<p>My 15-year-old son, who will be entering 10th grade this fall, has been begging for Chinese or Arabic language classes for over a year. Neither of these languages are offered by his school. He wants to take a language that is very different from English. I’ve hesitated to enroll him in a course outside of school because although he is extremely bright, he is also extremely disorganized. I’ve decided to go ahead and let him take a Chinese course.</p>
<p>He has been taking French at school for several years, and it comes very easily to him. This does not, of course, mean that Chinese will come easily to him. I’m wondering what the best way for him to study it. I know that the EPGY online HS offers Chinese, and it is possible to take a single course there without enrolling in the school. (It may be too expensive, though, because they seem to charge half-tuition for 1, 2, or 3 courses.) My son has done CTY courses in the summers, and I know that they offer Chinese as a distance-education course during the year. I’ve thought of having him do Rosetta Stone supplemented with weekly tutoring sessions. Or maybe I cold find an adult-education course or a community college course (could he take a CC course as a HS sophomore?)</p>
<p>Any suggestions? There are some Chinese Saturday schools around here, but they serve the children of Chinese families, or children who have been adopted from China, and they begin as toddlers, not as hulking 15-year-olds!</p>
<p>I think an adult-education or community learning class would be best. Those classes are low-pressure, low-commitment, inexpensive (at least in my area), and offer regular conversational practice and other beginners to talk to.</p>
<p>My D registered for conversational Chinese at our community college as a 10th grader, for about $250. She was also interested in learning either Chinese or Arabic, but only Chinese was offered. It was available as noncredit adult education, and she was allowed to register as long as she got her high school’s permission. </p>
<p>I thought conversational Chinese would be more interesting than the beginning Chinese class that was offered at a different community college campus (also noncredit). The class was very small and consisted primarily of businessmen who were going to be traveling to China in the near future. There were two housewives, who dropped out after the 2nd class, and one college student who was going to be going to China with his family on vacation. The class started with about 12 students, and ended with 3 (including my D). She really, really enjoyed it, and is looking forward to taking it again whenever it’s offered. They finished the class with a dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where the staff spent time with them after the restaurant closed talking about differences between their lives in China and their lives in our community.</p>
<p>Her high school guidance counselor told me that if we got a transcript, even though it was a noncredit class, the school would put it into her formal transcript as an ungraded language class, which was a surprise.</p>
<p>We have organized a Chinese class in our community. Few parents that wanted their kids to study Chinese - for different reasons - got together and approached a native speaker who is also an elementary teacher here.
The class is very informal, kids love it and the teacher is GREAT. She has really put her heart into it. There is 8 kids in this class, they meet once a week after school. Funny - we also finished the class last spring with a dinner at a Chinese restaurant where nobody was allowed to say aything in English :)</p>
<p>Thank you for the suggestions. My son does have a preference for a class with other students, as opposed to an online-only course. One question I have is what it is like taking the course through CTY or EPGY, online but with a virtual classroom.</p>
<p>He would love a one-month high school credit course in Chinese at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota in the summer. (Or Arabic - both are offered.) Check the calendar and see if any of the sessions offered fit into his calendar, given his schedule for next summer.</p>
<p>These are not labelled as being for gifted children but the kids who choose to spend four weeks of their summer doing language immersion, including homework? They are smart kids. The programs are a lot of fun, too.</p>
<p>My oldest has taken classes in both Chinese and Arabic – and he has tried online, self-study, Chinese Saturday school, community college class, regular college class, rosetta stone and independent study along with a native speaker. </p>
<p>He will say that the community college or college classes were by far the best way to learn the language. He says that Rosetta Stone is a waste of money. His second choice would be Chinese Saturday school (he took classes in two different cities and both offered adult classes – which he started when he was 13). Online classes would be his third choice – he says that they are better than self-study, but not much. He thinks that languages need an in-person class.</p>
<p>I suggest a private tutor first, just to get the spoken language down. It is not a language that you can learn online or easily from formal instruction. After that, all he would need is to master about 2000 characters/words to be able to read a newspaper as much of the vocabulary is built from compound words.</p>
<p>The thing about Chinese is there are a lot of over-qualified and under-employed potential tutors around, so it isn’t hard to find a relatively inexpensive Chinese tutor in many places.</p>
<p>Anyway, if I was your son, I’d want to take a 10 week intensive chinese course at a college over the summer. One of the classes where they cover a whole year’s material in 10 weeks (or 8 weeks or whatever).</p>
<p>However, these courses are very difficult (I took one) and the best thing to do would be to prepare for that course, not go into it knowing no Chinese. So what I would want to do is figure out where in the summer I was going to take the course, and get the textbook ahead of time. Then I would work with a tutor through the material in the book. Not everything, but a few specific areas.</p>
<p>I would want to learn how to write all the characters ahead of time. That’s the killer aspect of Chinese, but if you have time to prepare, you can master the characters in the course ahead of time. </p>
<p>So I would have the tutor just coach me in vocabulary. Learning to write the characters, and then how to pronounce the words correclty with tones. </p>
<p>Then I’d show up for summer school with a good background, excel in the class, and then make a plan for the future. That’s what I’d do.</p>
