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Lynbrook graduate improves language abilities on location

By Melissa Fall

For most people, learning a second language is hard work. Learning a third is time-consuming, but a little easier. Learning a fourth is easier still, but something even the most avid linguist has trouble finding the time to do. For Sabine "Chantal" Stieber, becoming a proficient speaker of Mandarin Chinese is a goal well worth the hours of effort.

Stieber is a second-year biochemistry student at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. She enjoys music, loves technical theater, and recently returned from a six-week immersion program at Yunnan University in Kunming, China. Stieber lived in West San Jose during high school, but previously lived in Sunnyvale for 10 years.

Stieber is gifted in the art of learning a foreign language. Both of her parents speak German, and they made the decision early to raise their daughter bilingually. By the time she began attending Lynbrook High School in 2000, she was fluent in German, but she wanted another language under her belt. She took Spanish throughout high school, but her interest in Chinese was awakened on a band trip to Beijing and Shanghai during her junior year. Upon entering Whitman College in 2004, she was seriously considering the addition of Mandarin Chinese to her linguistic repertoire.

Chinese, however, was unlike the other languages she had already learned. English, German and Spanish all use the Latin alphabet, while Chinese is a character-based, tonal language with around 47,035 characters and at least 55 distinct tones. In a tonal language, the pitch of a word is a critical component of its usage, in addition to its consonant and vowel sounds. While people who speak English, German and Spanish use tone to denote emphasis, emotion and contrast, the tone of a word does not change its fundamental meaning as it does in Chinese. These crucial differences often make Chinese a challenging language to master for non-heritage speakers.

"Chinese was completely different from what I had already learned," she said.

But Stieber was determined. Her interest grew into a passion, and her experimental first semester in Chinese quickly became a language minor.

"I really loved it, and the professor was fantastic," she said. "So I stuck with it."

Her Whitman Summer Studies trip lasted from May 26 to July 13 and took her from Shanghai to Beijing. Most of the program was spent in Chinese language classes at Yunnan University in Kunming, a city in the Yunnan province in southwest China. The area is a unique region in the country and is well-known for its wholesale flower markets and high population of non-Han Chinese. After this month-long stay in Kunming, students saw the Forbidden City and met with a Great Wall expert in Beijing.

There were few surprising occurrences during their journey, although the competitive soccer season affected the Yunnan's international dorm residents in an unexpected way.

"We weren't counting on the kids being sleep-deprived because of the World Cup," program co-director Susan Brick said of the students from various countries, who stayed up all night to watch the games. "But it was a bonding type of thing."

The Whitman students made other memorable acquaintances in addition to their friends in the international dorm. Each of the American students was placed with a language partner, with whom they were instructed to speak Chinese with as much as possible. Their language partners were English students at the Yunnan University, so if the Whitman students needed help with their conversational skills, they could ask for clarification in their native language.

Stieber, however, needed less help than most. Her trip to China with Whitman Summer Studies this year was not her first--or even her second. Besides the band tour she'd taken in high school, Stieber was able to make a second trip after having been awarded a prestigious Freeman Foundation Grant last summer. This two-week program allowed for both travel and study periods, and special topics included Chinese gardens and calligraphy. She was one of 10 students selected, and was able to drastically improve her language skills.

Still, this summer's program allowed her to get even closer to fluency.

"Last year, I could explain what I wanted, but sometimes I couldn't understand responses," she said.

Often, she was forced to have people write down what they were trying to tell her. This year, though, all that had changed.

"I was able to understand a lot more," she said.

Stieber plans to make the language an even larger part of her life in the coming years. She's hoping to participate in a program Whitman facilitates that allows post-undergraduate students to teach English in China for a year after they've graduated.

It's safe to say that this trip to Yunnan wasn't her first, and it certainly won't be her last.