Understanding my son's learning style

[anatess2]

So, my son is in sophomore year.  I thought I understood his learning method.  For example, I know he has a problem with abstraction and that he vacillates between visual learning and kinesthetic learning.  I've been using some methods geared towards his learning style when I tutor him at home to fill in any academic gaps from the classroom and we've been quite successful so far.

This time, I'm at a loss again.  It doesn't help that I am completely ignorant of the subject matter - Chinese as a Foreign Language.  I hired a tutor but still, there's not much progress.  Learning the vocabulary and speaking the language was great.  That was freshman year.  Sophomore year now involves more characters and very minimal pinyin.  And my son is failing.  Which is not good because he can't get any lower than a B to continue to qualify for the IB Program.  At this time, my son is so frustrated that he said he's not interested in IB anymore.  All because of this idiot class.

Anyway, I thought Chinese characters would be a breeze for a visual/kinesthetic learner.  Either I've been mistaken in how my child learns or there's some other reason he's just not getting it.

I just find it interesting that after 15 years you'd think I'd have 100% understanding of how my son's brain works.

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

So, my son is in sophomore year.  I thought I understood his learning method.  For example, I know he has a problem with abstraction and that he vacillates between visual learning and kinesthetic learning.  I've been using some methods geared towards his learning style when I tutor him at home to fill in any academic gaps from the classroom and we've been quite successful so far.

This time, I'm at a loss again.  It doesn't help that I am completely ignorant of the subject matter - Chinese as a Foreign Language.  I hired a tutor but still, there's not much progress.  Learning the vocabulary and speaking the language was great.  That was freshman year.  Sophomore year now involves more characters and very minimal pinyin.  And my son is failing.  Which is not good because he can't get any lower than a B to continue to qualify for the IB Program.  At this time, my son is so frustrated that he said he's not interested in IB anymore.  All because of this idiot class.

Anyway, I thought Chinese characters would be a breeze for a visual/kinesthetic learner.  Either I've been mistaken in how my child learns or there's some other reason he's just not getting it.

I just find it interesting that after 15 years you'd think I'd have 100% understanding of how my son's brain works.

If I understand you correctly, your son is transitioning from reading/writing in Pinyin to Mandarin characters, is that correct?  If so, I completely understand why he'd have such trouble.

Disclaimer: I don't speak, read, or write Mandarin.  I tried learning it.  I gave up.

Here's a suggestion: have him "paint" the words (not just characters) but WORD pictures.  That should get his kinesthetics going.  He could also carve them out of balsa or foam.  Cut them in paper?

[anatess2]

32 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

If I understand you correctly, your son is transitioning from reading/writing in Pinyin to Mandarin characters, is that correct?  If so, I completely understand why he'd have such trouble.

Disclaimer: I don't speak, read, or write Mandarin.  I tried learning it.  I gave up.

Here's a suggestion: have him "paint" the words (not just characters) but WORD pictures.  That should get his kinesthetics going.  He could also carve them out of balsa or foam.  Cut them in paper?

Ohh... I have a calligraphy set.  Maybe that will work!  Thanks, Carb!

 

P.S. I was surprised to find out Korean characters are a lot simpler!

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

Ohh... I have a calligraphy set.  Maybe that will work!  Thanks, Carb!

No prob.

Quote

P.S. I was surprised to find out Korean characters are a lot simpler!

As I had pointed out in another thread about Hangul, it is, to my knowledge, the only alphabet that is part pictographic and completely phonetic at the same time.  I wish all alphabets were like that.

Edited November 14, 2018 by Guest

[JohnsonJones]

I was under the impression Chinese was the hardest language (or one of the hardest) to learn on the entire Earth.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, JohnsonJones said:

I was under the impression Chinese was the hardest language (or one of the hardest) to learn on the entire Earth.

