My Stories of Learning English III
I once suffered a great humiliation during my stay in the college. It stings even today when I recall about it. After about two years’ training classes of listening and speaking skill, the teacher who was responsible for the course was told to give us a test. He carried it out alone. That day, he was sitting in a big room and we went in one by one to accept his examination. There were three or four tasks for us to perform. I can’t remember the rest but will never forget the last one. It was a free conversation between the tester and the test-taker. He began with the question: “What did you do this morning?” what did I do this morning? I washed my face and brushed my teeth and…but no, these don’t make sense. Then what else did I do? My brain ran quickly searching for some meaningful things that I did that morning. But it was a tragic that my idea of “morning” was then still confined to the period of time around and before breakfast, as the Chinese translation of the English greeting “Good morning” suggests. The effect of this expression was just too heavy on me for I learned it when I was a child and at the very beginning classes of English. My teacher told me then that “morning” meant “zaoshang”, a Chinese word whose meaning excludes the morning work time. I was still struggling for an answer when the examiner’s voice broke in: “All right. That’s all. You can leave now.” When I turned helplessly and disheartened, I noticed him shaking his head and whispering to his friend (or a teacher from another department? I don’t know. He was a stranger, anyway) who was sitting beside him all the time and watching with interest. “This one…” I heard him saying. He meant I was exceptional and all his other students are excellent. I fully agreed with him on that at that time. He marked something on his paper. I knew what it was. An Arabian zero.
But there was a teacher surnamed Yang whom I should owe my whole life’s gratitude. He was the vice head of our department and taught us phonetics and pedagogic. He was in his early fifties and was tall and strong. I know little about his life out of classroom, but I’m sure his happiest time was when he was teaching. He would always come smilingly to us a few minutes earlier and had small conversations with us before his lecture. Once the class began, he became excited. Not the over-excited kind, but in that pleasantly and inspiringly high spirit. Time in his class was the most easily spent. You could hardly be aware of the pass of time and the end of class came always before you realized.
Both of his phonetics and pedagogic were excellent, but here I’ll have to center on his phonetics lessons.
Before I entered the college, I didn’t have correct pronunciation for most of the words I learnt. We had no tape recorders. Our English teachers were not certain about those sounds themselves (I’m not complaining. They were already excellent, for there was no English education at all when they were young. Many of them had managed to learn some English all by themselves!) In fact, it was right the embarrassment rose from my pronunciation problems in the college that had goaded me into making up my mind to have a thorough study of English sounds. I resolved not to let my own students to suffer the same as I had. I had made mistakes pronouncing some very simple words. Once, when answering the teacher’s question, I said “no” for “now”, and was immediately corrected by my classmates, most of whom graduated from so-called “key” high schools. But “now” was once a word my senior middle school English teacher would say every day at the beginning of his class. He said: “No (now), let’s begin”, which was one of his only two English sentences. The other one was “no, class is over”. There was another time when I said “woman” for “women”, and was eagerly corrected again. I felt greatly ashamed in both the cases.
But it was due to Professor Yang’s help and careful training that my resolution has born fruit. ---- To be continued.
I’m sorry I can write only this much a night. I tried to upload last night, but failed. There seemed something gone wrong with the website. Jenny was true when she said that the system of Hongen often failed.
Thank you very much for reading and best wishes! :-)
Sincerely yours,Charles