<p>What I wouldn’t do is just hire a tutor and expect the tutor to be able to teach me Chinese. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to find someone qualified enough to do that. But it would be easy to find someone to help you learn to write characters and pronounce vocabulary items. [I actually wrote this before seeing padad’s comment. padad and I disagree about this, though, apparently.)</p>
<p>I’m a Chinese student studying Chinese at my high school for a good reason (can’t read or write). The general rule is that, as long as you can speak Chinese considerably well, reading or writing is a bonus, so he definitely needs a very good tutor/teacher and helpful classmates. An online class is doing a disservice, and most likely he won’t be able to advance very far.</p>
<p>My teacher is also the president of our local Chinese school, and she uses the “Integrated Chinese” series of textbooks. They’re very useful, because they teach the vocabulary in a common sense usage sorta way - as if you’re going to live in China. They’re paced fairly well, although he should push for completing one lesson every week or half a week. “Level 1, Part 1” is considered first year Chinese, while “Level 2, Part 2” is second year Chinese. They look like this <a href=“http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SM9TWQATL._SS500_.jpg[/url]”>http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SM9TWQATL._SS500_.jpg</a> There’s also a workbook complement for studying. I suggest Traditional first, because that’s the original way of learning Chinese, but if it is too difficult, he can switch to Simplified characters.</p>
<p>Also, my Chinese HS class is also offered as a community college class, so yes, depending on the teacher, it can work out for you. I hope this helps!</p>
<p>If you’re considering a summer program, this recent press release might interest you:
The Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (MMLA), a summer language immersion program for pre-college students established by Middlebury College, will begin its inaugural session on Saturday, June 28. The four-week residential camps will offer Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish at campus locations: St. Michael’s College in Colchester; Menlo College in Atherton, Calif.; and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. The Hampshire College program is offered jointly by the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth.</p>
<p>Kenf, There is no disagreement here. I said to hire a tutor first but did not imply that it should end there. The difficulty of Chinese is the near complete absence of grammatical rules, and one needs to learn the syntax in order to express correctly. Take for example the simple command “bring the chair over” in English would be comprised of characters that mean “possess chair move cross come”. These same characters may have different meaning when used in a different context. To me, it is essential to master the spoken language (tones and syntax) down first, and a private tutor is the simplest way.</p>
<p>Right, we have a friendly disagreement about this. I think that the real barriers to learning chinese are characters and pronunciation, and that a private tutor would likely do well in helping to master these two aspects. I think that Chinese syntax is a lot like English syntax, and easy for English speakers to master. Characters, though, are a huge barrier to learning Chinese, and tones are another big problem.</p>
<p>My Chinese sucks, but the only way I was able to develop even the slightest approximation of correct Chinese tones was by one-on-one tutoring.</p>
<p>I agree the characters are hard to learn. But like the words, the ideograms are also composites of parts, mostly two parts with one of them serving as the root. Unlike English where how a word is written out is based on sound, the Chinese characters were derived initially by their association with objects and ideas. For example, the word for interval is a single character but made from the two ideograms that stand for “door” and “sun” independently. “Door” partitions space whereas the movement of the sun does it to time. Two characters are used for the word time. Here the character for interval is preceded by a character that is made up of the ideograms “sun” and “temple”. So the word time in Chinese originated from “intervals marked by bells in a temple according to movements of the sun”. The character for “interval” is also used as the second character in the word bedroom, with the first character is taken from “household”. (Note: Chinese don’t put much emphasis on the bedrooms. Other rooms use characters that are associated with more than just space partitions). Hopefully, you get the ideas that learning the characters are much easier once you master a set of basic ideograms and learn to associate them with objects and ideas.</p>
<p>I have always been disappointed by how Chinese characters are taught in formal courses, which mostly use rote memorization. (BTW, you can hire me as a tutor but I don’t come cheap and tutors like me are in very short supply).</p>
<p>Thank you all for the suggestions. This has been very helpful. I’ll keep the summer immersion programs in mind for next summer, after he’s had some instruction. If he’s still interested, and not completely daunted (as I would be!), then an immersion program might make sense. I will drop the idea of an online course; I can see that it wouldn’t work. I’ll check with the local Chinese Saturday schools for adult beginner classes, and also with adult education.</p>
<p>My D just completed a 6 week intensive (3 hours a day, 5 days a week) Chinese language program. It was COMPLETELY FREE, courtesy of our government’s StarTalk program. We are lucky to be near one of the funded centers, so I’d suggest checking to see if you are near one for Chinese or Arabic for next summer.</p>
<p>The cultural center offers classes for everyone year-round. My D would even be welcome in the classes they offer on the weekend, even though it seems that only first or second generation families take advantage of these classes.</p>
<p>Wow! What a great program! I looked at the centers for this summer for Chinese, and there is nothing close enough, but maybe it will work next year. </p>
<p>I don’t think there is any substitute for going to China and learning there. Picking up the pronunciation (one of the hardest aspects of the language, imo) is much, much easier there. Most of the top Chinese universities have summer programs that mostly attract college students, but are also open to younger people. Look at Beijing University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Jiaotong University, and Nanjing University.</p>
![http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SM9TWQATL._SS500_.jpg[/url]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SM9TWQATL._SS500_.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
