Mandarin Student (普通话学生)

Benny is learning Chinese!

2012-01-10T23:13:00.002Z

Quick post this, I have been far too busy recently. Benny is learning Chinese! I have not exactly been a fan of Benny in the past or his approach however I found his post quite refreshing.

Crucially I expected a lot of the usual 'negativity by proxy', I have suspected that he often courts negativity so he can then rant against it, I don't detect that in his post or video.
I have my doubts about him reaching the conversational fluency level described, three months is not very long. To offset that somewhat Benny does have a lot of experience learning languages. It is undeniable that the more experience you have in this respect the better.

I will be interested to see how the conversational level is tested, will Benny take a risk on a total stranger? It is quite a tall order to listen fluently and allow a native speaker to express themselves comfortably in their own language. Keith was very brave in his first chatwithout safety net.

I am not sure also what the reading will demonstrate in this time, Chinese signs could to a large extent be learned symbolically rather than phonetically and a menu can be learned in a similar manner. Different menus from different restaurants could be challenging. I wouldn't make a big thing about the simplified vs traditional, simplified does not mean simple and in some respects the more complex characters are easier to read unless on the small side (then they become squashed insects and blur together ;) ) Traditionally would be harder to handwrite I think.

I hope Benny enjoys the experience, that is the most important thing 加油

Declaring war on Chinese

2011-11-04T14:18:00.000Z

Have been somewhat stagnant on Chinese recently just ticking over a little, needed something to kick me off and set me on the path to conquer that last big hump (huge) mountain before I will consider myself fluent. Reall, really seriously out of practice but everything is still there.

Anger will do I think, yes definitely. Take some negative (and somewhat unfair emotions and feels, because after-all humans are by nature self-decievers). I am fed up with students who want to language exchange but go cold on you when they realise that is not just going to be a case of them teaching you nihao and they get almost all the time practicing English.

I am fed up with students who have taken years to realise that just studying in England and hanging around with Chinese people all the time isn't going to give them native English. They don't tend to tell you that they are going to back to China for good in a month and that this practice is their last desperate attempt to get better. So just when you thought you have found a good exchange partner, they bugger off.

I am fed up with being blanked or answered in English, when I try to talk to Chinese people now (no problem earlier stages in the process but now I just make them uncomfortable). Even when helping them in shops, two occaisions now, I help them understand what the staff said, they are very grateful, tell me my Mandarin is good (in broken English) and refuse to speak Chinese with me (thanks a lot, you can bloody understand me when I speak to you in Mandarin, just try speaking some Mandarin back to me you may be surprised, I am not just a talking monkey who has learned like a parrot).

I am fed up with the introduce me to your English friends etc. , but no way am I going to dilute your usefulness by introducing you to any of my Chinese friends attitude.

DISLAIMER none of this of course in any-way applies to some of the wonderful Chinese people I have met, just the rest of them...

I am doubly super fed with everybody who assumes I have sexual motives, I don't want to steal your women, I am happily married to an English girl, I have no Chinese wife, no Chinese girlfriend and to be honest even if I re-wound back to when I was single, Chinese girls are good at cute, and pretty but for me mostly too small and cute/pretty/attractive does not neccessarlily equate to sexy. Its a big world out there and every race / culture has beautiful women, learning Chinese to get a date is rather extreme.

I am now fed up with Chinese learners who live out there (for years), did a few semesters at college, have Chinese wives and girlfriends, actually are part Chinese and picked up some at home as kids etc. Being treated like they are the only ones who will every really get it. Blogging about the difficulties etc. Try doing it my way you wimps!

Not fashionable these days, but sometimes I get things done by injecting some negativity (I just do), this is not a Care Bear movie I don't need to be all fuzzy, smiley and positive all the time, sickly sweet, surrounding myself with people telling me they "believe in me" or scaring away all the "hard", "difficult" aspects for me. This last bit I am declaring war on, I don't care how hard or tough this next bit is, if I declare war on something, it is going down!

Ohh yeah apart from that feeling pretty good, loving learning Afrikaans and about to start a new language learning blog.

A Chinese chugger

2010-09-26T18:53:00.001Z

Introduction

A couple of days ago I spotted a Chinese chugger as I was walking back to work, a golden opportunity for conversation that cannot be missed. For more information on what a chugger is (or may be) either follow the link I gave or watch this video. I will use the word chugger for the rest of this post, I am aware that this vocation is not all good or all bad, even though my choice of the term chugger may seem somewhat derogatory.

Generally I don't have a lot of time for chuggers, if I want to donate to a charity I will do so on more than just a brief invitation and introduction (with sales pressure techniques etc.) I have both observed chuggers and sometimes engaged then in conversation (to get a feel for their techniques) I would be fascinated to see some of their training, as they have to break down barriers fast, introduce a concept to a stranger and get them to sign over regular payments all in a short period of time, their techniques and approach have a lot to do with language use and learning.

This particular chugger was pretty obviously Chinese, so I started off right-away by confirming that (in Chinese) and then took the opportunity for a little conversation practice.

The practice

My chugger seemed a little surprised but then discussed my Chinese learning background for a bit, she assumed I was a teacher or lecturer (of what I do not know) based on the fact that the only person who had talked Chinese with her to-date was a lecturer (of what I didn't ask) and to be fair we were quite close to Bristol university. She also asked if I was English (I hadn't spoken any), this happens quite often now, sadly I suspect because other Europeans are considered to be better at languages than us Brits. I was pleased that she seemed quite happy to continue in Chinese, so I was treated to an introduction to Amnesty International in Chinese. I could follow along quite well and could break it up a little by adding comments that led to discussion about myself. Chuggers are supposed to engage you in conversation and explore you opinions etc. the idea being to make you receptive to the sale. During the whole process there were only a few places where she switched to English briefly. On one occasion she was explaining how Amnesty International influences various world organizations (she either didn't trust my Chinese or had learned the script in English and wasn't entirely confident of translating it to Chinese on the fly) on two other occasions she used phrases that had obviously been taught to her as important parts of the sales script and were designed to engage my emotions (the "magic" is much less likely to work on me if not in my mother tongue).

The time was rapidly approaching the sale, I needed a get-out, fairly easy on the one or two occasions I have talked with English chuggers but my Chinese is not good enough for anything complex (and I didn't want to be rude). I explained that I am a computer programmer and although good with computers I was rubbish at managing everyday life so my wife manages everything in that department (although not entirely true this is plausible ;)). I got a comeback that the direct debit wouldn't start straight away etc. so I could check with my wife but I stuck to my guns and that was that.

Communicators

Chuggers are trained to communicate, the guys (for example) will act more like one of your mates if you are a guy, they may flirt subtly with you if you are a girl and if an older women they will either flirt or present themselves as a nice young man (whichever looks like it will work the best). Some of their techniques for breaking down communication barriers can be reused to break down communication barriers when practicing a language. This Chinese girl is unlikely to be hampered by her English (I don't know how good her English is), she is short and pretty so is looking up at most Western guys in a cute way, also well versed (or a natural) in the simple subtle flirtation that will break down barriers with a lot of guys; leaning in slightly and a quick touch on the forearm with her hand when explaining something or sharing some snippet of knowledge all done so quick you barely notice (but your subconscious will). Studying sales and dating techniques etc. in your own language will certainly give you pointers for communication.

Follow up

I will follow this up by acquiring some extra vocab. and better strategies for exploiting my next language chugger. If in a foreign country studying language then I would definitely find many more of these opportunities. Some people have to communicate with you it is their job, why not exploit that opportunity, of course you would have to be prepared to avoid the date or sale or con. or whatever if that wasn't your goal. I will also track down some Amnesty International information in Chinese online, it will reinforce or remind me of some of the things she said (may put something into active language that was only passive before or move something up from unknown to passive).

