With the growing trade between China and the United States, learning Chinese is of great value for people in many fields such as business, teaching, and travel; one reason MATC is now offering Mandarin Chinese classes.
The classes teach students to understand Chinese characters (words), write them and speak the most widely used dialect in China. Students learn to order food, introduce family members, make plans and have meetings.
The teacher, Jinny Gao Lourigan, is a native of the Heilongjiang Province, China.
She works to stimulate the students’ desire and enthusiasm to learn Chinese through a variety of language and cultural communicative inputs and activities. Activities include a field trip to Chinatown and Chinese food cooking lessons, where she teaches how to make traditional Chinese food including Chinese dumplings.
Of course with the delicious culinary experience comes the hands-on learning of the proper pronunciation of the cuisine.
“Many characters are composed of two parts, one part tells you the meaning and one part tells you the pronunciation. That is a very cool part of Chinese,” said Lourigan. “Chinese characters originated as pictographs that represented objects in the real world. We could say that shan: mountain looks like a mountain; the water: shui looks like water; and the fire: hou looks like fire.”
As she explained it, pointing to the characters on her chart, the cloud of mystery over the language quickly dissipated, revealing a language that was built simply from life through art and expression.
“It’s a really good class,” said Andrew Ruble, student in the Chinese 1A class who is a teacher at Madison Area Technical College and is also working on his doctorate. “She makes sure you understand what things are. I ask a lot of questions and she has a lot of answers, she is willing to slow down and take the pace with what people need. I am the kind of person who likes to break things down to the finest bit and then understand where it comes from; why we do what we do. She is very good with that.”
The Chinese language is commonly known as a very difficult language to learn but, according to feedback from the students, that assumption is not always the case when you have the right teacher to learn from.
“At first, picking up the characters is difficult but it eases up pretty quickly. She is a very good teacher and very helpful,” said Math major Kyle Goryl. “It’s very exciting to learn how to speak to 1.3 billion other people,” said Goryl.
Each class is two credits and college transferable. As more students sign up for the classes, even higher levels of Chinese will be offered.
The spring semester will offer another Chinese 1A and also Chinese 1B.
“You could even take 1A and 1B at once, because I try to align them together,” said Lourigan. “It wasn’t until the end of August that the school decided to offer this class so right now I only have a small class. But I hope that many more people will sign up after learning of the class.”