欢迎收听我们的同样讲播客,我是柯珍。今天呢,Gigi不在,但是我们有一个嘉宾。你好,你好,David。你好,你好。欢迎来到我们播客。谢谢。那David呢,他是一个英国人,他生活过在中国很多年。
是的,很长时间,十三年。
十三年,哇塞,挺好的。那David,你给我们介绍一下你是谁。
So my name is David. 之前我住在中国十三年,在昆明,西南的中国,在云南省,昆明市。
我一边教英语,一边学中文。
So a little English, a little Chinese.
And it's really nice to hear how you're mixing up China and England,
because you're sort of between the two places, aren't you?
Yeah, often I have students who say this or, oh, your English is so good.
No, no, no, your Chinese is so good.
Yeah.
Where do you feel more at home?
Now, I think it's a mix.
It's really hard, actually, because there's some parts that I'm used to being in China and there's some parts that I'm used to being in England.
Like, for example, I live in Kunming before, which is famous for having pleasant weather all year.
So actually, for weather wise, it's very comfortable to be in Kunming.
Yeah.
But for other parts, I think England is more comfortable.
Even food. For years, I've been in China and I love Chinese food.
But I just like the food here in England.
Is that because you've grown up here and you're used to like roast dinners and beans on toast and things like that?
Yes, exactly. These are all the comfort foods.
I still really enjoy like things in China, 拉面, 火锅, 饺子. I 特别喜欢吃饺子。
我也是, 我也是, 好吃。
Oh, brilliant. So you were initially teaching English in China, or you were actually teaching
English in China all the time, right? Yes, all the time I was there, I was teaching
English at different training schools. Okay, and that's 部席? 培训. 培训学校应该是。 培训机构。 Industry, yeah, the 培训 structure.
Yeah. How did you find that? How was that?
I really enjoy it, actually, because we would teach on the evenings and weekends.
So that often meant you have the mornings to yourself.
So I have a morning person, so I would enjoy having the mornings.
And then we would be teaching at the weekends.
So then on Monday and Tuesday, we would have time off.
And China is meant to have the largest population. Maybe it's behind India now. I'm not sure.
I think so. Yeah.
But I never really felt that because my weekend was Monday and Tuesday when everyone was at work. So actually, that was that was a nice structure to teach to.
Oh, that's actually that sounds brilliant because you won't have that.
Yeah, exactly.
So did you do a lot of traveling then while you lived there?
Or did you mainly stay in Kunming?
Quite a bit of traveling.
There's all these famous places.
Even in Yunnan, there's Dali, Lijiang, Xishuangbanna, Shangri-La.
These places are all quite fun.
And now it's very convenient to take the high-speed train.
You can go anywhere you want.
Okay.
So what was teaching English like then?
Were your students well behaved?
I think sometimes people talk about what's their superpower.
And for me, I think my superpower is interacting with children.
Like I think that I am a little bit better than I am at other things.
So that's the most enjoyable part of it for me, because I think it's easy to make kids laugh.
Like whatever you say, they're going to laugh.
And that's really nice.
you know, to have that environment, like positivity and laughter.
I can imagine what that would be like for our listeners.
David came into my, one of my classes and shared his experience of teaching English in China.
And some of the examples he was giving were really, really positive and really nice, right?
So you talked about your big nose.
That was something that students were obsessed with.
Yeah, to give them ideas, like examples like this in class, then, you know, they'll find it really fun to,
I think that probably among Chinese culture, it's not so usual to make jokes with a teacher in this way.
So for them, they just thought, oh, this is really fun.
We don't normally do this.
So what's the difference between the teaching styles then in China and in Britain?
I mean, you've experienced both.
Yes. I remember seeing a BBC documentary where they had the Chinese teachers come to the UK and teach in Chinese style and the English teachers would teach in English style.
And that really resonated with me because I could definitely see exactly how it happens the same in my life.
So what you see in Chinese classrooms is a lot of rote learning, typically like following the teacher and what they're saying.
And they have more controlled examples where students have to answer questions, but in a controlled context, not in an open context.
And for example, like creative writing or writing a letter or even things like in an ESL context.
of like writing a postcard that wouldn't happen necessarily in a Chinese learning environment
a lot of the time whereas in an English learning environment I feel like there are a lot more
creative options yeah so you brought that English learning environment to China in a way through
teaching your classes in a more relaxed way yeah sometimes I think it was more the having a more
relaxed and fun environment was like less common for them and that's that's more of what I brought
do you think which which type do you think works better are they equally i think that's the thing
when the way that i've described it makes it sound like the chinese system wouldn't work at all
but actually it totally does work yeah what you see is they put in large numbers of hours into
their studies and there's this whole 10 000 hours thing of deliberate practice and actually if you
put the time into anything then you do see results and often i think i saw that with the
the language learners that I taught because I taught in classrooms where the parents would
come to class with students and they'd make notes at the back and then they would review at home
every night with the students so they wouldn't just have an hour of class a week with me they'd
have all of that time reviewing with their parents and then when they come into class it was just so
easy for them oh wow and we know that that's the best way of learning right as to learning class
but the actual learning then happens outside of class.