It is described as the hardest for English speakers to learn.  But honestly, I don't get that.  The alphabet is certainly the most complex on earth (AFIK).  But most people complain about the tonality of the language being a challenge.  I don't understand that.  But I have a gift for languages, so... We have tonal words in English.  We certainly understand the nature of tonality.  It's just not something we're highly conscious of.  But once we're aware of it, I don't see the problem.

Other languages have other challenges, grammatical structure being among the biggest challenges.  Just the Romantic languages tend to have grammatical structures that are difficult for English speakers.  Korean is particularly difficult because of the grammatical particles and honorifics -- both of which are completely foreign to the English speaker.  Literally, foreign.  Heh-heh.

The other side of the coin is that we tend to look at learning languages as a collection of rules of grammar, syntax, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc.   And you could make an argument for a lot of languages that end up being the "hardest".  I personally found Navajo to be really hard.  But that doesn't take into account how we naturally learn a language.  We learn language through osmosis, not memorization of rules.  These other tools may help us to organize things in our minds in such a manner as to facilitate that osmosis.  But it is, in the end, the osmosis that teaches the language.

[zil]

1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

But most people complain about the tonality of the language being a challenge.  I don't understand that.  But I have a gift for languages, so... We have tonal words in English.  We certainly understand the nature of tonality.  It's just not something we're highly conscious of.  But once we're aware of it, I don't see the problem.

The problem is that we use tonality for totally different purposes - e.g. emphasis or to form a question.  Chinese, as I understand it, uses tonality to actually change the word - instead of meaning "cat", the word now means "house" (not a real example, but realistic, or so I've been told).  This makes the tonality utterly unnatural for an English speaker who now has to repress the desire to use tonality for emphasis / forming a question and use it instead to actually form a word.

I took Russian in college, and one of the hardest things about that is that nouns change not just between singular and plural, but between singular, 2-4 plural, 5+ plural, and use in the sentence (subject, object, indirect object, etc.).  Also, words have gender (3 possible genders).  Thus, there are 3genders * 3pluralities * 6cases = 54 possible noun endings to memorize (not including abnormalities)!  (And Finnish has 15 cases! But apparently only 2 genders.  Not sure about plurality.  A friend who was in my Russian class served a mission in Finland and said Finnish is considerably harder.)

Interestingly, learning the rules is one of my favorite parts of language.  Every now and then I feel like taking a class to remind me how to diagram sentences - I really liked that.

Edited November 15, 2018 by zil

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, zil said:

The problem is that we use tonality for totally different purposes - e.g. emphasis or to form a question.  Chinese, as I understand it, uses tonality to actually change the word - instead of meaning "cat", the word now means "house" (not a real example, but realistic, or so I've been told).  This makes the tonality utterly unnatural for an English speaker who now has to repress the desire to use tonality for emphasis / forming a question and use it instead to actually form a word.

I usually point out the word "desert".  A soldier should never desert his post.  Moses and the Children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years. 

Simple tonality changes the meaning of a written word in English.  The tonality of a question in conjunction with the tonal word can also be exemplified here.

Did you drive in the desert?  Did Private Ryan desert?

Quote

I took Russian in college, and one of the hardest things about that is that nouns change not just between singular and plural, but between singular, 2-4 plural, 5+ plural, and use in the sentence (subject, object, indirect object, etc.).  Also, words have gender (3 possible genders).  Thus, there are 3genders * 3pluralities * 6cases = 54 possible noun endings to memorize (not including abnormalities)!  (And finish has 15 cases! But apparently only 2 genders.  Not sure about plurality.  A friend who was in my Russian class served a mission in Finland and said Finnish is considerably harder.)

Interestingly, learning the rules is one of my favorite parts of language.  Every now and then I feel like taking a class to remind me how to diagram sentences - I really liked that.

Yes, excellent example.

Edited November 15, 2018 by Guest

[zil]

22 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I usually point out the word "desert".  A soldier should never desert his post.  Moses and the Children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years. 

Simple tonality changes the meaning of a written word in English.  The tonality of a question in conjunction with the tonal word can also be exemplified here.

Did you drive in the desert?  Did Private Ryan desert?

