Expert: Natural language needed in Chinese learning

Zhong Yinghua, president of the International Society for Chinese Language Teaching, addressed the long-standing issue that plagues many Chinese language learners at a forum held last month in Beijing — the ability of students to develop to speak authentic Chinese.

The former president of Tianjin Normal University said at the World Chinese Language Conference that even if Chinese learners master a lot of vocabulary and grammar, they still end up producing textbook language when they speak.

Zhong, who has published two new works titled Expressing in Chinese Studies and The Case Study of International Chinese Education Degree, said speech needs to be "three-dimensional", and that situational discourse in life has its own set of rules in line with natural language formation.

To provide natural and situational language to Chinese learners, Zhong and his team spent more than two years shooting 1,100 instructional videos demonstrating Chinese language usage in the real world.

Learners can first immerse themselves in these stories without too much language processing, Zhong said, adding that high-frequency words and word patterns can then be ascertained.

"Meta-sentence pattern is not the whole of traditional grammar, it is grammar within grammar, and it is a high-frequency and strong-related expression scaffold," he said. "By mastering these limited 'core components', learners can effectively combine authentic sentences like building blocks, instead of facing endless grammatical rules."

Regarding the current global trend of Chinese education, Zhong said that 86 countries around the world have incorporated Chinese into their national education system, with the expansion of younger learning groups and the growing market demand for Chinese-speaking talent in countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative.

"The wide application of digital technology has broken the time and space constraints and promoted the equalization of Chinese learning opportunities," Zhong said, adding that international Chinese education is rising to meet the rapidly increasing demand for language learning around the world.

Liu Wenchao contributed to this story.