who does chinese heritage here? (1 Viewer)

[4025808]

well answer the question
coz i need to know...
and once you ppl start the course, tell me what it's like and what you learn and such
coz family friends of mine want to do chinese but idk if heritage is good though...

 

[muzeikchun852]

i heard it's like learning chinese in china, although i dont really know how difficult is chinese in china. but my friend came from china in year 11 so he's quite reliable and he's doing the chinese background course.

 

[vivaaviva]

No, that is not true!! As a teacher, I can tell you Heritage is not as Chinese background speaker's course at all. Learning Chinese in China is for Background speakers. Heritage is more culturally based and it is a bi-lingual course, so english is used through heritage course too. Have a look at the syllabus on BOS's website.

 

[vinvien]

i think heritage is at the continuers level or slightly higher but definitely not as hard as background. im not too sure since i haven't taken a look at their syllabus.

heritage is for ABC students (or for those who did up to year 4 in China ) who has contact with the Chinese language and culture at home (Chinese as in cantonese, and other chinese dialects) I personally dont think tht cantonese, shanghainese and other dialects are similar to Mandarin, not everyone who speaks a dialect would know how to speak Mandarin so i don't know how those students are able to do heritage Chinese in terms of the reading and writing components. but then again, speaking and listening i guess heritage speakers have a better advantage than new beginners....

*shrugs*

 

[Bendent]

shanghainese (wu), cantonese and mandarin are way different. but the ming dynasty (han chinese dynasty) is centred around beijing and nanjing so im guessing languages back then were mandarin and wu?

 

[4025808]

shanghainese (wu), cantonese and mandarin are way different. but the ming dynasty (han chinese dynasty) is centred around beijing and nanjing so im guessing languages back then were mandarin and wu?

I was told that Cantonese was first, then people went up north, got a new dialect called mandarin, and in the 20th century with unity, Cantonese speaking people had to adopt Mandarin and yeah. Idk about Shanghainese but I assume that it's similar to the case of Mandarin...

 

[Bendent]

I was told that Cantonese was first, then people went up north, got a new dialect called mandarin, and in the 20th century with unity, Cantonese speaking people had to adopt Mandarin and yeah. Idk about Shanghainese but I assume that it's similar to the case of Mandarin...

i don't think cantonese is first at all. rememeber the three kingdoms (when china originated), the three regions that fought each other were north china(beijing/hebei - cao cao as leader), central china (sichuan - liu bei as leader) and wu (zhejiang/jiangsu/shanghai - sun quan as leader). there was no history regarding cantonese and it's alien to the majority of chinese people today, in china i mean.

 

[Drongoski]

I don't think cantonese was 1st either.

For southern dialects: a Cantonese speaker cannot understand Mandarin nor Hokkien nor Teochew nor Hainanese nor Shanghainese in that all these tongues are more or less mutually incomprehensible. I know the Teochews can understand Hokkien quite a bit (since the Teochews were descendants of Hokkiens (so I'm told). In Singapore and Malaysia, the Chinese who are 55 and above can often speak/understand a number of southern dialects as a result of coming together as a community.

I was, although quite illiterate in Chinese, able to discover that many borrowed Chinese words in Japanese and Korean are very close to Hokkien but not to Mandarin which made me hypothesise that Hokkien must be very close to the language spoken by the Tang people in Chang'an (present day Xian) since the Koreans and Japanese do not have much contact with the southern Chinese (Hokkien), For example we say "kum sia" for "thank you" in Hokkien (This is ganxie in Pinyin) which the Koreans say: "kumsa hamida" where kumsa = kum sia. In Hokkien, river is "kang" ("jiang" in Mandarin)as in Korean, "hak sing" for students in Hokkien (xuesheng in Mandarin) as in Korean. In Hokkien we say "kan tan" for easy (jiandan in Mandarin) same as the Japanese.

 

[summerM]

Isn't the course starting in 2012?

 

[4025808]

Isn't the course starting in 2012?

The first HSC exam for this subject is in 2012.

 

[asianese]

I did Heritage for Yr11.

They ASSUME that you can communicate in basic Mandarin and have a grasp of basic characters.

It is COMPLETELY different to continuers course (I do Japanese Cont./Ext) where they teach you Sentence structures and basic grammar from a grass-root level. They DO NOT do this in Heritage. It is assumed knowledge.

Heritage and Extension courses are very similar in that you study ISSUES relating to the modern world. For Heritage you can look it up...I've forgotten it all. There is not set text for study, unlike Extension. Furthermore in YR12 there is a Personal Interest Project that is used in the speaking-component (interview) in the HSC exam.

To OP: Do heritage WITH extra units. It is not suited for some people.

However I would like to point out that many people who SHOULD be doing background sneak into the course. This is inevitable with the Asian languages as there is such a grey area - and people lie, too.

Anyway try it out but have extra units to backup.

Ps:

I am a native Cantonese speaker and Mandarin was completely assumed of me. I think the whole 'dialect = main language' is a pile of bullshit and you cannot assume that. Fortunately my teacher (who has now retired, I have heard) spoke all main dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese) because he had lived in these places before (Hong Kong, Shanghai) etc. and understood my situation...but I could not compete with people who spoke Mandarin at home so I dropped it