Chinese voices

2010-09-12T19:18:00.004Z

Some fun with recording.

Two different ways I have been playing with sound.

Searching for a voice

Computer crash this weekend has made this post somewhat harder than it should be, I am going to be doing much more output in the future, even in the area that I hate (recording), I have had hangups with telephones even with English, I have used Skype for Chinese (but each time a bag of nerves beforehand) and a microphone always reduces me to a self-conscious wreck. I have very little nerves talking face to face though.
I need get over this, perhaps I will have to take a test where I record my voice or participate in a telephone interview. So increasingly I will record voice files both off the cuff and as part of other exercises. I am not happy with my recorded voice at all, this latest example is particularly slushy and inaccurate but I gave myself one shot to say what I wanted to say (that will force me to get better in real-time). I have fixed on using Audioboo for now as they offer a quick convenient way to record and upload short sound files from an Ipod Touch.
Listen!
This example is simply about my Chinese voice (I haven't found one yet), obviously I don't want to talk like a girl or a tough guy from and old movie. I summarised it down (a little hurriedly to fit a Twitter post as follows. One reply already points out that rather than referencing movie voices from old films I would be better off looking to TV and new films (true but I still don't know who would be appropriate to copy).
我还没找到自己的汉语声音，我也还不肯定什么汉语声音是最好听，什么音色适合我。有一些电影里的男人说话很好听，不过不是时代的方式。我也听说过，很多老外学通过他们的中国太太，女朋友学中文，结果是他们的说话有女人的样子。问题是：我到底会不会自己选择一个地道很好听的汉语声音？#133字看法

Zombie School

I am always running crazy scenarios in my head, I had one provoked by a Chinese lesson at Popup Chinese, they have some crazy lesson content, but solid Chinese that helps to remember things and some good examples of Northern dialect and pronunciation. The lesson provoked an imaginary movie advert in my head, when I wanted to play with some new Ipod Touch software I decided to pull the advert out into the real world. Over 20 years ago it took a hardware sampler and couple of computers to do this kind of thing now you can do it with an Ipod touch and £8.99 0f software. This is just a bit of fun, the strange beat is to match the syncopated but fast movement of the zombies, and it only really works with headphones or good speakers (the heartbeat I made by modifying a drum sample is too low and quiet for example).
Listen!
All the voices are me, sampled through a standard IPod mic, just messed around a little with reverb etc. They are pretty much what I hear in my head, I am least satisfied with the news reporter. The guy that says "They are my sons friends, his fellow students" gets played twice because although I don't know how authentic that voice is I heard someone talk just like that when he was being interviewed on a Chinese news program. Yes I know it doesn't make a lot of sense without the video cut scenes that only exist in my head but I had fun.

Summary

I sound forced and self-concious, also I seem to make mistakes that I am less likely to make when talking for real (a friend confirmed this for me). I actually feel more comfortable with a microphone when trying to act a part. I will definitely continue experimenting with sound though. And pursue more recorded project similar to the fake film advert.

Change of style

2010-09-08T12:30:00.001Z

Official notice that this blog is going to change quite considerably in style as my Mandarin Journey alters. There will be some strange (but hopefully thought provoking posts) and details of a journey towards becoming a highly literate Chinese speaker (I have plans and will have fun).

For a blog that is more focused on the early stages of learning a language (after applying what I have learned whilst learning Chinese) than please visit my Thai learning blog.

My next post this weekend will include an audio file that I made with music and some Chinese speaking (I said it will get strange ;)). I think it was an exercise that started me on a journey towards a much higher level of Mandarin.

Mandarin has five tones

2010-09-08T12:21:00.000Z

Just a quick thought in passing, I have always considered Mandarin to have five basic tones, not the often quoted four. I guess it comes down to how linguists define tones but four tones + the neutral tone in my mind adds up to five. Not using the neutral tone correctly can make works sound wrong or even change the implied meaning. I appreciate that the neutral tone has more of a role to play in multi-syllable words etc. but come on, surely it is a tone? It adds a similar mental load.

I will admit that Thai "feels" a little more like a five tone language, as the middle flat tone in Thai gets a bit more emphasis and can apply to single syllables in their own right rather than just their position in a certain word or phrase, For me though Mandarin has five tones.

Disclaimer: I am ignoring all the bits and pieces that may happen in speech like third tones that may become second (but not quite second) etc. and any extra tones that may sneak into "near Mandarin" dialects.

Anybody else back five tones???

There are lots of Chinese people

2010-07-26T20:25:00.001Z

Okay, the title of this post is somewhat obvious, there are a lot of Chinese people and in at least three cities and a bunch I towns I frequent it is quite easy to get casual language practice, quite easy to find Chinese people to listen to and with a bit more effort quite easy to find longer conversations. Not so easy as living in a country that speaks your target language of course but much much easier than some languages I guess.

I have been a little quiet here recently but have posted a lot posts on my learning Thai blog, Thai being the second language I have seriously attempted I can focus much better on telling the story of how I learn a language and refine those things that seemed to have worked with learning Chinese. This blog is going to focus more on what happens next after I can cope with everyday conversation (a bit more and a bit less in some cases). I will also deal with what happens as I try "normalising" what I have learned in Chinese with more mainstream leaning, I have decided to take the HSK4 (probably early next year but I haven't checked out the times when I can take it for sure). for now though this post is about yesterday. I emphasize input a lot because I think input is what you spend most of your time doing doing when learning a language....

A fairly lucky day for Chinese practice but you make your own luck to some extent, another rambling brain dump I am afraid but it shows what I do.

Yesterday I went shopping in Bath with my wife, no set plans for language learning, and I have mostly been in Bristol recently. Eventually we wanted a coffee (or similar) so went to a chocolate/coffee shop. This place serves an excellent hot chocolate (forget anything you mostly think you know about hot chocolate, they also do a good mocha coffee), it is also somewhere where about a year ago I had a most excellent and alas too short language learning discussion with a Belgian, a Frenchman, a Malaysian Chinese and another Chinese girl from Shanghai. Today the shop had four (yes 4) Chinese staff. One of which was the girl from Shanghai (after a while Asian people don't all look the same and vice-versa I suspect) she seems to have become a manager there. This gave me the opportunity for a little Chinese chat, nothing spectacular (I was with someone who doesn't speak any Chinese) but everything helps, different accents, different ways of saying the same thing etc.

A little later and my wife wants to look for something I am not interested in so we split up for about 20mins, left to my own devices I go to a Chinese medicine shop I know but the shop is closed there is a sign saying they have moved. I hear Chinese (Bath is a city that has a lot of tourists you often hear Chinese). There is a party of Chinese tourists, some guy is talking to them loudly so I go up and listen. Nothing very interesting, they are talking about lunch apperently the guy (tour leader?) is going to take them to Hai bao for food. Not sure what he means, Ocean something probably, I think of Hai main bao bao (Sponge Bob Square pants). I assume Hai bao is a translation of something English, but don't know. As they march off I walk with them (why not?). I try not to look too obtrusive, perhaps some one will talk to me. They don't walk far, going into a shopping mall and up an escalator and the puzzle is solved, hai bao is there in big Chinese characters, "Ocean Treasure" a Chinese all you can eat buffet restuarant (not very authentic food for the tourists doh!!).

