They're teaching Arabic and Chinese. The big question is how many of the kids speak enough English to take instruction, or is it Spanish to Arabic / Chinese?
SCHENECTADY City students get familiar with Chinese BY MICHAEL GOOT Gazette Reporter Reach Gazette reporter Michael Goot at 395-3105 or mgoot@dailygazette.net.
“Wo jiào Dante Allen,” said sixth-grade student Dante Allen in front of his class at Mont Pleasant Middle School. “Hen hao,” said teacher Michael O’Shea. The two just had a simple conversation in which Allen said “My name is Dante Allen” and O’Shea replied “good job.” Sixth-grade students at Mont Pleasant Middle School are taking Chinese classes three days a week as part of the district’s foreign language offerings. In a recent 37-minute period, the class sang “Happy Birthday,” in Chinese and other simple phrases like “hello” and “thank you.” O’Shea said the students are doing well. Last year, these students had a 10-week introductory Chinese course, but this year they are having it for the full year. Part of the reason why the language is easy to learn, O’Shea said, is that there are no conjugations — or forms of the verb in Chinese. For example, in English, people would say “I eat” and “He eats,” but that is not the case in Chinese. They would use the same word for “eat.” “You learn one form of the word and that’s it,” he said. On the other hand, Chinese writing is more difficult. There are about 6,200 Chinese characters representing words. There is a more fancy traditional script that has been around for thousands of years, O’Shea said. A simplified form of the language was created in the 1950s to make it easier for Chinese to get an education. Before this change, there were as many as 20,000 to 30,000 characters in common use. “It has the added benefit of helping foreigners learn to read and write,” he said. For example, the Chinese word for horse took 10 strokes to draw in the traditional form, whereas the simplified form only takes three strokes. Fortunately, technology aided in the effort to learn the language. Computers have software that can produce Chinese characters on a standard keyboard. “If they input that phonetic code, the Chinese characters will pop up,” O’Shea said. By the end of the year, he hopes students would be familiar with about 350 Chinese words and be able to carry on a basic two-minute conversation in Chinese. O’Shea got involved in learning Chinese through his work in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. He received his certification in 1972 and he has taught at Adirondack Community College, Fulton-Montgomery Community College, and Washington-Saratoga-Warren-Essex-Hamilton County BOCES. Eleven-year-old Ana Castro said it has not been too hard to pick up the language. Ana had attended the district’s two-week Chinese camp this summer. “We just learned a whole bunch of Chinese and did activities about it,” she said. The district is offering yearround Chinese instruction in seventh and eighth grade at Mont Pleasant Middle School. It also offers Chinese in fi fthand sixth-grades at the four elementary schools that feed into Mont Pleasant — Pleasant Valley, Van Corlaer, Hamilton and Howe. Sixth- and seventh-grade students at Central Park Middle School and sixth-graders at Paige, Woodlawn and King schools are learning Arabic. Other languages students study are French and Spanish. Not a lot of middle schools are teaching Chinese, so O’Shea believes this experience would give Schenectady students an advantage. “It’s a skill that they have that will be unique to them,” he said.
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