A couple of summers ago in Monongalia County, when pandemics were the subjects of dystopian science fiction novels, a lesson in tolerance was being talked out in the classroom of an area school.
It came in the form of the pleasantries exchanged by Abdulbari Younis and Wayne Chen.
What follows is a phonetic rendering of their chat in Mandarin Chinese:
Chen: “Knee how.” (Hello). “Knee how ma?” (How are you?)
Abdulbari: “Wa hen how, shu-shuni.” (I am fine, thank you).
The exchange was notable because Abdulbari, then 8, was about that many minutes into his first study of the aforementioned Mandarin.
Chen, who had been in the U.S. for about 10 years at that point, grew up near Hong Kong and was a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
He was serving as a native speaker for the STARTALK Chinese Immersion Camp, which is sponsored by Monongalia County Schools and the West Virginia Department of Education.
Because of COVID, last year’s camp was a virtual experience.
“Everything was online,” said Debbie Nicholson, who coordinates foreign language instruction for the state Department of Education and is the chief organizer of the camp, which is held exclusively in Mon’s school district.
“It worked,” said Nicholson, who taught Spanish for 28 years at Bridgeport High School in Harrison County, “but face-to-face is always better.”
Which will precisely be the accent on the 2021 edition of the camp, which will be June 7-11 and June 14-18 at Suncrest Elementary School.
The camp is held here because five elementary schools – Cheat Lake, Mountainview, North, Ridgedale and Suncrest – offer Mandarin instruction on their schedules.
Sessions will run 9 a.m.-2:40 p.m. and bus service will be provided to Suncrest Elementary from the four other participating schools, Nicholson said.
Admission is free, she said, but registration is required and may be done online at the websites of the five schools.
Be ready to start talking a (second) language, Nicholson said.
That’s how she ran her classes at Bridgeport High.
No endless memorizing and verb-conjugating, she said.
No stilted, overly formal phrasing with outdated references.
“I would always get my students to associate names and objects,” she said. “Lots of repetition, because that’s really the only way you really learn a language.”
Learning the language, she said, meaning learning the culture.
And learning the culture means learning empathy and tolerance – two things in pronounced need right now, she said.
STARTALK came out of the National Security Language Initiative put into place by George W. Bush’s administration in 2006.
It’s amazing, Nicholson said, how international diplomacy can be created – just by asking someone, in his language, how his day is going.
“When you learn another language, and especially when you become fluent in it, that just changes the way you look at everything.”
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