The classroom can only just be sort of the first trigger.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So did the parents learn any English then?
Yes, actually, I would always try to like bring them into the class.
You know, you ask students like, oh, what's your mum's favourite colour?
And then, you know, we go and check with the mum, is it true or not?
And you'd be like, ah, you don't know your mum's favourite colour.
This is going to be a problem for you and things like this.
So in a friendly way, so that they would enjoy learning it.
Oh, that's excellent. Yeah. And the parents would have liked that, right?
They did like it, but a lot of them were very shy. They actually weren't very willing to speak much.
So often you kind of have to be gentle with them because it's different when you've got your kid there as well.
Oh, my child is speaking better English than I am. So they're not very willing to try.
Yeah. And then in front of the other parents.
Oh, yes, for sure. Yes. Yeah.
So that was teaching English in China.
And obviously there are lots of different teaching styles in Britain as well.
But for a Chinese student to come to Britain,
来到英国留学,然后在大学学习呢,我们的学法完全不一样。
是的,然后可能他们不习惯了。
所以第一个是可能是人口音。
每个人的口音都有点不一样
然后有一些人的口音可能很重
所以学生可能不习惯
因为在中国会强调老师有很正常的口音
可能是美式口音
他们不习惯人有
比如说在英国苏格兰的
苏格兰的口音完全不一样
不可能
这是很难懂的
So they need some time to adapt.
What can they do?
I think you have to listen.
You have to listen to language as much as you can.
It's all about the time you put in, I think.
If they've got a chance to listen to podcasts and other things like this, this is really good.
I think that's a great idea, yeah.
Active listening as well.
This is a difficult thing to do by yourself.
But when you have to answer questions, for example, on what you've heard, then that's great.
One important thing for Chinese students is for learning a language, you don't have to understand 100% of what's said to you.
If you're getting like 80 to 90%, actually, that's already really good.
And you can probably answer questions then from that.
Yeah.
Yeah. And it's very interesting because I've learned a lot of languages and you've obviously also learned Chinese and we'll talk about that in a bit.
But when you learn a language, there is this phase where you speak the language relatively well, but there's still so much that you don't understand.
But your brain sort of fills in the gaps and sort of, I don't know, it's like cotton wool, isn't it?
It's like there's this tiny little cloud around that word that you don't understand.
And you're sort of imagining what it could be.
And sometimes your imagination runs wild.
So you imagine something very, very different from what it really is.
I remember one.
Actually, I didn't know the meaning, but I didn't know the meaning.
But there was a bus crash and I was on the top level of the bus.
And I could hear someone speaking in Chinese.
面包车这样子,然后面包车那样子,然后面包车这样子.
And I didn't know what 面包车 meant.
I only knew that 面包 was bread.
Yeah.
So I thought, oh, is there bread all around,
like on the ground outside or what's going on?
But actually 面包车 is a kind of a van.
Yeah.
So there's things like this where you're like, huh?
And you might miss a beat like I did.
And sometimes it's funny.
You get good stories.
面包车就是好故事。
如果就是有一些这样的发生,
你可以跟其他人讲。
买面包的车。
Yeah.
可以就是开玩笑说的。
But yeah, sometimes it might be embarrassing or heavy,
but afterwards you then remember that forever.
Exactly.
And this is what we're stressing.
You know, 犯错是正常的,是需要的。
学习一门语言,你就必须犯错。
Yeah, 必须。
这就是学习的一个过程。
Yeah. And then you learn. But it's embarrassing. But at the same time, if you laugh about it, like you said, it's probably the best way, isn't it?
Oh, for sure. You've got more experience of this than me because you've got so many languages.
Yeah, but you sort of, you know, it's a process every time you think, oh, now I've learned a few languages. Now I'll be OK. But no.
then you learn a new language and you start again oh yeah but it's very normal when you
move to another country to uh to have that situation isn't it where you feel that you
don't understand everything but you can probably be okay not understanding everything yeah absolutely
that's very very normal so let's talk about you learning chinese because you learn chinese in
China. How did you learn it? Okay, so I started out with a language learning app just to get the
basic characters down like 100 or 200 characters and maybe 300 words. Usually a word is two
characters. After having like established those, I went on to Chinese readers. So I would just read
basic reader with my Chinese teacher continuously until they became more and more fluid. And there
are loads of great readers out there, especially now. They have lots of graded readers from very
basic up to very advanced. Did he use an app or did he use a book? He used a book at the time,
right? So yeah, after like getting those basic characters down and words down, I switched to
books. Recently, I'm reading Shi Wang Weishima, which is a famous series of questions and answers.