I am in the right place for the medicine shop, these places are everywhere (although fewer since the recession) the staff always speak Mandarin because they get their Chinese Doctors from mainland China and the staff often have to translate for the Doctors (all of their recruitment pages on-line for the various different medicine shops stipulate that the staff must speak good Mandarin (do your homework ;)). Anywhere I have gone in the UK I can usually get at least a little practice in a medicine shop, they are often expensive but you don't have to buy anything, and if you speak Mandarin they often forget the "hard sell". I find out if they have Tiger Balm, how much it is etc. No I don't need it now I have enough but I used to buy it from them where they were previously (the guy behind the counter is new to me though). They have other customers and I have run out of time....

Later on we are in clothes shop, my wife goes to try something on, I let her know I will be back shortly, opposite this shop, there is a mobile phone accessory shop, via a complicated set of coincidences (can't explain all it would take too long) I suspect a Chinese student I knew (I met her and her Chinese finance when they were working in a cafe and we met up a few times last year to practice English and Chinese) has been working there. There are a Chinese couple in the shop, I haven't prepared but say something along the lines of I am looking for an old friend and I think she works there. No problem but apparently she left a while ago and is now studying in Cardiff.

More shopping, and we have lunch (Spanish), a little later and time to go but we have one more coffee in a Starbucks. I draw the shortstraw and whilst my wife finds a table I join the queue, two Chinese people are ahead of me youngish guy and girl, haven't been in England long judging by their clothes, and manner. I spend a little time listening to their conversation, the bits I can hear are fairly simple, they are mostly talking about things in the coffee shop. They don't buy their drinks together, as she leaves to take her drink to the table I start talking with the guy, how long has he been in England (three months) I compliment him on his pronunciation (more English than American which is unusual) he asks me about my Chinese etc. We move into English, some people would say you should never do this but I tend to see communication as a two way thing, he has been in England for a few months and is going to be starting an Engineering masters degree soon, he wants to practice speaking some English.

I am going to try following a few tours of Chinese tourists when I have a chance, should be interesting. I was genuinely looking for someone in the mobile phone shop but if not I could have made up a name and pretended I was (they will just tell me that X has never worked there). I could have asked the Chinese couple in the coffee shop the time (the time in China that is) I have done that about twenty times before and so far no one has asked me why I need to know the time in China even though some have stopped to chat. None of these are long conversations, that can take a little more luck or planning.

When I get home I pull out my Ipod touch and look up a few things that I wasn't sure about, for example I heard the Chinese girl pointing at something and asking in Chinese if it meant xiao fei. the guy confirmed in Chinese that it did. I was puzzled, I assumed she meant tip, Chinese visitors are often worried about tipping but when I got to where there were, none of the signs had anything about tips (service charges or gratuities). When I looked up the word I realized it wasn't xiao3fei4 but xiao1fei4 (to be fair it is harder to eavesdrop when there is a lot of background noise) I should have worked it out though (we become blinded by what we expect), the word "consume" is bound to have been on one of those signs.

Sometimes when moving through a city I don't go five minutes between each occasion I hear Mandarin being spoken by someone. NOW THERE IS A THOUGHT.

The slow language

2010-06-07T21:35:00.002Z

My Thai language learning may well be too analytical already to ever be able to really master the language (I don't know for sure). I have plans for Chinese that I think will allow me to progress a lot further but I am keeping one language to myself. I am learning it quite slowly but one language is going to be entirely input based for early and middle stages, I won't even blog about it or say what it it is.

As for the more analytical nature of some of my other language learning, I want to see what is going on, I want to be able to come back to it in years to come and understand what happened.

I am aiming to be able to speak a number of languages and start traveling in the not tooo distant future. For this blog however the focus will mainly become what to do to take my Chinese on to the next stage.

Thai blog

2010-06-06T20:57:00.002Z

My Thai learning blog is now public, starting to learn a new language has really helped me to understand my language learning better, that link is for the first post. I will soon be reviewing the state of my Chinese and planning the next steps in both Chinese and Thai.

For my own purposes (because I know when I look back on it I won't remember it like it was) I have been analyzing thinss too much, I think what I will get back when I seriously start my third language will be a big enough payoff though.

There is a lot there and of it is quite repetitive I guess, also mainly written in haste, so don't be afraid to ask questions if you read a post, I will be happy to answer them even if they are addressed elsewhere.

Thai Experiment

2010-05-23T21:34:00.001Z

I may be quiet here for a little while. I didn't start language learning until quite late in life, Mandarin was my first serious attempt but now I want to apply what I have learned to other languages (whilst continuing with Mandarin of course). For the last eight weeks I have been learning Thai. I have been keeping a private blog (over 20 posts so far) that will be made public soon (within two weeks at the most). I have discovered some surprising things about my language learning.

Pinyin revisited

2010-05-15T08:55:00.002Z

Summary

I haven't posted about Pinyin (the romanisation of Chinese characters) for some time. Thought I would raise a few observations for comment.

Remember the tones with 5 new letters

Here is the weird bit, tones in pinyin are represented with those fiddly little marks over letters that we don't use in English, we find them hard to remember. There are plenty of learners who learn a lot of vocabulary but don't know the tones, they can remember "hen" remember the sound but not the little tick mark that goes over the 'e'. Of course you get those that can but there are plenty of people that don't. Actually a lot of Chinese people that use use pinyin on a daily basis for texting or as in a hanzi computer input method never bother with the tone marks and don't know the rules for where to put them and probably don't know how to input the tone marks on a computer, they don't need them.

Now for the weird bit, all you need to do is add five more letters to your alphabet and you can remember the tone if you remember the pinyin spelling. ying1guo3 tells me how to say England and the tones to use. After all we use letters for numbers in number bases above 10 so FF in base 16 is 255 in base 10, so why not use numbers to help writing and memory? I never bothered setting up a computer so I could type those little tone marks. If I write pinyin with a pen or computer I use numbers and that really really really helps you remember the tones.

It is not a Crutch

It seems a popular misconception amongst some people who haven't learned Chinese or only been learning for some time, that pinyin is a crutch for learners. In reality it is a tool and a tool that Chinese people use themselves, it is used to enter Chinese characters into mobile devices, used as an input method for typing Chinese on computers by most Chinese people, used in Chinese character dictionaries etc. etc.

Older Chinese who don't know pinyin are at a disadvantage, they may have to use a writing tablet to write Chinese etc. etc. so investing time in learning pinyin and learning it well is not going to be a waste.

If someone doesn't progress to learning characters don't blame pinyin.

The Chinese advantage

In Chinese every syllable counts, has a meaning, is a building block. If you master pinyin quickly you can hear words and have a very efficient way to look up the words you have heard in a dictionary

Pop-up Chinese Resource

2010-05-01T16:51:00.001Z

Trying to remember to keep posting resources, this time we have Popup Chinese a whole bunch of stuff going on here including help with HSK testing and a variety of podcast lessons. I don't know much about the subscriber facilities for now but you can listen to the lessons for free.

Usually I would look to be practicing with Chinese radio or video now, but recent work pressures and another language project have loaded my brain somewhat, I have quite enjoyed listening to popup Chinese in the background on a few occaisions now. Even on the simpler elementary lessons it is still worthwhile because they tend to introduce a few less well know, more authentic words and phrases and because the speech can often be fast or involve people with accents (as in real life). The scenarios are often outlandish, which I like, it is the speech patterns and words that you need to learn if the scenario is a bit wierd I think that can help you remember.

Definitely worth checking out if you are learning Chinese.

Passion in language learning

2010-04-18T09:50:00.001Z

Summary

I was going to write a comment on this post by Benny but decided to write a post here instead (lest I be accused of negativity). I see more and more of these kind of messages, I don't think they are particularly helpful, I think they are so off the mark in regard to human nature that they are actually harmful.