Good point, but it seems like this is more the exception in English but common in Chinese.  Is that perception incorrect?  (I've never tried to learn Chinese, so I'm just going by what I've heard.)

[Guest]

Just now, zil said:

Good point, but it seems like this is more the exception in English but common in Chinese.  Is that perception incorrect?  (I've never tried to learn Chinese, so I'm just going by what I've heard.)

Totally agree that it is an exception.  But for such a common word to never even be questioned when used tells me that we recognize the linguistic differentiation -- in our own language.  But for some reason, people don't recognize it when it is couched in the learning of another language.

An example of another linguistic differentiation:  In Spanish there are two words for "to be".  One is about a "state of being" Estar.  In fact, this is the same root as the word "state".  The other is "ser" which refers to an equivalency.  Yo SOY Carborendum.  I would never say Yo ESTOY Carborendum. That wouldn't make sense.  To the English speaker trying to translate that back to "To be" it is difficult to make the differentiation simply because we use the same word in English.  Yet, we have homonyms

Trump runs for office.

You have a run in your stocking.

The car runs well.

People can clearly see that in other languages this same word in English may be different in other languages.   But with "to be", not as easy to see because we think of them as the same word.  But when we recognize it is really a homonym, then we more easily find the differences.

A lot of it is about how you frame it.

[zil]

14 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

An example of another linguistic differentiation:  In Spanish there are two words for "to be".  One is about a "state of being" Estar.  In fact, this is the same root as the word "state".  The other is "ser" which refers to an equivalency.  Yo SOY Carborendum.  I would never say Yo ESTOY Carborendum. That wouldn't make sense.  To the English speaker trying to translate that back to "To be" it is difficult to make the differentiation simply because we use the same word in English.  Yet, we have homonyms

Trump runs for office.

You have a run in your stocking.

The car runs well.

People can clearly see that in other languages this same word in English may be different in other languages.   But with "to be", not as easy to see because we think of them as the same word.  But when we recognize it is really a homonym, then we more easily find the differences.

This is very a very common difference between languages - where language A has 1 word with n uses, language B will have n words.  It's also possible for there to be no such word (either it doesn't exist at all, or a phrase is required in one language to explain a single word from another language).  For example, Russian doesn't have articles ("the", "a", "an").  They simply don't exist.  If specificity is needed, you would have to use "this", "that", or description.

And then there's usage.  While Russian has verbs for possession and ownership, they just aren't used.  In English, you could say "I own a car."  The equivalent in Russian would literally translate back to English as "At me car."  (Or, "At me there is a car." - the "there is a" is implied.)

Isn't language fun!?

[zil]

50 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

A soldier should never desert his post.  Moses and the Children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years. 

Hmm.  I'm going back to this.  I think we're mixing stress and intonation and they're not the same.  I'm going to have to ponder this.  While we might use rising intonation on the syllable which gets the stress, I don't think it's required in English.  I think we can speak the stressed syllable mono-tonally.  (Am at work, so I'm not going to attempt this aloud.)  In Russian, a sentence is monotone until the last syllable, which is spoken with falling intonation.  Clearly the words of a sentence can have multiple syllables and in each word, one of the syllables will be stressed, and yet the sentence is monotone.  Thus stress and intonation can be separated.

So, either Chinese is using stress to change the meaning of the word, or stress is the same thing as intonation (but I don't think so), or your example is erroneously conflates the two.  More pondering required, but not right now, I need to go work!

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, zil said:

This is very a very common difference between languages - where language A has 1 word with n uses, language B will have n words.  It's also possible for there to be no such word (either it doesn't exist at all, or a phrase is required in one language to explain a single word from another language).  For example, Russian doesn't have articles ("the", "a", "an").  They simply don't exist.  If specificity is needed, you would have to use "this", "that", or description.

And then there's usage.  While Russian has verbs for possession and ownership, they just aren't used.  In English, you could say "I own a car."  The equivalent in Russian would literally translate back to English as "At me car."  (Or, "At me there is a car." - the "there is a" is implied.)