And it's really a lovely series, very straightforward to read.
And the level is for maybe for like middle school or high school students to read about physics and chemistry and biology and these kind of topics.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah. And especially if you're interested in the topic, right?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that also is really important for language learners.
I've had students before who their parents have watched like Downton Abbey and then they're like, I want my daughter to talk like this person.
OK, we'll try. And the technique that is encouraged for that is shadow reading.
I don't know. Shadowing. Yeah. Yeah. Shadowing. And I do the same for Chinese.
so I would read text at the same time as my teacher and yeah see how that helped and I think
it did help you're doing it actually with your teacher rather than the recording yeah rather
than recording with my teacher yes oh that's interesting so shadowing is usually you have a
text usually a relatively short text a recording of maybe a minute sometimes shorter sometimes longer
and you would listen to that a few times until you know it pretty much inside out you know it well
and then you speak alongside the recording and you try to totally replicate the recording.
Absolutely. That's the technique. And with a teacher, then instead of you're doing it with
a recording, you're doing it with a live person who's speaking at the same time. And so you might
be sharing a book that you both try and read from at the same time or something. But familiarity
with text is very important and i found this to be the best way for developing like good
pronunciation in chinese and for learning english it's the same obviously in english we don't have
tones but we have intonation so for learning chinese tones i think it's even more crucial
but for a chinese student coming to britain and learning to speak like in downton abbey if this
is what you want you can try to do shadowing with uh absolutely with Downton Abbey and learn it off
and although I think that nowadays I don't think it's terribly important I mean Chinese parents
definitely will emphasize having a some standard accent but actually in the UK people are not really
that concerned about it. Not anymore. It changed, didn't it? In the 1950s, 1960s, it was all
standard BBC and then you were posh. You were important. And if you spoke with a local accent,
you were from that area or working class. And it's changed in the media, on television,
on radio. It has changed a lot. Yeah. When I first moved to the UK about 20,
five years or so ago I moved to Manchester or Manchester as I would call it and lived there
for five years or so my partner was from Manchester so I spoke Mancunian every day and I learned a lot
of Mancunian expressions Mancunian is just a dialect from Manchester that's what you call
Manchester English but I learned a lot of northern expressions and when I then moved to Bristol
it was really strange because some of those expressions were northern they were special to
that area and not everybody would understand or people would say i had a strange accent because i
was speaking i was still speaking with a german accent but i had you know some of those mancunian
expressions in there and sometimes i still have them oh really yes yeah not not that often anymore
when you visit manchester do they come in very rarely but yeah it's a sometimes it's just i slip
back into them yeah i mean i'm from uh southwest and sometimes there's a natural tendency to
imitate people's accents yes and i sometimes do that as well i go more west country and i
yeah have a kind of farmer accent if you speak with a southwest accent even bristol accent
yeah the same but you know further i was in the countryside even worse so you are perceived to
be a farmer you're you know you're perceived to be maybe a bit stupid yeah they definitely carry
some stereotypes sometimes don't they and it's i guess it's still an issue here but less luckily
less and less so especially like you said with the regional news programs showing like people
with accents coming on there i mean that's really positive work yeah it's weird being in china for a
long time as well you're in a kind of mixed you're in an international group so actually your word
use changes things like eggplant for example rather than aubergine yeah because the american
speakers will definitely use all this vocabulary sets and you see it every day in the words that
you teach like zucchini as well courgette and things like this yeah so did you have like set
teaching books you were teaching from and they would use american words yeah absolutely and a
few years ago they all changed because in recent years the curriculums in china have all changed
so yeah and typically they go for american words yeah yeah i think that's very normal that's what
we learned in germany even though our textbook was set in england but the the english words
it was potentially just because of the cultural influences i was into british music so i learned
a lot of British words, but the English we all learned at school was American.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So for students from China who come to Britain, that may be a bit of a surprise, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And well, sometimes they have a kind of mix. I always think of this word,
the word water, and in an American pronunciation would use like a D, I guess.
Water.
Yeah. And, but obviously with British pronunciation, the A is like war, like even like the Chinese war, whereas Chinese students seem to mix it up.
So they wouldn't use this D and they wouldn't use this like, or like sound, but they would have like a mix of like T and American A, which I can't think how it sounds like now.
Oh, yes, I see.
Yeah, it's really difficult to know how to pronounce it,
which way is okay and which one isn't.
You hear lots of different versions.
And then in Britain, obviously, some people don't say the T or the D at all.
They just say wah.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Right?
It's true, yeah.
So for a Chinese student coming to Britain hearing wah.
Wah, what's that?
