Another practical way to teach Chinese (as a second language) is to connect to real-life situations. Did I already mention one reason why I hated to study Chinese, was that teachers were forced to simply focus on rote memorization more than understanding (read here)? Anyway, I found this photo on Facebook. These are some simple words that all connect to scam. This would make a good lesson for standard Chinese (åčÆ) to learn words that are connected to scam.
It would be ideal to do some vocabulary, fill in the blanks, and do a conversational lesson. One example of a conversational lesson (which was called as bon toi in Hokkien) would be like this:
- Question: What is a phone scam?
- Translation: "ä»ä¹ęÆēµčÆčÆéŖ?" (Pinyin: "ShĆ©nme shƬ diĆ nhuĆ zhĆ piĆ n?")
- Answer: A phone scam is where you are offered something too good to be true by a phone call.
- Translation: "ēµčÆčÆéŖęÆęęäŗŗéčæēµčÆåä½ ęä¾äøäŗå„½å¾ä»¤äŗŗé¾ä»„置俔ēäøč„æ." (Pinyin: DiĆ nhuĆ zhĆ piĆ n shƬ zhĒ yĒurĆ©n tÅngguò diĆ nhuĆ xiĆ ng nĒ tĆgÅng yÄ«xiÄ hĒo dĆ© lƬng rĆ©n nĆ”nyĒ zhƬxƬn de dÅngxÄ«.)
Okay, maybe I gave a bon toi where the answer is "hua teng nga" or very long. I could remember the Chinese teacher saying, "Mang ko tak che lo." or "Don't go to school anymore." However, depending on the HSK level, the answers to the questions shouldn't be too long until they reach HSK-4-6. What needs to be done is to develop the fundamentals of learning Chinese.
What can be done is to start learning and memorizing the words related to scam. At this point, it's memorize and understand them until death.