On the list of people’s fears, public speaking usually ranks near the top. Now imagine having to speak in public in a foreign language and you can see the challenges of being in the Chinese speech contest.

   On January 30, high school students from Kansas and Missouri competed in the fifth annual Chinese speech contest sponsored by the University of Kansas. LHS had five top wins and two honorable mentions.

   “It’s a two-step process, first the people that want to compete take a video of your speech and submit it for the final screening,” teacher Shianguu Hsieh said. “The judges at KU will look over all the videos submitted, they will select the top seven to ten and then invite them to compete live at Johnson County Community College.”

   All three levels of Chinese classes have to prepare and perform a speech for their semester one final. The topics vary between family, favorite things, their trip to China or hopes for the new year. The students were not obligated to compete in the contest, yet many decided to represent LHS and take the extra step in their education.

   “We all make speeches within Chinese class and we have to get that in a certain amount of time. We have to get that with a certain amount of phrases that you learn that year and it has to fit the topic,” sophomore Miles Allain said. “We record that and enter it into a video submission then people for the competition view it then select the top people and have them compete. A panel of five judges chooses the winner from there.”

   The students worked vigorously to write, memorize and perform their speeches. Students followed their teacher’s advice as they practiced their speeches.

   “The way that I prepared for it was I just practiced over my speech with my teacher and got down some phrases I needed to work on,” Allain said. “In Chinese, it’s really important to get your grammar correct and to get your tone marks right, so that you’re saying the correct stuff because there is a difference between saying ‘ten’    (十 Shí) and the word ‘is’ (是 Shì). It just matters all on how you say it, so I try to get it all worked out so I can have a very clear speech.”

   Students admitted that it’s not easy to speak the Chinese language.

   “The hardest thing is probably the fact that there’s no alphabet, there’s a certain character for each word or syllable, rather than having a character for ‘a’ and ‘b’ and so on,” senior Jessica Watt said.

   This contest grants students to exceed the basics of gaining a credit and experience the Chinese culture more vividly.

   “The contest itself is a good chance to practice a different language, to experience a different culture and I think that being involved in Chinese you do have a chance to see something that is so different from everything that we know and the language is completely different from English, French or Spanish,” senior Riley Payne said.

   The contest enables the students learning Chinese to go beyond the four walls in the classroom and go head-to-head against other Chinese programs.

   “The best thing for me and my curriculum is it offers a challenge with the students to work extra hard,” Hsieh said. “It is one thing to ace my Chinese classes or to get A’s on the test, but then there are other things when you go to the next level, to put all your knowledge and grammar rules and vocabulary together in a speech and work really hard and you learn Chinese better.”

   Both the competition and the school curriculum benefits students in the future because of the diversity incorporated in the programs.

   “This is something you can put on your resume for college, admission applications, for job applications or scholarship applications,” Hsieh said.

   Allain agreed.

   “You should do it specifically if you are in the Chinese class, so that you can actually practice having a conversation really with yourself so giving a speech in Chinese kind of helps you with your social skills,” Allain said.

   Chinese New Year

   Chinese classes celebrated the Chinese New Year on February 11 for the first three hours of the day.

   “We are having a little party, when we talk about celebration for the students. In China the schooling is very rigorous and very hard, we are expected to work, work, and work all the time, including the summer,” Hsieh said. “During the Chinese Year there’s about a one week when the students are not expected to study. I am here for three hours in the morning and so for the entire three hours we will block it down to have something that my students won’t have anything to do, just come and relax.”

   Almost the entire Eastern world celebrates the Lunar New Year; including Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and of course, China.

   “When we say Chinese New Year, we talk about the new year based on the lunar calendar, which is slightly off from the sun calendar that we use in the Western world. It’s typically from late January to mid February,” Hsieh said. “The earliest we could have it is January 21, the latest we can have is February 20, it’s different every year. It is similar to Jewish holidays and is not exactly on the same day every year, it’s the same phenomenon because Jewish holidays are based off the lunar calendar.”`