Gemma’s Journal #16 – Teaching Week Two
I’m honoured that this is one of the first columns up with our new look! I hope you enjoy it and you’ll visit us even more than you already do ;).
Anyway… if you remember I’m currently experiencing being a teacher and learning all the pain that Jenn had to suffer when she was teaching myself.
* Warning for the purists out there. I am going to be using mostly “English” terms for the hands and other things in these columns. I know not everyone agrees on the use of these words. I think some nice healthy and friendly discussion would be great, but please forgive me this once! The reasons I’m using these is that I am dealing with one person who is just starting out studying Chinese, two people who have no idea of Chinese or Japanese and one of these has no interest in learning languages. I, myself, am far more familiar with the Japanese terms. The compromise has been English with Japanese pronunciations and Chinese characters in brackets where appropriate. I hope through learning Mahjong they will feel encouraged to learn some of the language, but I’m not a language teacher…yet! And, hey people, it could be worse, my father still thinks you’re supposed to pronounce it Mah-yo-ng, and corrects me…
Well my students were an enthusiastic bunch! Left with a set of tiles for a week they’d researched on the internet and were ready to go for the next lesson! I’m always going to appreciate how much good students make a teacher’s life easier. So they were all well versed in the tiles and now could all correctly answer “What does the bird indicate?” Still a few confused looks and quick fumbling for their cheat-cards when faced with the Grands (Cracks or Wans). Yet I think everyone was more than ready to move onto the next stage.
Last week we’d tried out a couple of games to get them used to the flow of Mahjong and I thought that that would be a great way to start this lesson. So after a little revision, ironing out kinks and solving any remaining problems, we were ready for the next part… Hands. When I learnt Mahjong from Jenn, if I remember correctly, one of the first hands that I was taught was the Peace (pinfu) Hand. This is perfectly logical, considering how common it is and most books seem to feature it at the beginning. However, I decided not to teach this first. Please don’t flame me! I have reasons!
Firstly, (no offence to Jenn who is a wonderful teacher) but I found the Peace hand highly traumatic when I learnt it. It’s not the most intuitive hands and the conditions and limitations of it are quite complicated to explain to a person with very little understanding of the finer points of the game yet. Secondly, I thought it would be easier to start with the more intuitive hands, and the ones that anyone with an idea of card games should be able to guess at. That way they can spend some more time getting used to the “feel” of Mahjong and not be put off with too many complicated explanations.
I am most definitely a softly, softly kind of person.
Anyway, to continue, so Peace hand is out. First and easiest to start with is the dragons as a hand point. Well I thought it was the easiest… I must not have explained myself very well at first as after we played a couple of hands one person yelled ‘Mahjong’ in the belief that they had created a hand point and happily presented us with…
Teaching point to be aware of people! Stress the need for a set of THREE.
I then tried to explain about the winds. Round winds and seat winds. This caused enough comedy with people muttering “Never Eat Shredded Wheat” under their breaths. Again there were some issues with character recognition. Sometimes I forget that it’s not the easiest thing to distinguish characters if you’ve never studied them. I had some little cheat-cards made out, but even so East and West were easily mixed up. I’m not sure why that would be? But certainly something to watch for if any of you are teaching non-linguists yourselves. I found it helped to draw the characters in front of them so they had a slightly better idea of the shape.
After that we were all a little exhausted so I decided to explain about the “Lucky Tiles” (drag/dora). And that worked nicely as a way to wind down the session and set up for the next one.
I look at it on paper and it doesn’t look like we’ve got that far. I think that a lot of experienced players forget how new and difficult Mahjong once was to them. It certainly has opened my eyes. If you have any experience please share. I’d also be particularly interested if any of you have also taught people who are not linguists and have had problems with characters. How did you get around it? Or does anyone have any ideas?
