Wang FY, Yale 1953, Read Chinese & PLECO 2021, iPhone APP
Oldest and newest
What an amazing range of learning materials! This 1953 textbook showcases the revolutionary “new” (at the time) idea that one could and should teach “foreigners” Mandarin. Next to it is a screen shot of the newest approach – a very user friendly, up-to-date online dictionary with pronouncing and writing guides. Fred FangYu Wang’s “Read Chinese” is part of a set of materials I have used since my first trip to Taiwan in 1973. It was hard to find any materials at all for second language learners of Mandarin then but this series of books, bound in dark red, was an excellent resource. I have held on to ALL of my Mandarin learning materials for decades with some sort of anxious idea that keeping the materials would actually equal real language learning and progress! As I down size and let go of many hard copy books and materials, I am also letting go of an early idea I had: that the future spreads out limitlessly before me like a banquet in a great hall. Now I mostly use my iPhone 12 APP dictionary, “Pleco.” That’s a strange choice of name for a language learning APP; it means “a fish that eats algae” like one that can clean the glass of an aquarium. Perhaps “voraciously devouring whatever” is NOT a bad description of language learning – good learners grab input from everywhere! As the volume and size of my learning materials and resources decrease, I hope that knowledge is going into my brain – and stored in even smaller, more efficient units called “brain cells”!
Susan Olmstead Wang 