中文秘诀 | The Secret of Chinese
Finding order in chaos…
Chinese has become such an immensely popular language in recent years. In spite of its sudden rise in popularity, students still often tire when they get to intermediate or advanced levels – they tend to feel that they have huge gaps in their knowledge and that everything they’ve learnt is a seemingly random, series of disconnected rote facts, words and structures.
Having been teaching and tutoring Chinese across all proficiency levels and currently teaching at all undergraduate levels at one of Australia’s leading universities, I am all too aware that there’s a major information gap in Chinese educational resources and in the Chinese curriculum.
Firstly, there’s so much information out there that brings order to the seeming chaos and random placement of words in the Chinese sentence – but none of it trickles down into textbooks, into courses and into the minds of the teachers who are the gatekeepers of the students’ knowledge of Chinese.
Secondly, there’s so much about the language that simply isn’t known, and a lot more research is needed to find underlying regularities that I believe exist, but have yet to be discovered.So, through Zhongguo Mijue (‘the secret of Chinese’), I aim to bring you snapshots of some of this knowledge that I have come across, that I deciphered when I once too was a beginning student of the language, that I have intuitively known and now crystallised into something to share with the students and that I have researched as part of my PhD in Chinese linguistics. I aim to give you ways to see structure and regularity in a seemingly chaotic language.
So strap in, take a deep breath and prepare yourself, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride!
中文秘诀 | The Secret of Chinese 