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[Guest guest]

If we are talking about familiarity, then I have some ideas. If students

in the first semester had a class that taught them about stroke order and

character construction, using a dictionary and other basics, then chinese

could be incorporated into other classes in a reasonable fashion

throughout the curriculum. Knowing full well that few would be fluent

readers even upon graduation. Nigel Wiseman told me in a recent email

that he has a 10% rule, " As I said before, learning Chinese works on the

notion of 10% success rate.   Everyone required to learn Chinese will get

notions of Chinese that will help them in some way, but they will always

have to rely on English language material. " So setting aside the issue of

actual literacy, how can we achieve the goal of high familiarity. I was

thinking how I could use my materia medica class to further this goal. If

students had the prereq described above (which could be as little as 1

credit), then they could be required to learn the chinese characters for

all herbs studied and perhaps the characters of the herb categories they

are in.

 

This is not really a large amount of additional information and it is

hardly the same as asking them to actually read chinese at this stage.

However, the names of herbs and the categories will introduce many colors,

plant parts and other descriptive terms as well as treatment principles

like supplement, drain, warm, cold, etc. OM theory classes could require

knowing the characters for organ names, pulses, pattern names. Again, for

each piece of data being studied comprehensively in english, one is merely

adding just a bit of chinese. the burden should not be high and best of

all, it would be an easy way for professors to become more familiar with

this information as they teach it. I may not be able to memorize

characters, but if I know the stroke order I can draw them. It would not

be that difficult to write a character from my notes on the board at the

same time as I am writing ren shen and radix ginseng. I couldn't imagine

adding much more than this in herbs 1. Would this be a useful way to

accomplish the goal of familiarity and lay the foundation for the 10% who

will gain fluency?

 

I think this goal could be realized and would be quite advantageous.

After several years of this, students will have painlessly been exposed to

all patterns, herbs, formulas, disease names, body parts, many symptoms,

treatment principles, herb functions, etc. some may be able to read

product labels or get some information form very standard format books on

treatment. If you coupled this approach with perhaps a 100 additional

hours of classes designed specifically for medical chinese (perhaps as an

option to qi gong for those who are interested), then one could have very

high familiarity (not fluency) in one year, according to wiseman. He is

currently working on character workbooks to complement the texts he has

recently completed on chinese medical chinese. Such workbooks as these

would be ideal for implementing the idea I described above. Fluency and

the ability to do efficient translation would only come to those who were

extremely motivated outside the basic program.

 

 

Chinese Herbs

 

 

" Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre

minds " -- Albert Einstein