Princeton Weekly Bulletin January 11, 1999
Why I teach Chinese
Senior professor explains Princeton anomaly
By Perry Link
Recently I was asked why I am such an anomaly. Peter
Patrikis, who directs a language-teaching consortium for the Ivy
League schools, noted that two of my colleagues and I at Princeton
are full professors and yet regularly teach beginning courses in
Asian languages. He asked me to write this essay explaining
why.
Professor Perry Link
(photo: Denise Applewhite)
In general, as everyone knows, we senior faculty enjoy research. It's fun to study the questions that we find interesting, and, having earned tenure and waited out seniority, we expect it is our turn to set our own agendas. What frustrates our expectations are meetings, committee assignments, manuscript reviews, recommendation letters, promotion cases, job searches, questions from the press, reception of visitors and myriad other professional duties, as uncountable as they seem to be unavoidable. Such tasks have a way of pilfering all our time while we're not looking.
Hence we crave sabbaticals. We also seek to minimize our
teaching "load." We prefer to teach small groups of graduate
students who share our interests, and in undergraduate teaching we
favor the more advanced courses.
Professor Chih-p'ing Chou
(photo: Denise Applewhite)
What's in it for me?
Mr. Patrikis therefore raises a reasonable question: Why does someone like me, who is known primarily as a scholar of literature and cultural history, teach beginning Chinese language (not every year, but most)? Why, at my age, do I descend into the chalk, the tapes, the piles of daily homework and the scheduling maze? What's in it for me?
I do resemble my colleagues in most of the normal ways. I certainly crave research sabbaticals as much as they, indeed perhaps a bit more. I teach beginning Chinese because I find the work itself rewarding. I enjoy the sense of palpable achievement at the end of a school year. When the bushy-tailed freshmen arrive in September they can't say a thing in Chinese; by May they can sort of get along in the language, and in most cases are headed in the direction of true mastery. I can point to them and say, "Look what I did!"
I find such palpable results to be much more elusive when I teach advanced courses in literature. Literary texts are highly complex, and students' widely various thoughts about a professor's explications of them are usually silent responses, and often unpredictable as well. To teach exactly what one intends to teach is about as possible as to herd cats. Ultimately, only the teacher quite understands what the teacher has meant to say. I am reminded of a "Snoopy" cartoon, published many years ago, in which Charlie Brown reports his teacher's view that "teaching is like bowling -- all you can do is roll the ball down the middle and hope for the best."
The presence of "right answers" in language teaching -- compared to their nonexistence in literary matters -- affords the language teacher the related satisfaction of feeling that, on the whole, the fruits of one's effort will be useful to the world. In both of my fields -- literary studies and China studies -- the ground has been well trampled in ideological struggles in which one side's right answers are the other side's wrong ones.
In beginning Chinese the right answers are the same for both left and right, both post-modernists and their debunkers, both critics and defenders of the Chinese government. You the language teacher can instruct everyone with fairly good confidence that -- on average -- the world will be better off when your 65 bright young Americans, whatever their beliefs, eventually are able to communicate accurately with Chinese people. The good in your results is thus "above" ideology in roughly the same sense in which, if you are a gardener, the good in having grown healthy pumpkins will on average survive questions of what kinds of people eat them.
Teaching literature also has its special attractions; I do not mean that teaching language is superior. What I like is to be able to do both. I enjoy the sense of spanning the full spectrum of my department's teaching needs, and feel, moreover, that my teaching in both language and literature is improved by teaching the other.
Some of my personal rewards have to do with the Chinese language in particular and with the specific traditions of Western Sinology. It is a truism in the study of any human culture that language is the gateway to understanding; but for languages as different as Chinese and English, this truth is especially important. I began study of Chinese as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy; Spinoza and Kant were my world at the time. I chose Chinese in the naive hope that studying a language very different from English would help me to perceive things in radically different conceptual categories and thus perhaps yield insight into philosophical problems.
One individuation of humanity
As I look back now, I find that my original naive hope may not have been utterly ridiculous. There are indeed some ways in which the Chinese and English languages conceive the rudiments of things quite differently.
For example, all nouns in Chinese are by nature collective, like "sugar" or "water" in English. To speak of particulars we say in English "a lump of sugar" or "a cup of water," but in Chinese a similar thing happens with all nouns. The Chinese word for "human being," by itself, is neither singular nor plural but something like "humanity." To say "a person," one says -- putting it very literally -- "one individuation of humanity" (in Chinese this takes three syllables, not 12).
In Chinese you can, if you want to, make it clear that your reference is either singular or plural, or either definite or indefinite; but you do not, as in English, have to. Taking full stock of this difference in outlook sheds light not only on "the Chinese mind" but on the unexamined assumptions of the Western one. For me, it is a real pleasure to teach these points to beginners; I feel that beginning Chinese will be for them, as it was for me, crucial undergirding for every-thing else they will ever study about China.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of getting started right is pronunciation. Chinese is a tonal language in which a syllable's meaning varies with voice pitch and contour. To train adult speakers of English to pronounce tones properly requires patience and persistence. Yet the payoff for success is tremendous. There are hundreds of funny stories about Americans saying, for example, "horse" (low tone) when they mean "mother" (high tone). But Chinese people can usually figure out from context whether you are talking about your horse or your mother. The real cost of toneless Chinese is that the speaker always seems irretrievably alien.
Unfortunately, the great majority of Chinese language programs in the Western world do not train students in tones. These programs introduce the concept of tone, but do not follow up in daily practice and make no objection as students form wrong habits. One reason I enjoy teaching beginning Chinese in particular is that I use the foundational year to insist that students form correct habits in tonal pronunciation. My inveterate badgering can be irritating to students. But when my students go to China and understand for themselves the value of their good tones, they come home and thank me.
Democratic department citizen
Teaching both language and literature also allows me the pleasure of viewing myself as a democratic department citizen. In East Asian language departments in the Western world there has been for decades an unpleasant problem of a two-tier structure in which professors teach "content", while lecturers, instructors and graduate student assistants teach language. Recently, even Princeton's department has slipped a bit toward this pattern.
I feel there are serious intellectual costs in divorcing language from "content." There are also social costs in fixing individual faculty permanently at one or the other status. Teachers in tier two (who, by the way, are usually female and overwhelmingly Asian) can easily come to feel treated as second class citizens. In my younger days, I might have wanted to issue a revolutionary pamphlet about this condition; by now I settle for using my own academic posture as a counterexample.
And in the end, I teach Chinese simply because I like the language. I enjoy its sounds, and I find its grammatical puzzles interesting. I recently finished teaching beginning Chinese for the 20th time in my career. By now I have learned not to view the course as "the same old road." Each time I teach it, I happen across quite a few new insights into Chinese grammar and concepts.
The new insights emerge in part from the continual effort to figure out how best to explain things to a beginner -- an exercise that turns out to be very useful in cutting to the core of things. I also get invaluable help from three or four colleagues with whom I serve on teaching teams. The marvelous complexity of Chinese (or any language) induces humility when one has taught it 19 times and still finds a dozen ways in which it could have been taught better.
A longer version of this essay originally appeared in the spring 1998 newsletter of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.