So I shelled out $75 for this dictionary and it arrived at my local bookstore today. AND THERE’S NO PINYIN IN THE ENGLISH SIDE!

It’s useless, or at least 50% useless! (the Mandarin-English side grudgingly gives pinyin for main words, but not for many compounds and examples)

So your kid says “Mama, how do you say ‘lion’ in Mandarin?” as she does her homework. You tell her to  go to this dictionary and look up lion in the English-Mandarin side and it tells her lion is 狮子.

Well, that was helpful. You child knows how to write it but not say it. So the two of you have to laboriously count the stroke order and look it up in the Mandarin-English side, only to have her say “Oh, it’s shirzi! I knew that, I just forgot.”

I simply don’t get the thinking behind doing an entire dictionary with the presumption that the only people using it are people who are already fluent readers of Chinese. Do they not think that other people might be learning Chinese? It’s maddening.

So don’t buy this dictionary unless you happen to have a fluent reader of Mandarin in your household. It’s just not worth the price given that it doesn’t provide pronunciation.

And if there’s something I’m missing about why one would want a dictionary that didn’t provide pronunciation, please enlighten me. (Sorry, I’m pretty peeved right now – why is it so hard to find a good English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary for English speakers?)

–Beth

From the Wall Street Journal

Five years, 60 editors and translators, 300,000 words, 370,000 translations: It all adds up to the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary ever put together, due to be published Sept. 9 by Oxford University Press.

For Julie Kleeman, one of the dictionary’s two chief editors, putting together the dictionary has been a long but ultimately satisfying slog. Having read every entry in the huge tome at least once, she’s confident it’s a departure from other such dictionaries on the market, both within China and elsewhere.

“It presents both English and Chinese in a much more modern, colloquial, conversational way,” she says, in part a result of using native speakers of both languages in the compilation process, the first time this has happened on an English-Chinese dictionary of this size.

Please click here to read more.

Fremont starts first Mandarin immersion kindergarten program

Lawerence Tran, 5, whispers something to his dad Thang Tran as he gets dropped off on the first day…

FREMONT — Children in teacher Orchid Wang’s kindergarten class didn’t say “bye-bye” to their parents, who crowded just outside the classroom door Wednesday morning, snapping photos of their little ones sitting at school desks for the first time.

With a little prodding from the teacher, they said “zia jian” as they waved goodbye to their moms and dads before Wang closed the door.

They were among thousands of students throughout the Fremont and New Haven school districts who started the school year Wednesday.

Moments after Wang’s class began, out came Pikachu, Hello Kitty, a dragon, and several other props — all geared toward teaching the basics of Mandarin Chinese.

If everything goes according to plan, these 28 students will be proficient in the world’s most spoken language by middle school.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of the 28 students in Fremont’s first Mandarin-immersion kindergarten class have at least one parent of Chinese descent, although English is the only language spoken in most of their homes.

Please click here to read more.

British Columbia has one of the largest Chinese-speaking populations in Canada. But Mandarin immersion programs are thin on the ground there, with one up and running and two starting next year. They’re all oversubscribed.  This is from the national paper, The Globe and Mail

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Two excellent online dictionaries that save the day in many a Mandarin immersion home during homework hour.

• MDBG
• YellowBridge

by Nishi Gupta

KTVB.COM

Posted on August 27, 2010 at 6:04 PM

Updated yesterday at 6:28 PM

MERIDIAN — A school in Meridian may be the first of its kind in the state.

The Gateway School of Language and Culture will offer an intense Mandarin Chinese program to some of its students this year.

It’s predicted the language will be dominant in the business world of the future, and teachers hope to equip Idaho kids with the edge they need to succeed.

When you step into the Gateway School you suddenly feel like you’re in the Far East.  Its classrooms and halls are covered wall-to-wall in an Asian theme.

And teachers are prepared to step it up a notch.

“They’re going to call me Li Lao Shi, which means Mr. Lee,” Are they going to learn that on the first day? Yes, yes,” said teacher Peng Li.

Peng Li is one of three teachers who will put students on the path to global enlightenment and education.

Studies show kids who learn a foreign language early have a better of chance of being fluent, and at Gateway, about 40 kids in kindergarten and first grade will be exposed to it in classrooms like Li’s.

They’ll be taught for half a day in English, the rest in Mandarin Chinese.

Teachers will follow the general Meridian curriculum, but the immersion program will add an additional Asian flare — and for good reason.

“People look at China to be the next strongest country to, shoulder to shoulder to America,”said Li.

“What’s the world going to look like 15-20 years from now when these kids are entering college, leaving college, entering the workforce?  And it was really hard when you look at that crystal ball and try to look at what the world is going to look like to think that China isn’t going to be a major player and what an opportunity we can give to students right here in Meridian and Boise,” said Gateway Principal Craig Ayala-Marshall.

Ayala-Marshall says the district plans to add Mandarin Chinese courses in junior high and high schools as the kindergartners and first graders age.

The belief is the students who stick to the program will be ready to compete on an international stage.

“After 12-13 years in our school system, they should come out fully bilingual,”  said Ayala-Marshall.

And fully fluent in Chinese culture.

Teacher Peng Li will make sure of that.

“I have this mission to just share the language, share the culture and just bring as much as I can,” said Li.

The Mandarin Chinese immersion program is only offered to kindergartners and first grade right now.

All of the other students in the school will learn the language for about an hour a week, and that’s something the school has done for a couple years.

If you want to sign your child up for this program, it is not too late.  Call the school soon though, as classes start on Monday.

See the TV segment here.

Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.

“I can remember the shape, but I can?t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It?s a bit of a problem.”

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

There is even a Chinese word for it: “tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.

A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.

As a result, Li says that she has become almost dependent on her phone.

“When I can?t remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down,” she says.

Zeng Ming, 22, from the southern Guangdong province, says: “I think it’s a young people’s problem, or at least a computer users’ problem.”

One notoriously forgettable character, Zeng says, is used in the word Tao Tie — a legendary Chinese monster that was so greedy it ate itself.

Still used as a byword for gluttony, the Tao Tie is one of many ancient Chinese concepts embedded in the language.

“It?s like you?re forgetting your culture,” Zeng says.

Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.

The user enters each word using pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters that match. So users must recognise the character, but they don’t need to be able to write it.

In Japan, where three writing systems are combined into one, mobiles and computers use the simpler hiragana and katakana scripts for inputting — meaning users may forget the kanji, a third strand of Japanese writing similar to Chinese characters.

“We rely too much on the conversion function on our phones and PCs,” said Ayumi Kawamoto, 23, shopping in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district.

“I’ve mostly forgotten characters I learned in middle and high school and I tend to forget the characters I only occasionally use.”

Tokyo student Maya Kato, 22, said: “I hardly hand-write anymore, which is the main reason why I have forgotten so many characters.

“It is frustrating because I always almost remember the character, and lose it at the last minute. I forget if there was an extra line, or where the dot is supposed to go.”

Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability.

“There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic — we have to memorise, we have to rote learn,” she says.

Read more here.