Isn't language fun!?

Yep.  And these are perfect examples of why so many different languages have their own obstacles to learning as an outsider.  Some concepts simply don't translate well.

I once asked how you say,"How often do you go there?"  This supposedly bilingual person said,"You wouldn't say that."  So, what would you say instead to obtain the same information?  You just wouldn't.  Huh???

I found out later that she was just as lacking in Spanish vocabulary as English vocabulary.  That's why she could barely translate anything.  Another person told me how to ask,"How often." And it was some completely different words I'd never heard of.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, zil said:

Hmm.  I'm going back to this.  I think we're mixing stress and intonation and they're not the same.  I'm going to have to ponder this.  While we might use rising intonation on the syllable which gets the stress, I don't think it's required in English.  I think we can speak the stressed syllable mono-tonally.  (Am at work, so I'm not going to attempt this aloud.)  In Russian, a sentence is monotone until the last syllable, which is spoken with falling intonation.  Clearly the words of a sentence can have multiple syllables and in each word, one of the syllables will be stressed, and yet the sentence is monotone.  Thus stress and intonation can be separated.

So, either Chinese is using stress to change the meaning of the word, or stress is the same thing as intonation (but I don't think so), or your example is erroneously conflates the two.  More pondering required, but not right now, I need to go work!

I am conflating the two because that is how I understood the differences between words.  I'm not sure if its erroneous in the case of Chinese, because, as I stated before, I don't speak Chinese.  It was only how it's been explained to me by at least three speakers of Mandarin.

[anatess2]

44 minutes ago, zil said:

Isn't language fun!?

I'm totally lost in your conversation.  You keep saying English.

Which English?  American English?  If so, which one?  California?  Georgia?  Texas?  Rap?

British English?  If so, which one?  Queen's English?  Yorkshire?

Canadian?

Australian?

All these are not the same language to me.

[anatess2]

50 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I once asked how you say,"How often do you go there?"  This supposedly bilingual person said,"You wouldn't say that."  So, what would you say instead to obtain the same information?  You just wouldn't.  Huh???

I say it all the time... to properly speak another language, you also have to learn the culture.

So, in Bisaya, translating "I fell down" is not straightforward.  You first have to describe how you fell down then I can tell you the Bisaya translation for it.  And that stems from the Bisaya culture of straightforwardness (to the point that foreigners think we are rude and incapable of diplomacy).  It's too wasteful to have a generic "fell down" when the natural response to that would be, "How?  Why?".  So the manner in which you fell down is given in the first statement to already answer that question so we can go on to other questions, "When?  Did you get in trouble with your mother?"

Edited November 15, 2018 by anatess2

[Guest]

23 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

I say it all the time... to properly speak another language, you also have to learn the culture.

So, in Bisaya, translating "I fell down" is not straightforward.  You first have to describe how you fell down then I can tell you the Bisaya translation for it.  And that stems from the Bisaya culture of straightforwardness (to the point that foreigners think we are rude and incapable of diplomacy).  It's too wasteful to have a generic "fell down" when the natural response to that would be, "How?  Why?".  So the manner in which you fell down is given in the first statement to already answer that question so we can go on to other questions, "When?  Did you get in trouble with your mother?"

I think you're making the same mistake she was.  I recognized that a direct translation may not exist.  But there is a certain piece of information I was looking for.  Hence, I asked,"What would I say to obtain that same piece of information?"  She ignored the question and simply repeated that you simply wouldn't say it.

Another person told me what it was.  For instance, I could ask in English "how often".  As we look at that, it really is a funny twist of words.  The straight, logical, meaningful wording would be "at what frequency?"  But we don't say that.  It's too technical.  But I could have translated that directly into Spanish and it would have worked.

[anatess2]

20 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I think you're making the same mistake she was.  I recognized that a direct translation may not exist.  But there is a certain piece of information I was looking for.  Hence, I asked,"What would I say to obtain that same piece of information?"  She ignored the question and simply repeated that you simply wouldn't say it.

