为什么填写十笔比按顺序写十笔管用 – 中文写字的练习和巩固

在微信时代,很多人提笔都忘了怎么写字了。这也是中文教育遇到的新挑战,尤其是在海外。其实学会写字对学生们认字是很有帮助的,所以直接跳过写字而花更多时间认字并不是很好的解决办法。可写字对许多海外的小朋友来说门槛还是偏高的!咋办?

那就降低门槛呗!

我们的中文教材有很多填写,找错,拼句子的练习,其实都是降低门槛的一种方式,能让学生逐渐的适应和在句子里使用单词,最后做到能自由运用。可是在写字方面,我们却一如既往的要求孩子从第一笔一直写到底。从学习曲线的角度来说,他们就好像碰到了一堵90度的高墙!然后无数虎妈狮爸驱赶着孩子们翻墙,撞墙!孩子们则千方百计地在那儿拆墙!

多线联想

我觉得最大的问题在于很多写字练习都是单线联想,按顺序写下来,前一笔联系着后一笔。

对人脑有点了解的人知道,这种联想是比较薄弱的,只要中间断了一条线,基本上就忘了接下来该怎么写了。我相信这种感觉对我们应该不陌生。

优质的记忆往往都是多线联想和多源性的。绝大多数记忆大师们所用的技巧都基于这个原理。而且我们平时做的很多练习和游戏多少也都有多源和多线的元素的。唯独在写字这方面的练习让我觉得比较单一。

理想的记忆应该类似于以下的网状记忆模式,多点相连,即使一条线断了,还有许多条线可以确保记忆的完整和修复原来断掉的联系。

填笔画!

在经过一段时间的观察和摸索,我发现其实答案很简单,就是填笔画!

这个练习的门槛可以降到很低,学生可以只写一笔就能完成任务,而且初期还可以先给答案做对照。在写下那一笔的时候,学生需要知道这一笔对一个字整体的影响和它的位置。这样反复练习不同的笔画,一个字的框架就在学生的脑海里搭构起来了,以上的网状记忆也就可以实现了。这不仅对学写字有好处,更对识字有相当大的帮助。

有人可能会觉得这样笔画顺序是不是就乱了,学生用了这个反而不会按笔画写字了?其实 笔画顺序相差一点其实并不很重要,而且书写顺序有它可掌握的逻辑,不需要每个字的笔画都死记硬背。

同样,学习拼音也可以按填空的方式来练习。通过软件的支持,我们可以把任何一篇短文都用填空的方式来练习,也可重复练习同样的字,进阶增加笔画空缺的数量,让学生们逐步接受,无痛学成。

网址:https://tools.gamedeper.com/chinesegap/

最后说明一下,这个练习不能替代老师们耐心地教导和其它优秀的教材,语言教学基本上就是多学多练多用。我只希望学生们在学汉语的过程中能少点抵触,多点兴趣,让老师们辛苦的劳动成果能得到更好的巩固。

目前软件处于初级开发阶段,用户可以免费生成填空练习的Word文档。在手机上用可能会有问题,尤其是苹果手机上的和微信自带的浏览器。另外多音字的拼音可能会不准,需要生成文档之后自行修改。以后将推出App以及添加和完善更多的功能,方便学生、老师和家长。欢迎大家多提建议哦!


开发者: 李泉景 play埃特gamedeper.com

Our first gap-fill learning tool is online

Gap filling is the first tool developed at Gamedeper to make learning vocabulary and grammar rules with much more ease and creates leveled experiences for users to gradually master a foreign language or any rules based text.

You can basically use any text you can find and try to memorize the words and sentence structure in it. The webform takes the text and replaces some letters with _ (underscore). The user can then try to fill in the missing letters to complete the original text.

Current form is the basic version with a timer and check answer capability. The generated text with gap is at random and hence different each time the make gap button is pressed. More functions will be added later like adjustable number of gaps (_) and downloadable word files.

Find the tool at https://tools.gamedeper.com/makegap

Targeting specific skills

To learn a skill with a game, that game should mimic the real-life scenario when that skill is being applied. For example, spelling words correctly is a boring skill to learn. You really need to repeat a few times before it sticks.

