by Bob Flaws

Yesterday, Marnae Ergil and I had a short discussion on Facebook about teaching Chinese in Chinese medicine programs here in North America. Marnae's point was that, although a reading knowledge of Chinese is highly useful when studying and practicing Chinese medicine, adding Chinese language courses to the current curriculum would make entry-level education even longer and more expensive than it currently is. That's absolutely true and a real deal-breaker if that's the way you go about it. However, there is a saying, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting." What I am suggesting is a completely different approach to Chinese medical education using the learning of modern medical Chinese as the way of learning Chinese medicine. One would still take all the same courses/subject areas, but one would use the translation of basic contemporary Chinese medical primers as the modus operandi as opposed to the traditional "sage on the stage" lecture.

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Back in the late 80s-early 90s, I experimented with this approach to teaching/learning Chinese medicine at our short-lived school in Boulder. So I know the methodology I'm suggesting does work and can be implemented. Within the contemporary Chinese medical literature, there are primers on every subject area within Chinese medicine which are very, very simple. When you look at them, they are more outlines in their format, and often times there are no actual sentences, just lists of words or phrases. (It's hard to describe such texts adequately if one doesn't read Chinese. Chinese does not have the complicated grammar of Western languages and often there is even no hard and fast division of parts of speech. There's nothing inferior to these kinds of texts. In fact, they are often the very same texts Chinese lecturers teach from, however, monotonously reading from them in broken English.) So, for instance, for a medicinal, you get its name, nature, flavors, channel entries, functions, indications, contraindication, combinations, dosages all in outline form, all without any grammar. Same kind of thing for formulas. Same kind of thing for acupoints. Same kind of thing for pattern discrimination. Same kind of thing for pulse images. When it comes to treatment manuals, you have the disease name, a list of disease causes & mechanisms, then the treatment based on pattern discrimination. Under this section you have the pattern name, a listing of signs & symptoms, tongue & pulse images, treatment principles, and either an acu-formula with points or the name of a medicinal formula. If its a medicinal formula, then there's a list of the ingredients and their dosages, and finally modifications for this and that -- all essentially without any complicated grammar. That means that mostly what you are doing is simply looking characters up in a dictionary (or set of Chinese medical word lists).

In my experience as both a student and a teacher, most people can learn to look up a Chinese character in a dictionary in 3-5 hours of learning and supervised practice. With 10-15 hours of supervised practice, this skill is mostly a done deal. Heck, with on-line Chinese-English dictionaries such as Wenlin, one can look characters up very, very quickly. Sure, there are some difficult-to-find characters. Therefore, this process has to be supervised by someone who is either a native Chinese speaker or well-versed in this process. However, it's no big deal. Because of the nature of the Chinese language, literally, one can be translating simple, basic, outline-type primers within a day or two. And, by using this process, students learn to understand this medicine the same way Chinese understand it. They not only learn the subject matter in a linguistically accurate way, they learn the internal logic inherent in the Chinese language itself.

What this means is a much more process-oriented, problem-based style of learning. Students teach themselves rather than being lectured to. This is true adult education, and it develops skills that will last the practitioner a lifetime. Using this approach, one eventually gains access to the full library of Chinese medicine in Chinese. Slowly, one picks up more and more grammar and can read more grammatically complicated materials. Slowly, slowly one assimilates more and more characters simply by seeing them and looking them up over and over. At first, this process is slow, but the student is able to translate the material nevertheless. As time goes by, the main difference in the student's process is simply that they pick up speed and have to look up less and less characters. However, because we are talking about a specific subject area, the vocabulary is not open-ended; it is repetitive and eventually even becomes predictable.

To make this work, first, there needs to be a faculty who is willing and able to take this approach to learning Chinese medicine. (And yes, this approach can be supplemented by some "straight" lectures and assigned reading in English.) Secondly, there needs to be a cadre of students who know and are willing right from the get-go that this is the approach that is going to be used. Obviously, anyone unwilling or who believed they were incapable of learning to read Chinese would be debarred from entering such a program.

When people say, "Oh, we can't do that," what they mean is, "We can't do that if we keep doing what we're doing and we have no intention of actually changing." It is also said, "Where there is a will, there is a way." When I hear school administrators say there is no way to add Chinese language to the curriculum, what I hear is that there is no will to add Chinese language to the curriculum. There is no real willingness to innovate, try a radically new approach, think outside the box, push the envelope. But, actually, in my experience, teaching Chinese medicine via the medium of translation is very doable and results in students who really understand this medicine in an authentic, time-tested way. In closing, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."

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