of early disciples of the Buddha,
known as luohans. These figures are traditionally pretty gross: ragged and
repellent old men, with cartoon faces and hair sprouting from unlikely
places. They’re shown that way here too, but in a medium — white jade inlaid
on black lacquer — that is so ethereal, and worked with such fineness, as to
all but cancel out any impression of ugliness.

The screen holds another surprise too. When conservators moved it from its
original position against a wall, they found that the reverse sides of the
panels were painted with images of trees and flowers in tones of gold.
Stunning!

At the Peabody Essex, the screen was free-standing and could be viewed from
both sides. The Met, by contrast, has placed it in a long wall case, with
the luohans face out, and a few panels flipped to give a sampling of the
painting. And this is just one of the ways in which the Met edition of the
show differs from the Salem original.

Judging from photographs, you can see that the installation Ms. Berliner
devised at the Peabody Essex was spaciously laid out, with an effort made to
simulate the architectural interior in which the objects were once found. At
the Met, the same objects have been squeezed into the narrow Chinese
painting galleries, with almost everything confined to tall cases designed
to hold scrolls.

As if to compensate for a more straightened and prosaic approach, the New
York presentation — organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, curator of Chinese art,
with an ingenious design by Daniel Kershaw — has been enriched with examples
of Qing art from the Met’s collection, including a large Castiglione drawing
and a pair of panoramic scrolls depicting two of Qianlong’s imperial road
trips.

We also get something that in most museums we can only imagine: a real
garden, in the form of the Astor Court. It’s based on a Ming rather than a
Qing prototype, but the components — twisty river rocks set in greenery —
are right. And, because the Met’s display cases are as shallow as they are
tall, we can see everything in them close-up: the cloisonné medallions
adorning a doorway surround, the stitch work in a satin chair cover, the
chips of jade, coral and lapis lazuli embedded in a relief of a blossoming
plum tree that comes across as both garish and sumptuous.

Up close was the emperor’s perspective too: proprietary, absorbed,
evaluative. And — who knows? — it may not be available again, once these
objects return to Beijing and are placed, where they belong, in the
completely restored Qianlong Garden that is scheduled to reopen in 2019, to
what will surely be an avid new public.

*Forbidden-City Treasure*

*WHAT* “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City.”
*WHEN AND WHERE* Through May 1, Metropolitan Museum of
Art;
(212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org
.

恭贺新喜! Xin Nian Kuai Le! Happy Chinese New Year!

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20110131/LIFE/101310303/Year-of-the-Rabbit-dawns

There's more to the Chinese Zodiac than a hippety hop into year 4708 for people born under the sign of rabbit.

Rabbit babies are private, introverted and withdrawn. Or quietly charismatic, thoughtful and calm? It's hard to generalize a destiny using a centuries-old system based on natural elements, marked by fixed colors and assigned a dozen animals as they correspond to the hour, date, month and year of birth.

One thing is clear, said Elizabeth VanderVen, an assistant history professor at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., and a specialist on Chinese and eastern Asian culture.

"Rabbits are considered to be especially lucky financially," she said, noting some believe rabbits are the luckiest of all signs in the Chinese zodiac.

That, VanderVen said, could be especially true this year because the 2011 rabbit year corresponds with the element of metal, symbolizing great wealth.

This we can make easy sense of: Alex Rodriguez is a rabbit. Same for Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Drew Barrymore, Enrique Iglesias, George Orwell, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky.

In Vietnam, the rabbit's not a rabbit at all but a cat, which failed to make the top 12 in China, according to legend.

The rabbit comes fourth in the zodiac's 12-year cycle. Rabbit years include 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987 and 1999 on the more international Gregorian calendar, as opposed to the lunisolar Chinese calendar that pegs 2011 as 4708.

The major holiday in Asia shifts somewhat over January and February. This year it starts Feb. 3 and always lasts for 15 days.

The Chinese calendar not only follows the 12-year cycle but characteristics within the cycle are touched by the influences of fire, earth, metal, water and wood — each with a yin (female) form and a yang (male) form. To make leap year adjustments, the colors of white, black, green, red and brown are also assigned.

This rabbit year is white yin metal, likely making the precious metal of silver prominent, so watch for lots of silver souvenirs.

"The 2011 rabbit will obtain wealth if s/he works hard and diligently," VanderVen predicts.

Her personality list for rabbits: honest, sensitive, tactful, stylish, sophisticated, virtuous and modest, but they're also viewed as snobbish, standoffish, self-righteous, oversensitive and a little unpredictable.

