May 5, 2014 at 3:08 p.m.
Rhinelander High School graduate competes in Chinese language competition
Rhinelander High School graduate competes in Chinese language competition
By Kayla Thomason-
Kuczmarski won the elementary-level campus competition and advanced to state but could not compete due to scheduling conflicts. The campus-level competition was hosted by the Chinese Language and Culture Club (CLACC).
Kuczmarski enjoyed the competition and plans to participate again in the future.
"I really just look forward to competing every single year because I definitely have the drive and the hunger inside now and I want to compete and I want to win," he said.
Although he was unable to compete at state, Kuczmarski did participate in a regional competition at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. after his campus competition. Students from all over the Midwest, including Notre Dame and the University of Iowa, participated.
Kuczmarski took third place out of 27 competing students. There were 13 or 14 high ranking colleges and 200 students participated at the various skill levels.
"It was pretty awesome to say that I did that and it was an awesome experience and I look forward to going back next year," he said.
The top finishers get to compete in the world competition in Bejing, and Kuczmarski has made that one of his goals.
He said he enjoyed being in the speaking contest, being around fluent speakers and listening to his professors and teaching assistants. They would critique him in Chinese, which helped him with his listening skills and pronunciation, he said.
Kuczmarski is a freshman double majoring in economics and Chinese.
He believes that Chinese will be very useful in the business world and, along with his economics education, will set him up for a bright future. Along the way he has become passionate about the language and culture.
"Once I started learning it I just kind of fell in love with it and I took a liking to learning the language and the culture," Kuczmarski said.
Given that he took two years of Spanish in high school and didn't excel at it, it's surprising Kuczmarski is doing so well learning Chinese, a language he chose because additional language classes are required for his degree.
"That led me along the path thinking 'I needed a language, so I'm going into business, well it would be beneficial' so I ended up picking up Chinese almost a little bit because of that," he said. "I think it's kind of interesting that Spanish, which is one of the most learned languages at the high school level, I thought was a little bit challenging for me and I come to college and I start picking up Mandarin."
Kuczmarski said he finds Chinese to be a difficult language to learn but it is really rewarding.
"I think it's a combination of the fact that I'm really interested in it and the fact that I've had the help of some amazing professors and teaching assistants along the way," he said, referring to how well he has picked up the language.
Many people find the complexities of the language, both written and spoken, to be a challenge to grasp, he said.
"The thing that makes Chinese often so difficult for Americans to learn is the fact that it is a tonal language, whereas in English you can speak it a lot of times in the same monotone and the only real tone shift comes at the end of question sentences," he said. "There are four main tones in Chinese and every single word can have different tones in it and even if it is the same literary pronunciation, if it has a different tone it can mean a completely different thing."
There are traditional and simplified characters. The traditional characters have more lines, making them very complicated.
Kuczmarski is learning the simplified characters, which have less lines to memorize.
"Chinese characters are all measured in strokes, depending on how many strokes of your pen or pencil or writing utensil it takes for you to finish the character," Kuczmarski said.
He explained that some of the more traditional Chinese characters can have as many as 15 strokes while a lot of the simplified characters have around eight or nine strokes.
Kuczmarski plans to immerse himself in the language and culture during his third year of college by enrolling in the Tianjin Summer Program.
The program allows students to spend a summer in China and take classes. The workload is intense, it takes the equivalent of a year's worth of Chinese classes and crams them into a summer class.
Kuczmarski intends to finish college in four years, take Chinese each year and earn a master's degree in business management.
His future goals are to get his stockbroker license and sell Chinese stock. He may eventually live in Beijing or Hong Kong, he said.
Rhinelander High School teacher Linda Goldsworthy has been keeping up with her former student's college career.
"I'm really proud of him, I think the fact that he chose to graduate [from high school] in three years instead of four says something about his determination," Goldsworthy said. "To pick up Chinese, which is a very difficult language, says a lot for his willingness to work hard at difficult tasks."
Kayla Breese may be reached at [email protected].
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