If you find winging helps you then go for it (I might not want to listen though), if you find you have have a slightly miserable outlook on life yet still achieve then read on. If you hate sugar saccharin sweetness then read on. If on the other hand you have an over active gland somewhere in your brain that truly means you are always upbeat never doubt etc. then leave now and and have a nice day.

Besides is the post entirely positive, aren't people just getting a buzz out off feeling they aren't on of the slackers, getting a buzz out of complaining about the cry babies?

The Commentary

This is going to hurt but here goes, as Benny says this applies to many things in life, you can apply the same positivity logic to many often more important things, people who ruin their health with smoking or over eating or drug addiction. You can move into socially sensitive areas ("stop winging about not having children, you made the life choice that left it too late") but most people don't feel comfortable when you do that etc. etc. Actually for most instances language learning isn't important enough to warrant the worry in comparison to much more important ones (although learning a language can be vital for some to be sure).

The truth is many of the wingers didn't want it enough and some of them may be stable geniuses and satisfied over achievers in other areas, it is human nature to blame something else, whether failing to lose that two stone of weight or pass the MBA exams. People that achieve things often successfully apply this attitude in one area or another and yes it is important, but we are humans which means that very few people can take this approach in every area of their life or we would all be enlightened beings by now ;)

It is easy to find negativity in any endeavour but also easy to find positivity, yes people whine about tones in Asian languages but I picked up a book from a charity shop today about Thai that was very positive and upbeat about tones and that was written 20 years ago, go back over one hundred years and the famous Mr Giles tells us that spoken Chinese is quite easy to learn and six months or so should have you chatting away about all sort of matters (and they didn't even have mp3). When I started Mandarin I found lots of negativity but lots of positivity also and advice, and bloggers telling a more compelling message than the textbook, a message that supported my own positivity in knowing that I could learn to talk with Chinese people on my own in England (not being negative here I didn't actually want to travel at that time :O ) The Internet opened up my language learning world and there is plenty of positivity there when you need it.

For anyone who is inspired by the positivity post, then congratulations you have learned a life lesson but not about language learning, rather about learning or achieving almost anything. Now the good news is you can skip any similar post on any other area you become interested in and save time (a positive message).

For anyone who reads the post and feels guilty because they are one of the wingers then either get stuck in or decide that actually you don't really care enough about languages and be what you can be somewhere else, be positive about the things you have achieved :) You probably have a bigger car or a bigger $%^! than these successful language learners anyway and hey remember you play the saxophone like a god... (a positive message).

The danger is that life is a balance, be too positive and you can be positive that that evening course really is going to teach me to speak Mandarin this side of age 100 (and where would that have left me). But it runs deeper some of the greatest achievers are those that are never satisfied no matter what, they always award themselves 1 out of 10 no matter what, or they are often tortured by self doubt or other negative emotions. Not sure I want to be like that but I reap the rewards offered by those that are, the artists (I don't think Van Gough was on the whole very positive), the writers (Hemingway, Poe .... ) the scientists ..... and quite frankly if people like that want to winge or wake up some nights in a cold sweat of self doubt I say let them.

Take away the negative and you take away Punk music, you take away Joy Division Love Will Tear us Apart, you take away so much that is me, my tongue can taste both bitter and sweet and every aspect of my life is the same including my own attitude to life.

If you like this comment then be aware that it was mostly driven by negativity (with a twist of passion) but I guess most people can find positive messages in it if they are positive enough in their outlook (a kind of negative-positive mobius strip). I really, really do believe however that too much positivity is bad, like too much sugar, there are some things that taste better with lemon, sometimes a touch of wistfulness and melancholy with a glass of good wine is better than happiness at that moment. No I didn't skip the post but being human I often forget to apply my own life hacks (doh).

If someone is always positive then why change anything?

The next level doesn't even require you to be positive or negative, be the language, the language just is... learning Chinese? then be Chinese, at that time, (maybe a Chinese amnesiac who has to learn his own language again ;)). Don't judge the language, accept it. If you drive your language learning on positivity alone there is a danger that the energy can run out. IF you can find a way to drive the learning from both positive, negative and neutral feelings you will drive forward and learn something every single day, it will be impossible to go a single day without engaging with the language you will be in love with the language (and love of course is both bitter and sweet).

Maybe some will feel this is an inappropriate comment on Benny's positivity post but look again, can you feel the passion, I am passionate about some issues, and in a fight of emotions I would take passion over positivity any day. Think of passionate people (are they always positive?) even with negativity they can achieve their dreams.

How much do you want to learn like a child?

2010-04-05T16:36:00.005Z

I am working on a mini-project at the moment that is helping to focus my views and opinions on language learning. One big battle that is raging is between natural methods and academic methods, although I guess very few people sit right at either extreme. Part of the battle rages over learning like a child (natural) and the view that once we have passed puberty we can't use certain abilities (that help us absorb language rather than study language for example). My approach is developing into a mostly natural one but with some big exceptions, I justify my exceptions on the basis that in many ways children suck at learning languages.

Children and nature do some really dumb things when it comes to learning language, some are their own fault and some are just down to plain circumstance, here are a few examples.

Firstly they start learning languages before they have the cognitive ability to do it properly (or maybe they need the language to develop the cognitive ability it doesn't matter either way). So even at the stage when they have a growing vocabulary a good ear for their mother tongue they are still missing some abstract thinking capabilities, the ability to see things from someone else's point of view etc. this really restricts their progress and understanding of the language.

Secondly they spend a lot of their formative years hanging around with and conversing with other learners of the same language (other Children in fact). Don't they know that they should live in the target language not hang around with a bunch of 'expats' that don't speak it properly yet.

Thirdly they are lazy, very lazy most of them don't try, they can learn their target language far faster if they apply themselves rather than let nature take its course, the occasional precocious child or bookworm show quite clearly how much faster they could learn.

Fourthly they consistently try to talk even before they are ready (whoa there you are going to get fossilized little fella stop that meaningless babble and wait until you are ready to say it properly).

Fifthly as they get older many of them not only hang around mostly with fellow learners they even actively resist the target language, often going so far as to make up their own words, change the meanings of words or adopt language from another culture/dialect just because it seems cooler. They can carry this to the extent that they will alienate any of their fellow learners who appear to be too good at the target language ("grown up").

Sixthly there is no consistency each child depending on circumstance and interest bumbles around picking up what they can, so a bunch of little classmates may have some who know how to say their primary colors, a precocious child who loves learning colours and knows the difference between tope and aqua-marine, some annoying child who loves cars, won't say any colors and points at red saying "brake light" and little billy who seems happily oblivious to any color language and if you don't pull up your socks young man I am going to have to fill in a bunch of forms, talk to your parents and get a specialist in to test your vision (sigh!).

Do I need to continue? There are many more stupid things that Children and nature do when it comes to language, perhaps because it is compromise, perhaps because talking apes aren't natural at all, perhaps because the selfish meme idea is correct (do we speak languages because we evolved that way or did we evolve this way because some ape like creature got infected with proto language and from that point there was no going back).

Because of all this and because of the fact that I was already almost 40 before I started learning foreign languages (and I want to learn about five of the damn things mostly becasue it is best hobby I found for a long time) I will cherrypick. I am happy to listen to language I don't understand (when I think it is helpful). I am also happy to watch video WITH subtitles, and without, unlike the Child I have already been infected with one language I can use it to speed things up (if I am careful). I am not afraid of fossilisation (I don't see how some naturalists can argue that yes I can absorb like a child but no I can't avoid fossilisation of my mistakes like a child).

I am a naturalist, I disdain grammar study, ignore textbooks, I will use the most natural effective approaches I can and armed with my Ipod touch ERRRK (not exactly natural), armed with my Video ERRRK (also not very natural), my mp3's ohhh damn this isn't looking anything like when I learned my mother tongue!