Pardon My French [but] We're Teaching the Wrong Language

From:
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/01/26/pardon-my-french-we%E2%80%99re-teaching-the-wrong-languages/,

Pardon My French: We’re Teaching the Wrong Languages
Chinese school children during lessons at a classroom in China’s Anhui
province (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Of late, it has been considered glum news when a university such as the
State University of New York at Albany eliminates its French major. Yet
there were those who mourned the eclipse of the horse-and-buggy not so long
ago. I highly suspect that this news from SUNY and elsewhere, in conjunction
with reports of universities bulking up instruction in Arabic and Chinese,
is the beginning of a more sensible future in language teaching in the
United States.

In fact, I, despite having earned a B.A. in French myself, have a tripartite
vision for what the language teaching norm in America should be by 2050. It
includes many fewer me’s and many more students prepared for the linguistic
reality of our world as opposed to Woodrow Wilson’s. Ideally, we will also
see not only a revolution in the array of languages most taught, but in how
they are taught as well.

1. *Chinese* *and Arabic first, with Spanish as training wheels*. With China
poised to become the economic behemoth, and our most pressing diplomatic
problems being with people most of whom speak Arabic, an America where
Western European languages are considered central to an education has become
a puzzlement.

There was a time when French, for example, was Europe’s international
language, when for most Westerners, Europe was also effectively shorthand
for “the world.” This has changed: English, for better or for worse, is the
international language for Europe and far beyond. French is the vehicle for
an interesting culture, indeed—but in 2011, upon what grounds does this
culture exert a higher priority upon our acquaintance than any number of
others? To many, the cultures of China and the Middle East would seem to
have a certain primacy for modern Americans, and a Martian observer would be
baffled as to why there would be any question about the matter.

Our embrace of French as a mark of wider horizons is a conditioned reflex,
making about as much sense in our modern moment as throwing rice at a bride.
Why not barley? Or corn flakes? Or blowing on little plastic bassoons?
Whatever the reason, the chances are infinitesimal that we would choose rice
if starting over in ignorance of past tradition. The same goes for French,
German, and Italian. Europe is home to a mere couple of hundred of the
world’s 6,000 languages. Quite a few of the remaining 5,800 are important to
America’s present and future. Chinese and Arabic stand out among them.

This is all the more important because both are structured so much
differently than English—that is, they are “diverse” as we moderns term it.
There are those who question a mission in “identity” departments to
encourage students to study themselves rather than to broaden their horizons
to study the world. Such cavils would apply equally to the Western Europe
fetish in language teaching. French and German belong to the same language
family as English, Indo-European: they are cats to English’s dog.

Chinese is based on a collection of monosyllables that become a vocabulary
through pronouncing the syllables on different tones to indicate meanings:
in Cantonese, depending on the pitch *yau* can mean worry, paint, thin, oil,
again or friend. To acquire Chinese, along with its magnificently baroque
writing system, is to expand the mind into a greater awareness of the
immense variation possible in human expression. It is a different planet. In
comparison, French and German are like a vacation two towns over.

Arabic, meanwhile, has another fabulous writing system as well as a grammar
unlike the “amo, amas, amat” style we are familiar with, in which a skeleton
of three consonants can become a world of related words based on what you
squeeze around them: *katiib* “writer,” *kitaab* “book,” *kataba* “he
wrote,” *maktab* “school.” Again, this is education in its etymological
sense of “being led out of,” as opposed to the shorter trip offered by
European languages. And as for the argument that European languages are
vehicles of massive literatures, let’s face it—when were most of us going to
get around to reading “Madame Bovary” in the original?

Of course, European languages should be available for those interested—as
Arabic and Chinese have been “available” on the sidelines. However, only one
of them should be held front and center: Spanish. For one, its utility to us
is much more immediate than the rice at a wedding, useful to communication
with a massive contingent of Americans. And then, because Spanish, as a
Western European language, is so much easier to pick up for us than Chinese
and Arabic, it can serve as a “gateway” language for younger people. An idea
would be for schools to offer Spanish starting in elementary school as a
linguistic warm-up, with exposure to Chinese and Arabic beginning in middle
school.

2. *Reading** should be secondary to speaking. *One of the pitfalls in the
teaching of languages with non-Roman writing systems is that so much time is
spent from the outset on teaching the script that the students do not learn
how to actually say much. Yet he who offers a conversational repertoire
consisting largely of naming objects, exclaiming set expressions like *Good
morning*, and reciting sentiments such as *My uncle is a lawyer but my aunt
has a spoon* is at a distinct social disadvantage.

