Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese?
Barbarians at the GateShow Notes
Warning: GEEKY CONTENT
Hosting solo in this week’s episode, David takes a geeky deep dive into the digital revolution in Chinese language learning in conversation with Chinese language pedagogy expert Matt Coss. The Sisyphean task of learning to write hundreds of Chinese characters has long been the bête noire of Chinese language students. The explosion of digital devices and apps for processing Chinese characters is giving rise to a radical rethinking (no pun intended) of the handwriting and dictation components of Chinese language curricula.
Matt Coss is on the front line of a new generation of Chinese language educators who advocate a drastic reduction, if not outright elimination, of the handwriting requirement for Chinese language learners. Topics covered include the disturbing drop in the number of American students studying Mandarin, the implications of AI tools such as ChatGPT for Chinese language learning, and the escalating problem of native Chinese speakers forgetting how to write common characters (“character amnesia” tíbǐ wàngzì提笔忘字).
More from Barbarians at the Gate
What can a grief memoir about a beloved wife tell us about love, life, and society in 18th-century China?
David and Jeremiah are back together again in Beijing. Recording from Palace Moser, the two get weirdly nostalgic and compare notes on what has changed in the 20+ years (Jeremiah) and 40+ years (David) since they first moved to China’s capital. They ask whether students coming to China today are getting the same experience as previous generations of study-abroad students or if it’s the curse of the sinologist that every newcomer since Marco Polo has had to listen to some old-timer expat talk about how it was so much better before.
Two older gentlemen with expanding waistlines, staggering daddy issues, and a shared love of firing military brass meet in DC this week. And right on cue, the pundits leap forward to pontificate on the most important issues facing Sino-US relations today: What is Xi Jinping’s title in English? Many bytes and keystrokes are spent in social media wars between those who insist that Xi Jinping be called General Secretary and those who feel that such pedantry is ideologically loaded panda poop.
Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. Fifty years later, Jeremiah and David compare notes on a mostly quiet anniversary. Jeremiah reports that there were enough tributes to beat the over/under, but David argues that the Party would still prefer to keep things as ritualistic as possible. Mao is still dead. We will all bow. And moving on.
China’s last emperor (Puyi), his empress (Wanrong), and concubine (Wenxiu) spent two years sequestered in the Forbidden City before their expulsion in 1924. Around them were holdover dowagers, scheming eunuchs, corrupt officials, and two foreign teachers of English. Many people know Puyi’s tutor, Reginald Johnston, either from Johnston’s memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City, or from Peter O’Toole’s portrayal in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Puyi biopic, The Last Emperor. But it is Wanrong’s tutor, the young American Isabel Ingram, and her letters that are at the heart of our guest’s new book about these pivotal two years in Chinese history.