Chinese stories

The Nintendo DS has a bunch of language games called My … Coach aimed at people who want an introduction to a language. I think the DS would make a great language learning tool, especially for Chinese, as it has the touch pad you can use to write characters with and also has a built-in mic that you can use to practice speaking.

Even though My Chinese Coach has some good aspects about it, I wouldn’t recommend buying it to learn Chinese.  The first problem is the placement test it gives you in the beginning. It asks 50 questions in 3 minutes, and depending on how many you get right, it places you in the right lesson. The problem is I answered all 50 right (the hardest questions were recognizing the days and months), and was placed into lesson 11 (out of like 100) where it started to teach me the words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’. That makes the game useless for anyone past 1st year Chinese, because the later lessons have to be unlocked one at a time by properly completing exercises and games. I think this is a great idea to help people progress and learn in different ways, but really limits who can use the game.

The second problem is that both pinyin and some other romanization system are both used. This other system reads like “zuh, tsuh, suh, jir, chir, shir, rih, wu, yi” and so on. Are you kidding me? And this is called pinyin in the game, which will really confuse people who won’t be able to distinguish it from genuine pinyin later.

What the game really needs is character recognition software (not sure if it would be too big for the DS format) so that students can practice writing characters on a blank background rather than tracing over the character as the game has you do.  The game does let you record words and play them back in comparison with native speakers, which is a great tool, as are some of the useful flash card games. But in the end I think the game will just end up confusing people more than helping.

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I saw two shows on TV yesterday that made me think of China. The first was Ni Hao, Kai-lan, which airs on Nick Jr. At first it looked just like another kids show, but then I did a double-take when the little girl said “wo lai le”. The characters speak in Chinese about 1/4 of the time, and their pronunciation is pretty darn good, too! It’s not just really simple stuff either, and they have sentences like “Yeye ba yuyi dai guolai le” (Grandpa brought us raincoats!) Nevertheless, I think the show is really effective, and our son really seemed to like it. The show’s website says:

“Ni Hao, Kai-lan is the next generation of preschool television programming that introduces the psychology of biculturalism. If Dora and Diego popularized bilingualism, Kai-lan will weave together being bilingual and bicultural. Ni Hao, Kai-lanreinforces the idea that being bicultural and bilingual is being American. The show will familiarize the viewing audience with elements of Chinese and Chinese American cultures to promote multicultural understanding in the next generation and goes beyond featuring “culture” as only ethnic food and festivals. Instead, it celebrates growing up in an intergenerational family, having friends from diverse backgrounds, and “habits of the heart” that are Chinese American.”

I guess there still is some hope for American TV after all.

The second show is Exiled, which plays on MTV.  There are only 2 episodes so far, and it basically takes spoiled girls from Beverly Hills and sends them to an African tribe or remote Southeast Asian village for a week or so so they can have a taste of life in the third world. The reason this made me think of Chinese TV is because Hunan TV has been doing this same show for a while now, called 变形记. Instead of sending the well-off Chinese kids to another country, however, they just send them from their comfy home in the city to remote Chinese villages in Guizhou or to the desert and have them live with the locals for a while. Exiled is definitely the funnier show, as you can see the girls freaking out in situations that aren’t really that bad I don’t think, and the tone is still a lighthearted one, while the Hunan TV show is a little more sombre as you can see the stark contrast within China itself–it hits a little more close to home I think.

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