Language Barrier?

[Kempo Guy]

I'm wondering how those of you with Chinese teachers deal with the language barrier during training? Or does the language barrier matter at all?

I'm also wondering if this would hinder your progress in any way? What have you done in order to overcome the language barrier? Have you started learning Chinese to close the gap (so to speak)?

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about this.

KG

[TenTigers]

Many of my teachers didnt speak much English. Learning Chinese helps. Learning Ngam m-Ngam-ah? "right, not-right?" was a boon for me. Sometimes language gets in the way, and a one on one hands on direct transmission of knowledge is best.

[EARTH DRAGON]

Both of my teachers are chinese, and while the one spoke broken english, my Qigong teacher was right from china and spoke no english at all. When I first started I had an interperater translate what I could not understand from physical demonstrations, I also HAD to learn chinese inorder to ask certain questions when The interperater was not available. It was diffacult at first but as My teacher learned english I was leearning chinese so we would use both to communicate.
There were many times that nothing worked so she had a pocket translater that I could type in what i wanted to ask and she could just hit a button and it would translate into mandarin.. Pretty handy gadget and under a $100 bucks......

[red_fists]

Hi.

When I start Tai Kyoku Kempo my Japanese was hardly existant.

My Sifu speaks only Japanese and the Sijo speaks Japanese, Chinese and a smittens of English.
So it was fun trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.
My Wife helped with some translations in the beginning.

But most of the times Sifu simply grabbed me and forced me into the correct Posture.

Now my Japanese has improved and I don't need a translator anymore.
Fun part is that a lot of the Posture names are written in Chinese but read in Japanese. Also Japanese use less Characters than the chinese so a lot are unknown to us.
On the reverse side while the beginning was tough I earned a lot of respect from both my Teachers and fellow students.

[Kevin Wallbridge]

I studied two years of University Chinese (I have an Asian Studies minor, so they were useful credit courses as well), then I lived in China for a year studying Qigong.