Gemma’s Journal #15 – Teaching Week One

Lesson One is pretty much decided I suppose. We basically just played with the tiles for half an hour.

Finally, back in Taipei! Unfortunately my last Mahjong buddies all left me for mainland China, however, I now have a whole new group of Canadians who are more than a little keen to learn and enjoy the fantastic game which is Mahjong!

So, now that my journal has taken you through the trials and tribulations of me, as a beginner, learning Mahjong, now you get to hear my experience of teaching it to other beginners. Maybe I can even convince them to write some words on what they thought of the game, and perhaps even an evaluation of my teaching methods!

I suppose the aim of my next entries is to give an example of teaching Mahjong to encourage you all to go and recruit some more players. I'm not sure how good my teaching will be, so advice will be welcome along the way! I do hope that this will be a contribution of sorts to the community and if nothing else at least we will have three more players!

My students are a mixed bunch. One has actually played a little Mahjong before with me, one has played some computer Mahjong and the other is a complete beginner. Two do not speak Chinese and one is learning. So I'm expecting that they'll advancing at different rates and this is my main concern at the beginning; to make sure none of them are left behind, yet balancing that out with steady progress.

Lesson One is pretty much decided I suppose. We basically just played with the tiles for half an hour. I gave each of them a suit and got them to find 1 through 9 of that suit to get them used to the tiles and what they looked like. I think it's easy for people who've been playing for a while that it does take a bit of time to get used to the patterns. For example, the one of bamboos is always an issue and even the eight of bamboos was making my students squint at the tiles!

Then we looked at the honor tiles. I tried not to fuss them too much with what each one exactly meant at that point as the non-Chinese speaking were having enough trouble with the numbers on the grands (wans). (I was using a Chinese set with no arabic numbers. I do in fact have a set from the UK with the Arabic numbers written in the corner. That would have been a life-saver this week!)

After that, we looked at what made a basic hand. This seemed to not be too much trouble although I'm not sure I was doing a good job of explaining!

Then, we set up the table and played! We played a first few rounds with our hands open so that we could talk about what we were doing, then when they were confident we played out hands closed. I think overall it went well. All three seemed to have no real problems with the basic progression of play. I think the biggest problem that was encountered was most definitely lack of English on some of the tiles. However, that could have easily been overcome with a different set.

We started talking about hands but, as I didn't want to overload them with information, I avoided it and have saved it all for next week. I mostly wanted everyone comfortable with the feel of Mahjong and accustom people to the tiles.

I can predict there are going to be a lot more problems in the making!

Anyway, have any of you taught Mahjong? Any advice for me? Let me know your thoughts!

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