Sighh nothing is ever simple is it? Perhaps I should just grab the language when and how feels good at the time, apply meaning to it when and how I feel like it, check back with reality every now and again to ensure I am making progress avoid stress and have fun. I do want to make reasonably rapid progress though so when that stops happening I will think again.

SocialMandarin and Chinese swear words

2010-04-05T08:44:00.003Z

I will keep trying to interleave my posts with links to resources, today we have socialmandarin.com this site is very young at the moment and needs users to join and contribute so why not give it a go. It is a place for Mandarin learners to share and comment on Mandarin resources.

I am confident that you will already find something of interest there, I found the following on Chinese swear words and slang now I know why someone I follow on twitter occasionally drops 靠 into his tweets..

My Chinese Reading Experiance

2010-03-28T18:16:00.002Z

Summary

My last post described my experience learning to read English this one extends this to my experience of learning to read Chinese so far. Let me say that I haven't completed this process yet and that this post may summarize some details and opinions that will be elaborated on in later posts. My approach has been more about acquiring characters than learning them and it has progressed far enough for me to think that it is successful.

First appraisal

Here is what I quickly found out when I started, Chinese is not phonetic, did you hear that Chinese is not phonetic. This means that Chinese as it sits on the page and unlike my mother tongue has no sound ... it is silent it has no sound except the sound that I give it and that sound may be completely different depending on the language/dialect that is applied. That is huge, that makes me instantly stop listening to anybody who is European and tries to justify approaches to reading based on European languages or how they used subtitles to learn Spanish etc. To be scientific it about it their conclusions may or may not be correct but they are completely unconnected to their reasoning. Everything changes, a Mandarin speaker may be able to read and understand the writing of a Cantonese speaker despite not being able to speak each others language he will have no idea what it is supposed to sound like, whereas an English speaker can quickly learn to "hear" the writing of a German speaker even if he has no idea what it means. At first glance the Chinese have the upper hand but consider that the Mandarin speaker cannot learn Cantonese from the writing but an English speaker could conceivable get most of the way to mastery of German entirely through the written form, and that the advantage of meaning over sound comes at the price of having to master a harder writing system.

Process (or lack of it)

I have long ago decided that dictionaries are unreliable, they are not even particularly good at defining a word in a language, in its own language, if I know the definition of a foreign word in my own language I have often barely started to learn it. If I started intensively learning to read Chinese when I started learning Chinese, I would be learning to read words I didn't know, learning to read English meanings for characters that have no sound. If I wait however I will be learning to read words I know, I will be hearing Chinese. I decided I AM NOT READING CHINESE UNLESS I AM HEARING IT.

Acquiring characters means that I have learned to write some but never really stressed about it, I have learned the stroke order rules by occasionally trying to write a character and then watching an animation, have learned reading a lot of characters by watching subtitles for Chinese when I can understand the audio (I understand a lot of learners work this the other way around), extended my learning by using Chinese subtitles on English audio and recently using Chinese subtitles to understand material were the audio is in a language I do not understand, have used a genuine zidian (Chinese character dictionary) to look up characters by radical and stroke count (only a little), have acquired familiarity with a number of radicals and character components and phonetic elements without really studying them etc etc. I have noticed characters by looking at them when looking up words but not learning them. I have run pop-up translators over text to read (but always strived to use them less because it slows me down), have modified pop-up translators to only give pinyin for characters (no definition). I hope that big mush of text above gives the impression that I have been attentive to characters but mostly concentrating on learning Chinese not Hanzi. I can almost exclusively only read or understand written Chinese I can already speak and when I read Chinese I hear Mandarin in my head (sometimes now the really familiar stuff goes straight to pictures and meaning).

This means that my handwritten Chinese is poor, I can use my finger to write things like 我是一个英国人正在学中文，下一步是什么？ on misty a bus window but not enough characters in my handwritten repertoire to make many sentences. I hardly ever need to handwrite Chinese though. When I read, I read the stuff I know well fast, and can quickly work out a whole bunch more, sometimes I can read a few paragraphs from a personal email with hardly a pause. I still have many problem areas and am particularly weak with news articles, I did worry about the news thing but discovered some Chinese people I met who had lived in England for years, worked in England and who I considered to have good English, still struggled with our news, so news is awaiting an assault later this year.

I read a lot, starting to read novels, but cutting my reading teeth on snippets from Twitter and bits I find in Google when searching for words and phrases. So I can read 上个月家里用了 1,000 kW•h 的电，怎么搞的，我还在想是不是什么漏电了。 and just need to look up 漏电. Or I can read 孩子不肯睡觉有许多原因：怕黑、担心自己不能醒来、害怕一个人睡觉等等。同睡觉相比，他们无疑更喜欢玩或看电视，而且他们愿意你总在他们身边关照他们。 Pushing it somewhat I can read 建工作正在进行中的奉节县城，迎来一男一女两个山西人。　　男人韩三明（韩三明饰）来自汾阳，是名忠厚老实的煤矿工人，来奉节为寻十六年未见的前妻。前妻是他当年用钱买来的，生完孩子后跑回了奉节。寻找前妻的过程中波折不断，韩三明决定留下来做苦力一直等到前妻出现。女人赵红（赵涛饰）来自太原，是名沉默寡言的护士，为寻多日不曾与自己联系的丈夫而来奉节。丈夫与她的夫妻关系早已是有名无实，这点她虽然深知，仍想让丈夫当面给她个说法。赵红的找寻过程也不是一帆风顺，丈夫在有意无意地躲着她。韩三明和赵红虽不认识，却因为要做相对意义上的“拿起”与“舍弃”抉择，在冥冥之中有了某种神秘的联系。　　本片荣获2006年第63届威尼斯国际电影节金狮奖。 © 豆瓣 with the aid of looking up a few words and having watched the film in question.

I still have far too many gaps and gaping caverns, my method of learning to read Chinese would be useless for passing tests in college (good job I don't need to pass tests) but now I am in a virtuous cycle, the more I read the better I get.

This post is a summary, it is hard to describe what is going on in the sub-concious, apologies it won't be of interest to most people, but I decided I didn't need to stress about learning Hanzi and it appears that in my case I was right, and when I read I hear Chinese, when I learn a new phrase from reading, I can say it if I wish, job done.

The Sound of Reading

2010-03-07T21:50:00.003Z

What sound does reading make? At first glance this may appear to be strange question but I believe the answer to the question is key to how you should approach learning a language. First let me map a typical path to reading mastery of English (should also apply to many European languages and languages with a simple phonetic script) as a mother tongue.

I was lucky because when I went to school in England they hadn't started the stupid approach that means they try to cram "measurable" and "iterative" learning of reading English (based on letters and writing and testing etc.) as early as possible into a child's life, this means that I was already over five years of age before I starting doing any formal learning of the English alphabet and that I can remember learning to read (my mother and her contempories were wisely told NOT to try to teach us to read prior to attending school). The sound of reading was my mother or father reading a story to me, I knew somehow the story was encoded in the page (becasue every time they told the same story it was the same words and they turned the pages at the same point) but I was more interested in the picutures and hearing the story they were telling me. So the sound of reading was my parents voices and besides I had no real time to worry about the writing becasue there was the story, there were the pictures and there were the many new words that I was hearing and learning in the stories. By the time I started schooling I guess I could probably recognise a few words that were of special interest in my life "toy" "sweets" etc. and that were important to recognise on signs especially when out shopping but I certainly could not break them down into their component letters and sounds.