When learning new words, I find myself often skip the spell part and dive almost immediately into the meaning of the word only to find out later that some part of that word is wrong when I need to reproduce it.

A fun way to play this is to have the syllables of a word to be split into multiple cards and try to spell the word by first collecting/drawing all cards of that word. There are many variations thinkable, below is just an example for triggering more inspirations.

The Syllable Mahjong

This game requires at least 2 persons and works a bit like the Chinese Mahjong.

The game starts with a deck of cards containing syllables of the new vocabulary list. each player takes 10 cards. Each round, a player must play a card and then take another card from the deck. A player wins if all syllables can be combined into words without any extra card left unused.

You can add extra difficulty by requiring the person with a complete set of words to make a sensible sentence out of these words. In addition, you can allow a player to take the played card from the player before him/her iso the card from the deck.

10, 11 are the only number of cards players can be finishing with. So you can win after playing a card, after drawing a new card or after taking the played card from the last player. If in the end no one was able to win by utilising all the cards, then the player with most letters in completed word(s) wins.

For learning Chinese characters, we can use elements of a full character iso the syllables and count the number of strokes iso letters.

Other applications

You can image that we can make the players learn other grammar rules with this too by replacing syllables with different variations of words and immutable words. The person wins if he/she can construct grammar sound sentences out of the cards. I’m sure much more is possible, basically just replace the elements on the cards and you’ve got yourself a new game.

The Addictive Chinese Card Game “Level Up” Readopted For Language Learning

Level Up is a card game that almost all Chinese adults know how to play, they can play this for hours and hours deep into the night. To make it even more exciting many also play it with small amount of cash as the wager. Nevertheless, I find this game addictive even without any financial incentive. Once I started playing, I just can’t stop before any party actually wins the game.

The game has an excellent mixture of elements suitable to make it into a entertaining learning game. However, as I’ve pointed out in the very first post, the goal is really to play the game for fun. So here is how I imagining this for language learning materials.

The cards

Use a set of words as cards. Each card contain one word. Ideally, a word should appear at least 2 times per deck of cards and no more than 4 times.

The goal

The goal of the game is to reach the highest level / rank as a team. When with odd number of persons, each player can play for themselves. At the beginning, each team are at level 1. Your team will gain a level after winning a game.

Levels

Depending how you divide the words’ categories. They could be nouns, adjective, verbs and all the rest. The categories can also be made with the length of the words: a = 1, it = 2, the = 3 …. content=7 etc. Which way to choose depends on how much time is there to reach the final level. You can define the category 1,,2,3,4 for the first approach, or just 1 to the highest number of letters from the longest word as in the second example.

Winning condition

You win a game if the total number of points collected by your team is more than that of the opponents. Some cards can have points which can be decided based on the required learning goal. For instance, if the goal is learning new set of vocabulary, then cards with these new words should have points, ideally corresponding with the number of letters the words contain. If the learning goal is simply making longer sentences then every cards should have just 1 point so that at the end the player with the most cards/point wins the game.

Ranking of played cards

Played cards with highest rank wins a round. The rank is simply the number of letters on the played cards. The played cards can only have a rank if the player can make a meaningful sentence out of the words on these cards. They can supplement the sentence with extra words that are not on the cards, but for computing the rank, only the amount of letters on the cards are counted. (For Chinese, consider using the number of strokes i.s.o. letter counts!) Two of the same cards can be used as one word but counted as double the amount of letters. Higher multiples of the same cards will multiply the letter-count accordingly.

For the convenience of counting the points, the words on the cards should have a fixed count regardless of the way they’re used in the sentences like plural forms or past tense.

Major cards (optional, but you really want to include them)

You can decide to assign some cards the status of major card(or the dominant suit in the case of Level Up) and assign special properties to them. Just like some cards with points, the major cards (can) have those too. You can even count these as double the number of letters of the major cards. A common practice is also to rotate the major cards statuses. We can assign major status to cards that belong to the current level. If the current level is 1, then all cards that belonging to this level will have points equal to 2x the number of letters of the words on them.

