Mastering Mandarin

After school on Wednesday — one day after a massive sell-off in the Shanghai stock market caused the Dow Jones index to plummet by more than 400 points — more than two dozen students trooped past a large Chinese flag in Dave Dixon’s Thurston Middle School classroom.

The students were there to learn Standard Mandarin, the world’s most common language. Researchers have found that more than 1 billion people worldwide speak Mandarin Chinese, but only about a half-billion speak English.

Thurston’s two Mandarin courses are offered as part of a partnership between Berlitz Language Center and the school, and were made available to all Laguna Beach Unified students, parents and teachers.

They’re offered Mondays and Wednesdays after school, and Tuesday and Thursday evenings; Dixon himself is taking the evening course, along with several other adults and three high school students.

The after-school class is predominantly filled with middle school students, but one parent still joins in for learning.

Those who miss an afternoon class can make it up in the evening, and vice versa.

The initial program is 15 weeks long and will end in late May. It will be followed by a two-week intensive review and writing camp in July.

Dixon also is considering a summer 2008 trip to China; several students are interested, and some say they’ve already been there.

The classes are taught by Jean Wu, who’s in her first year of teaching; this is also her first group class, but Dixon, who’s taught for more than 30 years, said he is amazed at her innate abilities.

“She is the most natural teacher I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Dixon said. “If someone had told me that I could design the perfect teacher, I would create her.”

He added that he has already learned techniques from Wu — now in her third week of teaching the class — that he has incorporated in his own Spanish classes.

For Wu’s part, she is taking pleasure in her new adventure.

“I’m really enjoying having them,” Wu said of the class.

“Chinese is not the easiest language to learn,” Wu said, but added that she finds English to be the hardest.

In Wednesday’s class, the kids quickly transitioned from discussing magazine fundraiser tactics in English slang to reciting Mandarin pronouns.

The emphasis for now is on the verbal language, but Wu still writes each word on the chalkboard in Hanzi (the traditional Chinese characters) and pinyin (a way to represent Mandarin Chinese using syllables in the English alphabet).

When Wu asks students how they’re finding the class, the answers range from “it’s OK” to “hard.” Wu takes time to reinforce concepts to confused students before moving forward and works directly with each student during the class.

When asked a question about words or phrasing, Wu hands it back to the student, asking guided questions like, “How would you say it?”

She also teaches the politeness inherent in the language and culture, gently guiding students to say “excuse me” as an attention-getter before asking a question.

This native grace permeates into Wu’s teaching, as well.

“Your concept is correct, but unfortunately, in Chinese you need to add a word to make it grammatically correct,” she politely told one student of his phrasing.

She emphasizes the importance of tone, and uses English phrases like, “What do you want?” as examples in how a change of tone can dramatically alter a message.

The students tackled the “to be” verb Wednesday, along with questions like “Who are you?” and “What is your name?”

Wu said that she has opted to spend time on the fundamentals of the language before progressing forward.

“I don’t want to go too fast,” she said.

She also kept the laughs going. During a discussion on figures, when a pupil asked how to depict “zero,” she wrote a complicated character on the board that had students open-mouthed.

“All for nothing,” she said, smiling.

But rather than ending the class with an epigram, she reminded her students that they will be tested on those numbers on Monday.

Given China’s rising status in the world market, it may be these students’ most important Mandarin test.