At school the sound of reading suddenly took a turn for the worse, the sound of reading was a teachers voice whilst pointing at letters and expecting us to learn that "a is for apple", "b is for ball", ......, "i is for indian" etc. etc. I can still remember vividly the chart that we had on the wall. At home I was not longer interested in the book when my parents read a story to me, I liked stories especially adventure stories, if I was lucky enough to get a story I just want to listen and enjoy now. Sometimes they read to me and I was supposed to pay attention to the words, I hated it, those times the stories weren't the least bit interesting, they weren't even stories "Dick is sad." actually "Chris is SAD", "Jane helps Dick", bring back the dragons and griffons and pirates.

Next the sound of reading was my own voice, me reading the awful Dick and Jane stories and adults expecting me to read out aloud what was on the page. This code of letters to sounds was complicated (especially as English often cheats and throws a curve ball). I had to read the things out loud and then I simultaneously understood, it was boring and tedious and it was my voice uttering the boring words but I guess it was kind of fun and motivating when I got it right and the adults were happy.

The voice in my head retreated internally, reading was my voice still, but I didn't have to say the sounds to understand the reading, I heard them in my head. Some kids took longer it seemed and were embarrassed or cheated by saying the sounds in a not saying them kind of way "His lips are moving when he reads". As time progress I may hear other voices in the my head as I read that were the characters I was reading about but I guess that was just my internal voice imitating. Steadily I was getting to the point where I could read anything I could say and sound out words that I couldn't understand, which meant I could ask an adult the meaning of word I didn't know. Via reading I could actually hear words I didn't know the meaning of and say them out aloud or even listen out for them being used in speech. I didn't connect all the dots just then but amazing don't you agree?

Wham, I can read the stories, the real stories the interesting ones, the adventures, if I get past this silly color graded reading scheme I am on the teachers would let me take the real books on the shelf, the ones meant for the older kids, "The Hobbit".

Quickly I came to love reading, the more I read the faster I got and the more I learned. At some point the internal dialogue was too slow and somehow my mind started to connect words and groups of words in such a way that once I got into a book then the words vanished and a movie played in my head, fastest during descriptive seactions and perhaps slowing for dialogues. I don't know if this is way that everybody learns to read faster than speaking (an I think many people don't get to this point) but I have talked to enough people to know that many do it the same way. For example a friend of a friend at school read many books, very fast (if you check a book out from your local library in the morning and check it back it at lunch time, annoying them because before computers they hadn't had time to move the cards around to the right place, you are reading fast). One day he had to submit a book report on his favorite book, he picked a new one that was very popular with all of us "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". A major character in the book is called Ford Prefect, in his report he mistakenly called the character Ford Perfect. Many people wouldn't believe that he had misread the name throughout the book so many times, but actually he only misread it once, the first time after that he never read the name at all just saw his image of the character or heard "Ford Perfect" whenever he saw the word, a weakness of this approach for sure but more than compensated by the fact that you can read more and fully remember the story even if you get the odd name wrong. I was lucky I knew that the Ford Prefect (the character mistakenly chose it for his name because he thought it was human name) becauswas a car my Mum had one once.

I learned my mother tongue through sound at first, then I extended my knowledge of the language through reading which as you can see was intimately connected with the sound. Only when completely acquainted did reading begin to go straight to meaning.

Now most European languages use a written system that is similar enough to mine that I can very quickly learn how to "hear" the language by reading the text, stage one think about how people from that country accent English when they speak it, stage two practice with some text and audio and very quickly I should be able to get to the point where I can read the language and "hear" it in my head, even though I do not understand it, or I could read it out aloud without understanding, yet a native speaker could understand what I read. Combine this with a little passive acquisition over my lifetime, a few cognates splattered around and then the following occurs: my wife gives me a toy that has no English instructions, we know that it is a Dinosaur Egg but don't know what to do with it, on the back I have the instructions in German, French, Italian and Spanish. I can fairly quickly decipher an English translation from the combination, starting with my strongest suit (German, more on that in a later post) and then cherry picking sentences from the other languages to fill in the gaps with all the languages in their phonetic glory and a strong dose of context this could probably work quite well in a number of circumstances. Nobody in their right mind would say that I can speak any of these languages but of course being a European I have at least acquired some passive knowledge and also share a language that has connections to them.

Die Suche nach den letzen dinosauriern hat begonnen, Place ton OEUF DE DINOSAURE in warmes Wasser et regarde, es magisch beggint. etc. etc. The magic truly does begin.

Starting any of these European languages I would of course engage with reading straight away.

Chinese however, now that is a completely different story, I have a busy week, next week but in a week or so my next post will describe how I have been learning to read in Chinese and where I have got to.

Old Chinese Movies

2010-03-02T20:50:00.003Z

I am going to make sure I regularly post Chinese learning resources on this blog, particularly resources that are less obvious or well known. When it comes to media resources, us internet users are truly spoilt for choice. I had a brief bout of enjoying old Chinese movies a while back and am going to revisit the genre again, now that my Chinese is a little better.

A good place to start is archive.org, I will give you a link to a search for mandarin in their movies category, a few strange ones in there but a whole bunch of older Chinese films you can download right now for free. My personal favourite so far is Street Angel there are plenty of reviews and information on the page I have linked to.

The dialogue in these movies can be quite accessible to learners, and not too dated (although the first time I heard a Chinese person say the infamous 马马虎虎 was in Street Angel) in fact a Chinese person told me that the dialogue in most of these movies that are contemporary to their time should be better for learners than watching a modern Chinese historical drama (that is set a few hundred years ago and often use slightly funky language to sound "authentic"). Obviously you will encounter some propaganda also.

Archive.org usually provides a number of downloads of differing quality, what are you waiting for?

Chinese vocabulary lists

2010-02-27T12:06:00.001Z

Sometimes apparently a picture tells a thousand words, in this case I think a video does a much better job, first let me make it clear, I do not like vocabulary lists and I do not like language learning approaches that rely heavily on them. Recently I had a go at some Cantonese learning material I was given, it started with a lesson on a dialogue with a fruit seller, part of the lesson material is a long list of fruit to learn in Cantonese, part of the review and audio exercise is to test you on your knowledge of fruit in Cantonese when you barely have any other vocabulary. A lot of language learning material seems to take a similar approach, take a fictional situation and give you a whole bunch of supporting vocabulary around that situation, surely better by far would be to introduce two common items of fruit and extend the vocabulary around areas in the situation that can be applied elsewhere, more fundamental language learning areas.

If I need to learn a lot of fruit, then a good dictionary and/or Internet allow me to compile my own vocab list easily, a list relevant to me. I can cope with this kind of material, usually I would just learn one 'fruit' and substitute that but some learning material would make that approach hard. To extend this further I deliberately decide not to learn many words (whereever I find them), leave them until later. For the longest time I only knew 3 or 4 colors, could only count to 100 etc, I was aware of others but didn't feel the need to learn a long list of colors before I had enough vocab. to have meaningful conversations about colored objects. You can only learn so much a once so learn what seems most naturally relevant.

Once I attended an evening class for intermediate learners, the teacher approach seemed very similar to the trainer in this video (although obviously not for self-defence). It quickly became clear that although the teacher was very keen to try to put her students in a very good light in comparison to me (a self-learner) they had no real ability to range outside of the situations they had been taught (the 'pointed stick' situations). This didn't make the teacher change her mind about her approach however, the final conclusion was simply that I am the exception that proves the rule. I never bothered returning to the evening class after the experiment.