In addition to above, major cards can also be called by a player when the game is in dealing phase. See below.

How to start

A game starts by dealing/drawing the cards to all the players. All cards should be dealt to players unless we adopt the rule for picking the last few cards on the deck (see section “The right to pick the last cards”.

It’s during the dealing of the cards, any player can call for a category to receive the major status. A player can only do this though if he/she has a duplicate set of cards for that category. To overthrow one players call, another player must have a duplicate set with higher number of letters from another category. Have a major category called is useful when a player have many cards from that category. At the end of dealing, all players should have the same amount of cards.

The right to pick the last cards (optional)

The regular Level Up has a rule that gives the team members that won the last game the option to inspect the last 8 cards and swap those freely with the drawn/dealt cards in their hands. Depending on the number of players and the cards in the deck, any number of 4-10 seems to be okay here.

During the game

A round consists of each player playing the same number of cards one after another (e.g. counter clockwise). The player who can make a sentence with the highest number of letters on the played cards (thus with the highest rank) wins the round and takes all the points from the played cards of that round. The team immediately loses the game if a player can’t come up with any sentences with the cards played by him/herself; not all cards needs to be included though, so at least one (this can also be agreed upon).

The winner of the last round can start the next round. The person who initially picked the last cards from the deck can play the first card(s) in the game (see above). Or when there is no card picking at the end, the player who called the major card can start. And alternatively the player who started with the dealing can start. The game ends with all the cards being played.

Jokers

For the sake of certain learning purposes, you can require players to make predefined sentences with certain cards and that these predefined combinations will be jokers so that when they’re played by a player, he/she always wins the round.

Attack and defend (optional)

Like the Level Up game, teams can have an attack and defend mode. So when the previous game was lost, they should win a game first in order gain a level in the next game if they win that one too.

Other possibilities

There are many more variations of this game and you should try out different methods to see what works better at which stage. For beginner courses, you may want to supply a set of rules for applying basic grammar on the words and maybe simpler game mechanics should be adopted in stead of the full rule set of the game.

I can also imaging this game to be applied on other areas like math and chemistry. All these above could be the future topics of this blog.

Hello world!

This blog is all about having fun with games while also learning things. Please notice the way I put the first sentence, having fun is more important here!

I started this blog because I noticed that the biggest obstacle to learning well isn’t always the method, but mostly it’s the motivation. I see lots of motivated people who are just average persons but still achieved great results while many highly educated people struggle with a foreign language. And often at these cases, motivation is the differentiator.
I’m teaching Dutch to a group of Chinese parents here in the Netherlands. They take the course because they have nothing to do while waiting for their kids on the Chinese school and learning Dutch seems to be a somewhat useful activity to spend their time on. The fact is however, even when people are obligated to take the courses for the state exam of getting the green card here, they still have the feeling of having to break a giant wall. This is certainly not motivating and many “learned” skills will soon be forgotten afterwards. Furthermore, my son is learning Chinese in the Netherlands and he also had a hard time doing the homework while he’s already on the higher level among his classmates.
As a kid, I learned things differently. I always had this inherent curiosity and competitive spirit so that I almost suck the knowledge out of my teachers so that I would have learned most of the stuff while in class without hardly doing any homework. And when playing the game I like, Oh man… I’m just unstoppable!! Just like most people who like play games!
And although I see some games being played in the class (I also do some in my own class), the game-playing part is still treated as a “small” addition just to keep the student occupied with the lessons and for relaxation. There is in my opinion still too much disconnect between games that are played during the lessons and the lessons themselves.

So my challenge becomes “HOW CAN I MAKE THE LESSONS JUST AS ADDICTIVE AS THE GAMES?”

After long search, the answer seems to be simple: Take a really addictive game, and combine it with the material from the lessons! Again, the emphasis here is on the addictive game. It’s really important that “addition” is triggered here. (actually, the original question was how can someone learn the skills and not forgetting them easily)

I’ll gradually add games to this blog to share with everyone. Hope you’ll find them useful and if not, I would really like to see your comments on them.

Let the journey begin!