I’m very lucky to be learning a bit of Chinese at the same time I teach English.  The process has shown me that many of the tools we use in the West to teach language just don’t cut it for Chinese speakers.  For example, I recently learned that Chinese speakers think of the past as up and the future as down unlike most westerners who imagine the past as behind oneself and the future ahead of oneself.  In Chinese, the term for “last month” combines the words for up and the word for month. This has had a huge impact on the way I plan to demonstrate and diagram tenses for my classes “down” in the future.

Some background:  Chinese students have a great deal of trouble conjugating tenses because their verbs don’t change as tenses change.  They simply add a time word to the verb. So, for example, one hears sentences from students like  “Yesterday I go,” because this makes perfect sense in terms of the construction of their language.

It’s not too difficult to explain to them how to correctly conjugate verbs in the simple past and simple present. But explaining past perfect, present perfect, conditional tenses (subjunctive cases) and other subtle verb conjugations presents a real challenge.

ESL teachers have long used diagrams like the first one below to help students visualize present perfect tense (which, in itself is confusing because the word “present” is used for an action that started in the past.  But can you see how this would be more confusing than saying nothing at all?

Diagram usually used to explain present perfect tense to westerners.

I’m now revising all my diagrams to reflect Chinese up and down thinking. (See the second diagram, below.)  I’ll use different hand gestures, too.