Another person told me what it was.  For instance, I could ask in English "how often".  As we look at that, it really is a funny twist of words.  The straight, logical, meaningful wording would be "at what frequency?"  But we don't say that.  It's too technical.  But I could have translated that directly into Spanish and it would have worked.

I stated that the translation of "fell down" depends on information not present in the English sentence, so it needs more information before it can be translated (not that there's no translation so you simply wouldn't say it).

"How often" doesn't strike me as a funny twist of words.  "Often" is a word indicating frequency.  "How" is a question requesting to clarify often.  But yes, literal translations from one language to the other doesn't work.  The culture gets in the way (e.g. we don't say it like that).  Like my dad saying, "Consume your food.".  Technically accurate but nobody says that.

Here's another one.  Brush (that thing with bristles or the verb indicating the use of that thing with bristles) has no Bisaya translation.  That's because, brush is an invention brought into the Visayas by the Americans.  So, we use the English word and not bothered with finding a Bisaya word for it.

Edited November 15, 2018 by anatess2

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

 Like my dad saying, "Consume your food.".

I'd say "Ingest your sustenance."

[zil]

56 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

So, in Bisaya, translating "I fell down" is not straightforward.  You first have to describe how you fell down then I can tell you the Bisaya translation for it. 

Ah, Russian has several verbs of motion.  In English, you could say, "I went outside.", "I went to NYC.", "I went for a drive.", "I went swimming.", etc.  But in Russian, there are many verbs for "went" - went by foot (one for with a destination in mind; one for wandering; and one that focuses more on the fact that you left, without specifying a destination), drove a car, flew a plane, etc.  And while English lets you use either "went" (probably more common) or the specific verb, in Russian, you use the specific verb.

[anatess2]

17 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I'd say "Ingest your sustenance."

Sorry dude, I'm sure you're going to not qualify for Sanderson's class too.  He doesn't like being one-upp'd. 

[Iggy]

@anatess2 you have such a wonderful openness and oneness with your children - I admire you for that. Have to be honest here, I had to google kinesthetic to find out it's meaning. I am a visual learner and person. When I worked in a hardware store, I was the one who could *see* their plumbing or electrical problem just by them describing it. Same goes with any one describing nearly anything to me. I form a picture in my mind and by doing that come to an understanding/knowledge of what is being said.

Lectures on the other hand are picture-less to me, unless the professor/teacher uses visual aids. [when at church during GD or even RS, if the teacher is "lecturing" my eyes roll back and I am out/down for the count!]

My MOST difficult time in school was my intro to High School. In my part of the US [Seattle WA], and in the years 1965-1966 in which my Freshman year was at the Jr High school  & Sophomore year [1966-1967] was at the High School. To me ALL but my Home Economics [cooking & sewing] teachers might as well have been speaking in a mashed upped language of Greek and Gibberish. Even their writing on the blackboard made no sense to me.

My parents sat me down and we had a wonderful heart to heart to heart talk/discussion. My Mom attended my classes to understand what I was trying to explain to her. Yep, she saw it and heard it. Even talking with my teachers after class - she had a very hard time understanding them. Poor pronunciation, enunciation, slurring words together. Their handwriting on the black boards was even worse. My Mom had taken shorthand in school as well as Latin and she couldn't make sense.

All three of us went to the Principle with this and he and his Vice Principle attended my classes and THEY couldn't understand them either. No, the teachers didn't get fired, but they were educated on speech and penmanship.

Have you had your son explain what is happening from his perspective? He learns from visual AND touching - does this include him drawing and creating to help others understand him?

 

 

 

[Iggy]

54 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I'd say "Ingest your sustenance."

Your children are IA??? Like Data from Star Trek, Next Generation???

[Guest]

36 minutes ago, Iggy said:

Your children are IA??? Like Data from Star Trek, Next Generation???

You mean AI?  Well, if you only looked at their vocabulary and their inability to forget useless facts, one might think so.