Increasingly I am studying linguistics related material that I can find, I think this article Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage And Word Lists - 1997 has some relevance to the topic and is an interesting read besides. The following section in particular.
We are now ready to answer the question "How much vocabulary does a second language learner need?" Clearly the learner needs to know the 3,000 or so high frequency words of the language. These are an immediate high priority and there is little sense in focusing on other vocabulary until these are well learned. Nation (1990) argues that after these high frequency words are learned, the next focus for the teacher is on helping the learners develop strategies to comprehend and learn the low frequency words of the language. Because of the very poor coverage that low frequency words give, it is not worth spending class time on actually teaching these words. It is more efficient to spend class time on the strategies of (1) guessing from context, (2) using word parts and mnemonic techniques to remember words, and (3) using vocabulary cards to remember foreign language - first language word pairs. Detailed description of these strategies can be found in Nation (1990). Notice that although the teacher's focus is on helping learners gain control of important strategies, a major function of these strategies is to help the learners to continue to learn new words and increase their vocabulary size.
Not everything in this paper agrees with my views, but then I will hardly learn and develop by only reading things I agree with will I?

I hope you enjoy the video and I hope you understand the message I am trying to convey, I can see the relevance of specialized vocabulary list of words to help you in a particular situation but would assume you already have a decent understanding of Chinese, vocabulary lists if used are a very personal thing in my opinion. However you may be learning Chinese, are you safe from the pointed sticks?

Slow Chinese Resource

2010-02-21T20:45:00.004Z

Slow Chinese is a great learning resource. A blog provided by a native Chinese (Xinyu Weng). Currently there are 36 articles all with audio.

The Chinese is spoken slowly and clearly (some people have said too slowly but hey read the title, it does what it says on the tin) and the language used is accessible (it has been pointed out maybe slightly too accessible in places, but I think that is appropiate to the aim of the site).

I am using the site mainly at the moment to improve my reading, it is great to have the option to listen to audio, particularly as my approach to learning Chinese means that at the moment I can understand considerably more than I can sight read (being addressed right now though), still learning a bunch of new words from it also.

You can find the podcast in Itunes and text is included in the description (so you can read whilst listening). If you prefer the audio a little faster then my Ipod touch does a reasonable job playing at 2x speed (the pitch is held constant it is just the speed that is increased). If need you could probably do a reasonable job of increasing the speed using a tool like audacity.

Ok not entirely natural but that is the point, there are plenty of natural sources of native Chinese, Slow Chinese however can be a great help for learners looking for either listening or reading (with audio) practice or both.

If anybody knows of any similar resources with the same aim then let me know.

If you use this resoure, and like it then consider leaving a donation to the author, it will encourage more of the same I hope and perhaps some variations.

Motivation In Learning Chinese

2010-02-20T20:47:00.001Z

Summary

Haven't blogged for a long time, been far too busy recently and frankly working too hard (more than is good for my health). Still learning Chinese though and moving into new areas, but then I am a well motivated learner, a highly motivated self-learner. Actually the previous sentence is rubbish who am I kidding? I am just having fun and relaxing, enjoying myself, challenging myself a little, nobody ever had to motivate me to do that.

Whilst motivation in teaching Children to learn in general is important, I don't understand the relevance of much of the motivation discussions for adult learners. What kind of crazy mess are we in that there is a problem with motivation of adult students. If they aren't motivated why are they there (simply get a job or study something else, it not complicated), how did they end up on the course in the first place? If your course isn't helping motivated learners why is your course there?

Motivation, is surely something that comes from the inside, not something that can be poured in from the outside (outside events can motivate you but you still have to spark it up yourself). It is simple, you want to do something or be something, you work out what you need to do, get some help if needed and do the things to make it happen. You measure your success by getting nearer to the thing you want to be or achieve. If you can't do the things that are needed either you are incapable (get realistic) or you don't want it enough (find something that else that is worthwhile to you). If you can't find anything worthwhile then by all means blame the world, order more fast food and spend as much free time as you have blobbing out munching grease (or even eating healthy organic food I suppose), in front of mind-numbing TV (even choosing to do nothing is a choice).

What motivates me

Many many many years ago, I worked out a system for being motivated and it has helped me to accomplish a few life changing events, I am human though and suffer from my fair share of human frailties and weaknesses so my system has not converted me in some kind of supreme, being that has perfected every aspect of his life prior to moving onto the next plane of existence. When I feel I need to apply it though it works. In summary it was provoked by light cones and the many worlds theory, but you don't need to understand these to understand how I apply it. for example assuming the sun is fine now then what ever catastrophe hits it I will remain unaffected for around 8 minutes (light or radiation, or the stoppage of light can't get to me for that long because of the distance). In the same way assuming I imagine (and I do take the time to imagine so I know what I am aiming at) a me that can speak Chinese fluently, then the first time I decide I want to be that me I cannot possibly achieve it by tomorrow, I don't know how long it will take but I can start to guess (unlike the speed of light in vacuum the speed of learning Chinese is not a constant, but at the moment until someone invents a brain knowledge download device I can make some guesses).

I have to do things to bring the imagined goal closer and I have make realistic guesses how much closer it is (rather than focusing on the effort I put into it or using non-related indicators to measure progress). Every action that I take may or may not effect the probability that I achieve the goal (the probability that I eventually occupy the world where I speak Chinese), you could be honest and step outside of yourself and ask if I was someone else would they be prepared to bet on my achieving that goal, what odds would they give/accept at this point in time.

I am motivated by wanting to do/be something enough that it overcomes the inertia of being lazy or wanting to work on something else. Other people have motivated me, but I never expect someone to or offload that responsibility.

I really dislike the current trend where you hear approaches like we are all "good looking (Americans seem obsessed with this) , smart, intelligent, young (old doods are fossils of course and can't do anything) etc.etc.) If you need your ego massaged to do something then ..... go somewhere where charisma counts more than results and where everybody smells of rainbows. Basically the me that I imagine that can speak fluent Chinese doesn't miraculously become good looking with flashy white teeth and doesn't actually need to be that smart. I am ugly, middle aged and maybe sometimes a bit smelly, that has nothing to do with learning Chinese (so long as I don't let it get to point where Chinese people can't bear talk with me of course ;)). I don't need to be pampered, pumped up, feeling happy etc. to learn, maybe I will be tired, sad, even a little depressed at some times doing the process, fair enough that is life. In fact if I can make it fun, then that would be a trick, if I can make it self-driven then that would be a trick.... I have posted about effortless learning in the past.

I don't need someone to sugar coat the problem or prod me by pretending it will be easy or quick or give me gold stars every time I cough up a Chinese word (maybe when I was five year old but not now). I am driven by a more English drive, I like to hear how hard it is, that makes the goal more sweet, or even provides two goals, I can both try to achieve the end result and try to find an easier way.

What motivates other people

I am in awe of the motivation and dedication I see in other people, people who play golf for example, will happily sacrifice huge chunks of their free time in the pursuit of improving their game. The strength of character required to put all that time into improving their golf game is phenomenal, I am sure that their none golfing partners are grateful and supportive to the hardworking self-motivated golfers. People who like beer for example I have known many who will selflessly sacrifice most of their evenings to the selfless pursuit of excellence in beer drinking, even to the extent of risking their health due to intoxicating effects. Those dedicated selfless souls who religiously quality control the modern music industry, listening with due diligence to hours and hours on their Ipods, on buses in cafes etc. whilst I selfishly use the same device to listen to Chinese (shame on me). Those dedicated fishermen who will set forth in the middle of the night to go somewhere in the cold and spend a freezing wet day on a riverbank fishing (I have to assume that they are keeping the skills alive for times when other foods may run out). The elevated souls that sit honing their brains on crossword puzzles, sudoko puzzles and Nintendo brain trainers, the best I can feebly manage in my lazyness it to hone mine on language learning. Last but not least, my own teenage sons, I never would have thought that young people could work so hard, risk so much damage to their thumbs, sacrifice so much of the free time in the pursuit of playstation game excellence. To all these amazing people I salute you, this humble soul has no concept of how you do it.

