“Crazy English” in China
As economic (and other forms of) power shifts from the US and western Europe to China, will English retain its status as a global language of commerce and politics? According to a recent New Yorker article, there are hundreds of millions of potential new English speakers and learners. This creates not only new potentialities of interaction between China and the West, but a vast new market for teaching English. Learning English has become almost a national obsession in China. The most successful English teaching system in China is known as “Crazy English.”
China has been in the grip of “English fever,†as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
K_eng wrote:
My initial reaction? “Wow, a person could really exploit these individuals’ desperation to learn English and make a lot of money!” It’s unclear if Li Yang is really doing that, but one thing is certain, his program is doing something unique in terms of teaching English. His methodology makes it apparent to me that cultural practices are an integral part of a language. In order to properly learn to speak English, the Chinese are finding that they not only have to comprehend proper pronunciation; they have to learn to grasp the behavioral nuances.
Having from experience tutored Vietnamese speaking (A language similar in grammar form and in cultural background to Chinese) children and adults in English, I can say that most of their problems stems from the lack of understanding of sentence construction. There are the strictly grammatical reasons. For example, in Vietnamese, there is minimal use of the article which feeds into their English sentence construction. But more importantly, and more difficult to change, is the cultural attitude, the more subdued, stoic or perhaps even submissive nature of the people, which is mirrored in their language. Attitudes are highly ingrained, and thus very hard to alter. This leads to a struggle for new English learners to comprehend various verb tenses and perhaps even the social situations that many ESL books use as examples. Sometimes when a family member inquires about a specific word he’s heard on the news, I have trouble translating it to Vietnamese with the full nuances intact. Often it simply can’t be done.
I’m uncertain if that is solely the case in Chinese, since I don’t speak the language. Does anyone who can speak know the differences in their verb forms and ours and how much of it is socially based?
Posted 29 Apr 2008 at 3:15 pm ¶
amelia wrote:
One of the articles I found in writing my paper commented on some cultural-linguistic peculiarities of Japanese. Apparently head nods and “aizuchis,” phrases roughly equivalent to uh-huh and yeah, are much more common in Japanese conversation than in English or Mandarin. Mandarin and English speaking students of Japanese are often confused by the frequency and seemingly random distribution of these affirmations. The authors seemed to think that the use of aizuchis reflected Japanese social ideology. (the article was “Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships” by Sotaro Kita and Sachiko Ide, published in the Journal of Pragmatics in July 2007).
Posted 29 Apr 2008 at 4:35 pm ¶
Stephanie wrote:
When I first read this, I instantly thought of the zany, often cult-like energy that goes with pyramid schemes in the U.S. I don’t know how useful the “Crazy English” instruction materials really are, but it strikes me that these giant rallies have nothing to do with learning English and everything to do with making people believe they can.
For a country that has China’s history with English, as the article mentions, perhaps it’s not surprising that they want to feel nationalistically motivated in order to learn English. When it’s cast in the light of “taking over” the language, it doesn’t seem so much like conforming to the system of the historical oppressor.
Posted 30 Apr 2008 at 5:52 pm ¶
Offenbarung Futhorc McGee wrote:
My first thought was that this guy kind of reminds me of Richard Simmons – the wild overenthusiasm, the emphasis on “craziness,” the group calisthenics-like behavior (I think it was probably the phrase “unleash your international muscles” that got my attention). And he talks about a business venture that would be like a “language gym.”
I suppose you could make a case that the phenomenon of Li Yang’s Crazy English is similar to the frenzy of diet or exercise crazes. It is tapping into a belief that doing something difficult but image-improving like learning English (or losing weight) can make you a better person. In both cases there is the danger that a harmful obsession can develop.
Here’s the best clip I could find of him online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XQFsXtFcJE&NR=1
Li Yang comes in about a minute into the video.
~ Luke
Posted 01 May 2008 at 12:10 am ¶
Judith wrote:
Hmm…after reading this article, and thinking about what could enable such a cult mentality and fervant following toward English learning, it really made me think about language in a couple of different senses. The first is language as economic capital. It seemed that most of the Chinese speakers they asked entered the program to converse with American businessmen or customers. Learning English became an initial investment for future profit and entrepreneurial success. Also, it seems the language takes on a characteristic of national property. Not only is English a cultural mode of communication in much of the Western world, but it is a national possession that can be “conquered.” In Li’s view, it’s similar to land or cities that can be taken over by a superior nation. Learning English, then, is not an expression of admiration or conformity to Western culture, but the dominance of a greater nation which can acquire the language of another. I think viewing language in these two ways, as nationalism and economic capital, can help explain the strong drive toward English learning in China.
Posted 01 May 2008 at 8:23 am ¶
Ye Olde Steve wrote:
Have to agree with Judith on this one. In China, learning English is only secondarily a cultural pursuit, as, on a whole, China is very in to blowing its own cultural horn (as expressed in me being told about 10,000 times about the 5000 years of continuous Chinese history while I was there). I think that learning English is much more a method of national conquest over the once dominant Westerners who should be pitied for not speaking the Chinese language. That being said, I have no plans to change my course in studying Chinese, as I believe it will be difficult to be looked upon as an equal with out it.
Also, in class there were times where there was talk of English becoming a lingua franca in China. This is very, very unlikely, has Mandarin has been quite effectively pushed upon everyone in China, making me fairly confident that English will continue to exist only as a sign of prestige and a way to interact with the west.
Finally, I think in class someone said that 1/3 of the Chinese population was illiterate. Since I’m adamantly against blurting out statistics without backing I decided to investigate a little bit, and it turns out that according to the CIA world factbook the literacy rate is in fact 90.9% as opposed to 66%, so there is certainly an attachment to written language in most parts of China.
Posted 01 May 2008 at 10:27 am ¶
sean wrote:
Y.O. Steve,
Appreciate your comments here – would have liked to hear more about your experiences (linguistic and other) in China. Re your observation:
Agreed that it seems unlikely: but not altogether impossible to the extent that English will be a kind of economic tool or piece of infrastructure – who’s to say what other uses will be made of it in China and elsewhere? If I were in England in 1150, I would have bet the farm that English was basically dead as a language of law, theology, commerce and literature. Two hundred years later, English (albeit radically different) is back on top, or at least vying for supremacy with French (and Latin).
Posted 02 May 2008 at 10:28 am ¶