介绍:
【特别感谢热心听友“Maggie 欣欣”帮忙听写本篇文稿】
Heyang: Is learning English a long, boring and tedious process? The answer is probably yes for a lot of Chinese students. But a fun change is taking place in a middle school in Chengdu, Sichuan province, where students can learn English by playing mahjong or 麻将. Is it possible to learn English in an entertaining way?
How does it work, guys?
Yuyang: Yeah, this is really interesting. A set of English mahjong tiles invented by a middle school principal in Chengdu has gone viral in China. Of course this is different from the traditional Chinese mahjong. And this set of mahjong is English ones. The 26 English letters are stuck on the surface of the tiles. Students have to combine the tiles into words, and whoever composes a sentence with the words wins the game.
Meantime, Students can also play poker and weiqi (or Go) in classrooms. Of course, these pieces in students&`& hands are in English alphabets. Such fun time for students!
Ryan: You know when we are talking about this, I imagined maybe a teacher or a parent walking into a room when their kid was in there. There were three other friends smoking cigars, drinking 白酒, and playing this. And their parent’s like ‘what are you doing?’ Then they are like ‘learning English’. But maybe that gives you a point of where I’m coming from. I think that…I don’t know a lot about mahjong, but maybe I can compare it with poker. And that in my family I wasn’t allowed to necessarily play poker until I was of a certain age because there was a heavy gambling context associated with that game. And so when I’m thinking of this, yes, the good is there that people are learning English and I think it’s really cool to learn English in a fun way. But at the same time I think this is still relevant in that they are playing game that’s commonly used to gamble with and that could have some effects on them.
Heyang: Yeah, and actually that is a really worthwhile concern, I think. As mahjong for me, I would have thought it’s sort of just entertainment for the masses and I wouldn’t necessarily connect it with gambling coz I’ve seen older folks play mahjong and instead of money, they use like 瓜子儿, you know like sunflower seeds to replace the money or…you know there are many ways to play it. And you see in so many places in China that it is a really important item in the entertainment list that people have. But I think it’s really interesting that a teacher is actually connecting the two, learning English and playing mahjong together. What do you think of this kind of mentality behind the design?
Yuyang: Oh yeah, I think I come from very traditional background in China. But Ryan, compared to you, I was allowed to play poker from a very young age. That is about when I was in primary school. I can play poker with my parents. So I think if you can give the students safe context, maybe they can do it; they can both play mahjong and learn English without causing the parents’ worry. Well, let me explain. Let me explain the school principal’s logic in some way. Well, students have to form English words with the letters they get and then write down on their notebooks. A student wins a game after they form the most English words, writing sentences and telling a story by using the words. And the school principal says that he has calculated the frequency of letters appearing in words, and then set the quantities of each letters differently, such as having eight mahjong pieces of ‘I’ but only two ‘B’. So according to the school principal, it’s scientific design, in some way.
Ryan: Yeah. You know, listening to this, I just think there is better ways to learn English and that is listening to RoundTable. Number Uno! (Yuyang: Oh yeah) Come on, folks! Why are we even talking about this? You should be listening to RoundTable as often as you can. But maybe another good personal idea is that I would say watch TV shows. Listen to how people interact, you’re learning their mannerisms and you’re learning how they speak, pronunciation and how they formulate sentences. So those are my two suggestions but like I had said before that, RoundTable, obviously, number one, folks.
Heyang: Oh definitely. Ryan, you’ve just provided us with the most valuable words of today. That is, well you know, RoundTable. I can’t think of another option for you. Yeah and I think with this playing the mahjong thing to learn English, actually the idea is similar to playing Scrabble. So it’s about, you know, forming those words and expanding your vocabulary and those things. And also those mahjong tiles they don’t look cheap to me at all. It’s special mahjong tiles. And now for some reason it’s just mahjong tiles ringing in my head right now.
