Neelanjan Chakrabarti

I used to teach Chinese Language at IISD, Kolkata. IISD is an institute for Self development including personality. An integral part of the course conducted by IISD was foreign languages. The course was a 6 months & 1 year certificate course and the students ranged from different walks of life including university post-grads, doctors and businessmen. Each had different intentions why they wanted to learn the language. For example, students of South and South East Asian studies at the University of Kolkata have a special paper on languages. Thus they needed proficiency in an Asian language apart from Indian languages, and Chinese (Mandarin ???) does feature as one of the most influential languages in the world with the largest number of speakers. Some doctors who want a diversification in their medical profession are eager to learn new healing technologies - and acupuncture, moxibustion, etc. are some interesting areas to concentrate on. All these healing methods have their roots in China, which in order to learn need to be learnt in original, i.e., Chinese. Again businessmen who are the faces of the growing Indo-Chinese trade, look for opportunities wherein they can have a better bargain over price of commodities, in which case a knowledge in Chinese will definitely give them a better edge. In short, Chinese is a language whose importance can't be ignored at the present times.



I also took voluntary classes at my university for students of BBA who were to take up a compulsory paper on Chinese language. These students came from various areas including Bhutan and Nepal, apart from India. Since the purpose for these students were more academic, I stressed more on the theoretical area than on the functional on. Of course, spoken Chinese was a must for these students, and I loved teaching them oral or conversational Chinese.



The teaching procedure that I followed was that I liked to make and keep Chinese interesting to students by using various anecdotes about the origin of of the characters, and explaining the process of their evolution over the ages. I always prefer to make Chinese learning appear easier than it actually is. I preferred to make the base strong, as that being done, the student may add their own inputs later on. The target I kept and achieved was to enable the students manage basic conversations and survival techniques, which my students could achieve by the end of the course.



I believe I am a good teacher because (i) I love teaching, and the most important of all, (ii) I never bore my students at any point of time so that they might feel the pressure of learning a foreign language. Since my students ranged from 20 to 70, the classroom was a heterogeneous one, and I successfully managed to reach out to each age-group according to their level of understanding and requirement.



I believe that a teacher learns more when he is teaching than when he is a student, because teaching necessitates one to have a more wide-ranging knowledge on the subject than when he is just attending lectures on the other side of the table. When teaching my students I frequently refer to the culture, geography, and political history of the land of which I am teaching the language. Thus, like any teacher, I get a chance to learn more while teaching, than when I was a student learning the language. I am always open to any suggestions or broadening of knowledge, no matter even if it comes from the student's end.