Tardigrades

They are eight-legged creatures that look like tiny bears, thus the name waterbear for tardigrades, the name adopted for our Language Studio. We teach learners how they may learn efficiently on their own, learning a language in the process. 

The group’s motto is “Let’s Play Language,” using a “hear-repeat” methodology we crafted at Shenyang Aerospace University’s repertoire of English pedagogy in 2011 to 2014. 

“Let’s Milk” is an accepted marketing phrase in China so “Let’s Play Language” is not “incorrect.” The pedagogy is heavy on usage, hearing, and repeating sounds. Familiarity is on listening (hear) and mimicking (repeat) rather than memorizing words on reading (sight) and writing (memory), an audio complement to the visual ken.

Academic pedagogy relies on transfer of “secondary” language like English to a primary philology like Putonghua, common across China on read-write Hanzi calligraphy, and has tongues diverge in pronunciation but focused on uniformity of meaning in writing 5,000-some characters in current usage.

English, on the other hand, is phonetic, consisting of less than 50 common sounds put together to approximate a word, which is written differently from the way it sounds (thanks to the Normans, we eat buffet, smell a bouquet of flowers, like to cook live chicken, and live like a king). Meaning is derived from use rather than dictionary meaning of words.  “All-you-can-eat” does a “buffet” make!

English and Chinese diverge at the phonetic nature of the first, and the write-read Hanzi of the second. There is no equivalent correspondence one-on-one between Chinese characters and English words, and transference of meaning in the old method of understanding English through Chinese is a tedious and ineffective method.

Getting familiar with Hanzi characters constitutes learning Putunghua; listening to spoken sound is getting familiar with English. Chinese focuses on place (clan names are determined by their place of origin) and roles played in stratified social scale. English, like its Gaelic cousins, follow time-differentiated verb tense (past, present, and future); Zhonghua verbs are similar in time, gender pronouns undifferentiated, unlike the “he, she, it” in English. 

The academic teaching of English in China is like that of learning Putunghua, memorizing meaning of each abstract term (cognitive) before getting familiar with use, which begins at the sense level of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, and progresses to feelings, thoughts and deeds, thus the difficulty in casual speaking but widespread in abstraction.

Zhongguoren on Saipan speak English in common discourse while those who learned it formally are reluctant to speak; those who use it in regular trade find it easy to converse, albeit syntactically awkward; book learners have text-capable dictionary-equipped-smartphones to guide correct use, shielded by a strategic defensive silence.

The contradiction in speaking is abetted by concern for face (mienzi).  It is easy to deal with reading and writing but not easy to have one’s speaking corrected without the “loss of face,” too public for comfort.  Many are tongue-tied, afraid to make a mistake. 

Multi-lingual Dong Bei has the advantage of history. It hosted Russians (Port Arthur to Harbin and Manzhulli), Koreans (Kogoryo, part of which is Yanbian, Korea-in-China), and Japanese (Manchukuo) within its borders. The common Hanzi in Sinosphere was a unifying consequence.

“R” in Russian is always a roar; the tongue’s thrill of the trill poses unfamiliarity (“r-l” sounds leans to the “l” like “flied lice” for “fried rice,” to use a stereotype) in spite of Russki’s presence in Dong Bei along the Amur River.

Mienzi fostered an inferiority complex developed in response to the carving out of spheres of influence by Japan in the last century.  Traditional Chinese is often downgraded as “countryside.”

Economic analysts of the off-the-cuff variety refer to Chinese products as “fake.” China’s Central Bank numbers are presumed unreliable, making the value of the renminbi inaccurate when converting to other currencies. China does what the U.S. model prescribes to manage externally induced recession: print money to bail out a sector! Ironically, when Beijing allowed the renminbi to “float,” the stock market convulsed and the world expected Beijing to “interfere.”

Authenticity in mienzi remains a challenge. The authenticity of the human spirit sans glitzy-ness of mienzi is our pedagogical mission. We incorporate into our pedagogy the practical wisdom to use Saipan’s shops, beaches, and people as our language immersion studio. We package programs so that learners from China speak rather than read. We train the ear before the eye. English “to be one’s own” means one leaves the mienzi outside the door.

Tardigrades are resilient creatures known to survive outer space and the depth of the Marianas Trench, arid deserts, and wet rainforests.  We aim to teach humans to be likewise.