Yet too often this is most of what students of Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and
the like are capable of after even a whole school year of study, because so
much time is spent drilling the writing system. It’s also easy for students
to get weary or discouraged when this is most of the yield after so long.

Certainly one should be able to read in a language one has
learned—eventually. However, the idea that reading must happen at the outset
of one’s acquaintance with a new language is based on a mistaken impression,
understandable but pernicious, that writing “is” language on a certain
level. To be a literate modern person is to think of a language as its
written version, with speaking as a casual reflection of it. However, only
about 200 of the world’s 6,000 languages are written ones, and writing has
only existed for less than 6,000 years. Fundamentally, language is speech
and always has been. Speech is not a messy reflection of language; writing
is a studied and inaccurate refraction of speech.

We intuitively understand the primacy of speech when it comes to our native
language. We do not discourage an infant from speaking until he or she
masters writing. Note also a cognitive disjunction one encounters with
foreigners or children of immigrants who speak a language like Tamil
fluently and yet sheepishly mention that they can’t write it. In such cases
we do not think, “Then you don’t really know the language, do you?” as they
converse in it on the phone.

This means, however, that in my ideal language-teaching scenario, languages
like Chinese and Arabic should be taught first in Romanized transliteration.
The writing system should be introduced gradually, with no sense of it being
the primary object of study. This will mean, it should be clear, that the
student of Arabic will only very gradually be able to decode Arabic writing
– but will much more quickly be able to have modestly contentful
conversations, which will only heighten students’ motivation to learn the
writing system (it’s no more fun to read about uncles and spoons than to
talk about them, after all).

3. *Revise the conception of what idioms are*. To get as far beyond those
uncles and spoons as quickly as possible, in my 2050 utopia there will have
been a complete revision of what are considered idioms in language teaching.
Too often, we come away from years of studying a language unable to express
things as utterly everyday in a human experience as “It’s the wrong kind
anyway.” Instead, one is able to refer eagerly to cousins, bathing suits,
silverware and other things often rarely engaged at length in conversation.

Much of the reason is a sense that a language consists of 1) the basic
meanings of individual words and 2) grammar such as tables of endings, with
all else as idioms one is expected to pick up, if one ever does, upon living
in the language. However, linguists are increasingly aware that the brain
processes idioms like words. For example, “up a storm” in “He talked up a
storm” is retained as a “word” alongside words you could substitute in the
sentence like “copiously,” or other constructions like “a lot” or “at
length.” To the extent that expressing a concept is fundamental to being
human, then “idiom” or not, it is as vital to language teaching as the word
for “Tuesday.”

A certain few idioms have a classic status and are taught early, such as
French’s “*Je m’appelle,*” (“I call myself”) for “My name is,” a usage of
“call” that, from an English perspective, is non-basic. Yet what makes “My
name is” more important than “pretend,” which in French is “*faire semblant*”
(“make seeming-as”)? This is an “idiom” much more central to speaking a
language than venturing insights about your aunt or even counting past 30.

Namely, in my experience grappling with languages, I find six basic concepts
key to not rolling into the linguistic gutter at every second attempt to say
what you are actually thinking. Key ways of expressing these concepts should
be imparted long before most irregular verbs or how to say “socks.” They
amount to an acronym, DEPICT. To speak is to be able to: Disapprove beyond
just not liking (“the wrong hat,” “it doesn’t fit,” “it’s supposed to be…”);
Experience beyond mere liking (“looks,” “sounds,” “smells,” “tastes,” “feels
like,” “you can tell”); Precisify (“all the way up to,” “that much,” “right
into”); render the Inexact (“and things like that,” “about four of them,”
“not necessarily”); convey Counterexpectation (“even without a shirt,” “do
it anyway”); and Transform (“make it nicer,” “pretend”).

These things are generally no more difficult to acquire than basic words, as
witnessed by how quickly students take to German’s “*Wie geht’s”* and
French’s “*il y a”* for “there is.” In the language teaching of the future,
concepts in the DEPICT class must be taught as urgently as words and grammar
if students are to actually learn to use the languages they are taught.

In the future, then, language teaching should expand minds further than we
are accustomed to, unshackled from linguistic assumptions which can only be
termed prejudices: that the languages most like ours are central to
enlightenment, that there is no meaningful progress in learning a language
without being able to read it, and that beyond words and tables is an outer
ring of idioms rather than the very heart of speaking. Surely, this expanded
sense of language study would bring us closer to the heart of the liberal
arts mission than expounding in French about what color our niece’s forks
are.

*John McWhorter is the William Simon Fellow at Columbia University and a
contributing editor to the New Republic.*