In a shift from my usual posts on foreign language, I thought to share an experiment I designed integrating the Sifteo cubes and the Creativity Kit with speech delivery and memorization.

Having been interested in joining a Toastmasters group and wanting to improve my Mandarin, I took the opportunity to join a bilingual Mandarin-English Toastmasters group. As one meeting was drawing to a close, I volunteered to be the Table Topics Master for the Mandarin section of the meeting.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Toastmasters meeting format, a Table Topics Master prepares a set of questions and calls on members of the audience at random to deliver impromptu 1-2 minute speeches. Although my Mandarin skills are elementary, I thought I would be able to get away with using simple sentences. Easy peasy.

When I decided what I wanted to ask, however, it became clear that my questions were more complex than I could express with my limited Mandarin skills; they required the use of sentence structures I hadn’t yet learned, not to mention a cornucopia of new vocabulary. In my rush of enthusiasm to become a Table Topics Master, I had bitten off more than I could chew.

But rather than backing out of the role, I decided to design a little experiment for myself. Could I use Sifteo cubes and the Creativity Kit application to help me memorize and effectively deliver some pre-written remarks in Mandarin?

The first step was to decide on my goal. What kind of results could I reasonably expect with my very limited Mandarin skills that had never been used in front of an audience?

More than anything, I wanted my questions to be understood by the audience. The audience’s level of fluency in Mandarin would vary quite a bit, and I knew that only a few members were native speakers. This meant correct and clear pronunciation was imperative.

As any new student of Mandarin will tell you, mastering the five tones is not easy if you’ve never encountered a tonal language before. My ability to distinguish and pronounce distinct tones was lacking, and I needed to improve that quickly. For me, there are few situations more awkward than asking an audience a question and facing a wall of blank, uncomprehending eyes. (Teachers, you know what I’m talking about.)

The second step was to practice delivering these remarks with a natural, confident air, meaning that learning the new vocabulary had to come first. From previous experience, I knew that speaking at length without understanding the content of my words would inevitably produces a clumsy, unnatural delivery that would interfere with the audience’s ability to comprehend my meaning, even if the words themselves were pronounced correctly.

Additionally, I had to remember to slow down. I have an unfortunate habit of speaking quickly, something that has been pointed out by several of my language students. When I get nervous, the speed increases in a desperate bid to finish. Maybe if I talk faster, they’ll understand more quickly! Ridiculous as it sounds, this is actually what floats through my mind at such times.

When I brought my concerns to one of my fellow Toastmasters, she advised me to not race to the finish, but rather to make an effort to speak at an especially measured pace so that the tones and sounds could be fully heard and understood. If you watch films or the news in Mandarin, you will notice that the speakers utter a few words at a time, then pause. I have always found this technique quite elegant and wished to follow this example.

Composing my remarks in English didn’t take too much time. Jenny, a fellow Toastmaster and native Mandarin speaker, helped me with the translation. Looking at the large block of text to memorize was intimidating; it clearly needed to be broken down. With 48 hours left, I decided to process the different parts of the text in layers.

Layer 1: Vocabulary

With a limited amount of time, I first noted the most commonly-used words and phrases along with their tones.

Layer 2: Syntax

Upon examining Jenny’s translation, I could immediately see that the syntax, though unfamiliar, followed a certain logical progression. One sentences with a lot of description depended on a series of nouns and phrases used as adjectives to modify the object noun.

Here is an example of one sentence:

I used the Creativity Kit program to break down the sentences into small units and played the sorting game to rearrange them, reviewing the sentences in 3-4 hour intervals.

Layer 3: Tones

In the snippet below, you can see that I capitalized some words. These words are in the first tone, which I used as a point of reference for identifying and remembering the other words’ tones. This strategy came to me when I thought of harp strings, in which the red and blue strings denote the C and F notes.

Even though the Sifteo cubes’ Creativity Kit doesn’t offer audio feedback, the Sorting program was quite helpful when I was working with the tone component. After a pronunciation coaching session with Jenny, I reviewed each sentence with the Creativity Kit: Sorting program, reciting the words aloud as I rearranged the cubes. Since the content was presented to me by the program, I didn’t have to search through my memory to generate the words themselves. This allowed me to effectively concentrate on and produce the correct stress pattern and tones of each sentence. By creating an individual file for each sentence, I could memorize each line’s pattern and gradually learn the whole sentence.

By the time it was my turn to speak, I had all 12 sentences memorized and the result of my experiment was largely successful. There were a few instances when the person I was speaking to did not quite catch everything I was trying to say. When I registered their confusion, I cheated just a bit and whispered the English translation to them. Despite these occasional misfires, several audience members were very generous in their compliments on my pronunciation and for making a valiant effort.

All told, I’m making steady progress with my Mandarin, and making some great friends along the way. I’ll keep you all posted on any future Sifteo cube – memorization experiments!