Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 19

Breakthrough to Fluency

Оглавление

I finally achieved genuine fluency during a weekend with a brilliant and eccentric teacher named Zhang Damu, who moonlighted as an instructor of Chinese composition at elementary schools throughout central Taiwan. He had refused my invitations to tour together down-island, suggesting instead that I take him on his teaching rounds in my car. He asked me to prepare a five-minute introduction of myself—who I was, where I came from, why I wanted to learn Chinese, and so forth—which he would then ask me to present in Chinese to the students of each of his classes.

The prospect—imagine a purple adult six-footer, making his maiden speech in Chinese to a classroom full of tittering Taiwanese sixth-graders!—was alarming. But I did it, and got better each time. In two days we visited six schools, three classes at each school. By the eighteenth session, I was teaching the entire hour, answering questions about America (“Does everyone wear six-guns?”) and asking the students about their own lives. Zhang, who knew exactly what he was doing, would disappear from each class after introducing me and make me fend for myself. After that weekend, I was confident that I could finish any sentence I started. The inhibitions were gone.

When the FSI course ended in early 1964, I qualified with the rest of my class at the 3+ level, which meant I was ready to work professionally in Mandarin Chinese. Our command of the language was still rudimentary, we found. It would take years on the job, as well as constant practice, for all the material that had been stuffed into us to settle.

CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir

Подняться наверх