But then, I don't know, is it often do the Chinese students tend to, like,
grouped together? Is that what happens here? Many of my students from different parts of the world
hang out with students from that part of the world. And I was an exchange student myself in
Denmark and I found other people like me, not just Germans, there were others, but you know,
I had a quite an international friendship group in Denmark. And I think it's very normal. I see
that here as well some students integrate really well some students are very open and very keen to
find friends and integrate very quickly so find new friends very quickly other students are much
more shy and struggle with english and don't know how to meet new people so that very much depends
on individuals but it's very difficult when you don't speak the language very well you're in a
new environment everything is new everything is overwhelming and you have to find new friends
who speak that language really well and you don't understand what they're saying they speak quickly
you don't understand them okay in english we can say hang in there yeah hang in there definitely
yeah just and then eventually after a while you suddenly understand and you must have had that
experience with chinese i've had that experience with chinese not that long ago where i went from
watching television and understood individual sentences and individual words and all of a
sudden i understood everything and there would be one word i wouldn't know and i would look that up
in the dictionary. But, you know, going from sort of everything is very strange to everything is
really clear other than one or two words, I don't know. And that's great, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. I've definitely had that experience where it's like, ah,
suddenly it all makes sense.
Yeah. And it's like that. It's really, really sudden. Yeah. It takes a while of living in
the country. I remember when I moved to England, I had written my PhD thesis in English. I've
written my MA thesis in English. I've written some research papers in English and I moved to
Britain to work here. And I often watch television not understanding everything and not understanding,
you know, lots of words and being also quite surprised by people's accents. And, you know,
And so I watched a lot of television.
I don't really like watching television,
but I watched a lot of television, got a lot of input.
And then obviously because I was in the country,
also a lot of output, so I was speaking all the time.
And there's things about the culture as well.
就是文化
比如说中文经常语道人要说
你吃饭了吗
然后如果说你吃饭了吗
就是回答吃了
然后在英国
如果你跟其他人说你吃饭了吗
意思有点像
你要不要跟我一起吃饭
招手车车
但是英国人就是
你开始跟他们说
如果他们开始学中文
他们就是想知道
How are you?
怎么说的?
They always want to know,
how do you say how are you in Chinese?
可是中国人一般来说不会说how are you,
因为这个有时候就是问其他人健不健康,
只是要问how are you.
有别的意思,对。
就是和健康有关系,
it's not really a question you ask every day,
it's like you don't really know about people's mood,
it's usually have you eaten or not,
as a kind of general introduction.
So there's things like that
you probably see from TV when you've seen it.
好奇怪的是在英国,how are you? How's it going? 你必须说,一定会说,oh great, yeah, how are you? Yeah, all right, all right. 身体不好,你很累,但是...
对,最近有一个朋友他说I'm okay,然后我 uh-oh.
哈希克西比!
对,对。
And even 不仅是中国,
而且有其他国家也是,
进来英国的时候,
我有一个俄罗斯朋友,
还有南非朋友,
他就是跟我说,
他们来英国的时候,
问人,How are you?
我觉得,Oh, wow,
English people are so nice.
They ask you,
How are you? all the time.
They really consider it.
But actually it's not like that.
And they've realized later.
我们也意识到
其实这个问题只是
我刚到英国
是一样
对我也觉得
那么那么友好的那些人
我的邻居都跟我说
你最近怎么样
挺好的挺好的
但是呢
但是
两年三年
之后才发现
这就是他们的说法
对吗
对,就是有一点点。
对,就一点点。
在德国不会,就是问?
一定不会。
现在呢,是因为文化的那个接触,就是,对。
有可能也会说,vigils。
你可以说vigils,对。
对,是也一样,但是在英国,more extreme, I'd say, yeah.
yeah but if you ask in in in england if you ask in germany have you eaten that would be weird oh yes
it's lunchtime and you know and yeah it's you would not ask that would you would you ask it as
a question for asking someone to to eat together have you eaten yet should we go yeah maybe you
would you would do like that but just straight out have you eaten oh yeah china is like how are you
it's like whoa it implies you know that yeah yeah you don't eat look at you skin and bones i know
exactly you have no money shall i buy you a sandwich yeah so obviously it can be quite scary
to be in a new environment and speak a new language but it takes it takes time and you get
there and when you get there it's amazing isn't it when you have that feeling of i understand i can
take part in conversations. I can be part of this new community now. Yeah, absolutely. And people in
Britain are also very forgiving when it comes to accent and not speaking English perfectly and so
on, because there are lots of different accents, lots of different people, lots of different ways
in which people don't speak perfectly. So you never have to feel you have to speak a language
perfectly to move somewhere or live there. Absolutely. Brilliant. Well, it was really
nice to have you david oh it was really nice coming in thank you it was a shame we didn't
have gg but unfortunately i had to teach oh no he was doing his day job well maybe next time yeah
next time next time exactly well thank you very much thanks bye
Bye-bye.