Discusses the recent recognition of the importance of listening comprehension in Chinese language instruction, and how extensive listening comprehension exercises can drastically improve students' listening comprehension. Describes such learning strategies as tolerating the unknown, listening for specific information, listening for the main idea,…

Examines the background and nature of general English usage in Singapore, focusing on the speaking patterns of students whose native language is Chinese. Focuses on the influence of Chinese on the syntax and pronunciation of "Singlish." (MDM)

The device of employing adverbs as quantifiers is common in daily use of Modern Chinese. Quantifiers that have the closest glossed meanings are compared, based partly on a survey of 13 native speakers of Mandarin. Findings suggest that certain quantifiers cannot be characterized uniformly because of inherently different properties. (Contains six…

Describes ACTS, an Automated Chinese Text Segmentation prototype for Chinese full text retrieval that applies partial syntactic analysis, (i.e., the analysis of morphemes, words, and phrases) but not complete sentences. Topics include Chinese morphosyntactic categories; word grammar; segmentation; category disambiguation; parsing; and possible…

Describes the availability, installation, and use of the ZhonWen Disk Operating System (ZWDOS) to display, print, and transmit Chinese characters on conventional International Business Machines (IBM) personal computers and IBM-compatible machines. Also discussed is the use of ZWDOS to compose electronic mail messages, read newsgroups, and access…

Explores whether or not beginning readers of Chinese (first and third graders) activate phonological codes while reading Chinese characters. Finds that subjects used phonological codes while reading. (RS)

Culturally specific compounds in Chinese could be more effectively studied from a cognitive approach, using the underlying idealized cognitive models defined by Lakoff. It is argued that the formation of Chinese compounds are systematically guided by idealized cognitive models and compounds are semantically compositional. (seven references) (LB)

Discusses three of Lawrence Yep's novels (which portray the Chinese-American experience of being caught between two worlds) as good examples of what literature about ethnic groups should be. (SR)

DeFrancis' recent essay on the development and status of Hanyu Pinyin, "The Why of Pinyin Grapheme Selection," is critiqued, particularly his account of how the Hanyu Pinyin transcription was developed and the argument that it is not only rational but effectively permanent. (LB)

Study of verb-copying in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on its relationship to the thematic structures of verbs and on phrase structures, shows that the function of verb-copying is to highlight the quantity element in a sentence. (21 references) (Author/CB)

A pilot study attempting to determine the feasibility and value of a cognition-based study of classifiers in Chinese demonstrated that the use of the classifier "tiao" was not an arbitrary linguistic device of categorization, but represented some type of human categorization based on an imputed salient perceptual property of extension of…

Presents data from a research project studying tobacco and alcohol use patterns in San Francisco's Chinese community (N=1,808). Results indicate that the prevalence of both tobacco and alcohol use is lower for San Francisco's Chinese population than for the general population. Those who smoke tended to be different from those who drink.…

Reports on increasing difficulties experienced by Chinese students and scholars in obtaining U.S. visas, possibly due to more rigorous examination of individuals in "critical" technological fields following the recent spy case and to the high numbers of Chinese students who do not return to China. Critics claim the visa process is…

Presents the case for treating the "ba" construction in Mandarin Chinese as a verb, considering both language-internal arguments and arguments from universal properties of parts of speech. (Author/VWL)

This article discusses the teaching of Chinese in the general, social, and political context of foreign-language education. It points to the fallacy of assuming that the instructional approaches used in the more commonly taught languages are appropriate for Chinese as well. (12 references) (CK)