“Jaw Laoshy” and Teaching Chinese

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Notes

1 John K Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the Chinese Coast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 14.

2 If you don’t believe it, try reading the four different sentences below: 1. She likes you. (She told me so) 2. She likes you. (Not me) 3. She likes you. (Nobody else does, but hey) 4. She likes you?! (You’ve got to be kidding). Don’t be fooled by people who will tell you that English only has stress accents. Stress accents in English are tonal. And look at the unstressed words. I can write the tones (or “intonation”) of all four sentences in Chinese tone marks (diacriticals). The first sentence, for instance, could be written Shě līkes yŏu.

3 Her father was the main architect of this system.

4 She did not use the “direct method.” It was too late to learn like a child. It was too slow. Her father had said in his famous textbook, Mandarin Primer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 74: “The ‘direct method’ should be suspended the moment it interferes with the direct understanding of a focal point.”

5 Much of this story is told in a fascinating new book, Shuhua Fan, The Harvard-Yenching Institute and Cultural Engineering: Remaking the Humanities in China, 1924–1951 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

6 See, for instance, Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光, “‘Zheng shangwu shi shuohua, shui ye meiyou jia’—Yijiuqiqi nian Yang Liansheng huiguo ji” 正晌午時說話, 誰也没有家—一九七七年楊聯陞回國記 (‘At high noon no one has a home’—A record of Yang Liansheng’s return to China in 1977), Dushu 讀書 (Reading) 2014·3: 161–71.

7 See my article, “Open Recipes Openly Arrived At: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945): The Translation of Chinese Food,” Journal of Oriental Studies 45·1–2 (December 2012): 67–87.