I know that are more deep issues at play for some people, what if you have to learn a language as the side effect of another goal for example. I will revisit this and other topics another time when I feel motivated enough.

Heisig for Chinese part 3 A Comforting Approach?

2009-12-07T16:53:00.000Z

Not for me but maybe for you

Continuing my thoughts on the Heisig method for learning Chinese Characters, Ultimately it is not for me but maybe for you. Have a look at various posts on Mandarin Segments for reports from someone who is getting on well with it. As always make up your own mind.....

Comfortable Progress

It seems that people have an irrational expectation that processes are linear, that progress (or change) is directly proportional to input, this unreasonable expectation has adverse affects on many areas from financial analysis to education. It seems that when people study or teach they tend towards methods that appear linear, methods that appear to reward X amount of effort with a directly proportional Y result.

In reality many things are not linear, many language learners are familiar with the situation where they suddenly feel they made a huge gain in a very short period of time, then again they may also experience plateaus where progress seems slow or non-existent no matter what they do for a long period of time.

The Heisig approach to learning hanzi appeals to this desire for linearity. I put X effort in each day and I know Y more characters, it is therefore highly motivational (not always a bad thing). If you scratch beneath the surface however it is not so linear as it appears. if you have studied 1000 characters and it turns out the retention rate is actually 95% you know 950. The real problem of linearity is that the range of what it means to know a character extends far beyond a simple boolean known/unknown. Some characters you will know the sounds of some you will read without thinking and without even resorting to stories, some you may know the function of in a number of compound words or in a grammatical context. Therefore if two different people tell you they know 1500 from Heisig study you actually "know" very little about their comparative Chinese level.

Motivation is important, but I suspect that those who have been motivated by Heisig may have a tendency to oversell it, those that are already highly motivated may not actually need it.

Heisig has to market at beginners

One aspect that initially annoyed me when I read about Heisig in the introductory download, was the very weak argument for why a beginner should use it at the start of their learning, this argument is primarily based on the following sentence The truth is, written characters bring a high degree of clarity to the multiplicity of meanings carried by homophones in the spoken language. The argument that follows is fairly weak after all people don't speak with subtitles so you are going to have to deal with homophones. Besides modern technology offers a number of ways to working with hanzi without having to actually learn them.

The issue of course is that most language learners (in any language) give up fairly early, so if you are in the business of selling books then there is a very real pressure to make your sale at the earliest stage possible.

Dislocated from the language

What you get from Heisig is related to the language you are learning but also somewhat disconnected from it. There was an excellent post on the Global Maverick blog (I highly recommend reading this blog), that mostly agrees with the impression that I am forming about Heisig for Chinese.

Suppose for example that you were spending some time investigating whether to learn Chinese or Japanese (perhaps even both). Then during your investigations it may be beneficial to study the traditional Chinese characters with Heisig (will give you a huge boost on your kanji learning if you pick Japanese)

Unusual Chinese Learning Resource 1

2009-11-16T21:25:00.001Z

I am starting to find that good Chinese learning resources are less and less conventional, sometimes I have mentioned them in forums or added them to lists of resources but from now on I think I will occasionally post a resource on this blog.

Today's resource is http://www.xianzai.cn/ This website has some resources for Chinese people learning English with a number of regular postings everyday English 每日英语 for example. The dialogues are written only and sometimes the English they teach feels a little unnatural but the Chinese translations and explanations can be very interesting. If you have time check out some of the dialogues and see if you find any of them interesting.

This is not the first time I have found that resources for Chinese people learning English are of interest, the Internet is a huge boost over anything language learners had previously....

Chinese Conversation Practice part 1

2009-10-25T20:03:00.000Z

Summary

A brief respite from my Heisig related posts (although more to follow). For many language learners there comes a time when they want to practice conversation. If you don't have the benefit of Chinese speaking relatives etc. then this is not always easy to arrange even (apparently) if you are living in a Chinese speaking country. Even supposing you have a Chinese relative or friend or two then there is much benefit to be gained from practicing casual conversation with strangers, you can repeat subject matter and practice different ways of saying something or the different ways that someone may reply in the twists and turns of real conversation.

I am a computer programmer, casual conversation doesn't always come easily in any language ;) however I am happy to have discovered that in the UK there are plenty of Chinese speakers around and plenty of ways to get conversation practice if you need to. This post is just a quick introduction with on very specific example, I hope to follow up with a few more specifics and examples in further posts.

When to have conversations

There is some debate about when to try to start having conversations in your target language, I never attended classes so I try when I feel I want to, I think that is important. Some say that attempting to talk too early causes damage, I don't think so, so long as you are aware of what you are doing and treat what you say as unfixed experimentation (assume that the story is not over and at some stage you will have different/better ways to express the same thing).

Watching an expert in action

A long time ago when the first Asus netbooks came out I was in an electrical shop looking and playing with the display model. A guy in his 30's with an Eastern European accent came up beside me and started talking to me about it, we had an approximately five minute computer related conversation and then went our separate ways. I had a number of things to do in the same area of town and returned to the shop a little later, the same guy had engaged someone else in a conversation about the netbook, I was curious and returned a little later to see the same again, in fact my curiosity was roused even more and I returned a couple of more times in the next hour to see him engaged in conversation with three more people, I overheard a little of some and it seemed he was going over similar territory each time.

I am pretty sure this guy was practicing his computer related conversation, that little Linux netbook was a perfect focus as it was likely to attract people having a least some interest in computing. Even if he wasn't practicing English it is the type of thing I may have done.

One example of many

I think many aspects of getting a conversation in your target language have a lot in common with the advice for how to get into fruitful conversations with members of the opposite sex, in some circumstances the paths may converge, I am happily married however.

One particular technique I like at the moment is a variation on the classic "asking something you already know" method. There is an ancient Chinese character jiong 囧 that has gained new life in comments etc. on social networks because of its resemblance to a human face that can express embarrassment, surprised resignation etc. there is a nice article at the www.slow-chinese.com site (nice site with audio although it would be better if a faster version was included). When an opportunity arises (cafe, laundrette, tube train, whatever). I simply sketch the character and ask nicely if the person could explain the characters meaning for me (maybe adding that I guess it represents a face maybe not). I have used this five times so far and always got a great little conversation out of it, this particular approach ticks a lot of boxes.

If you approach it correctly it is hard for the Chinese person to be dismissive, it should result in at least a brief conversation.
Many Chinese find your choice of character amusing or interesting.
There is enough ambiguity about its use that if you ask a group of two or more the conversation can get interesting.
This question is level neutral, it gives nothing away about your Chinese level and could easily be asked by a very advanced learner (even some youngish Chinese don't know about it. In fact I am usually told it is a new character rather than an old one that has been reused (although as one Chinese guy pointed out to his friend after a little thought "then how do we type it?")

That is one of many ways I have, do you have any? More to follow on this subject in later posts. Of course the most important thing is to be open open and friendly, a smile works wonders, and as I am sure many have discovered Chinese health shops are usually better than restaurants for practice.

Heisig for Chinese part2 Knowing a character

2009-10-18T12:48:00.000Z

Summary

Been busy and as always sparetime priority is learning Chinese rather than blogging, but got some time now. I think the series of Heisig related posts will continue for a fair while longer, the debate touches on some fundamental learning issues and besides the background reading (both directly related and less directly) is interesting. My schedule for these posts will be a little random and I will start mixing some more interesting posts back in, like how to get into Chinese conversations with real people for example.

So what does it mean to know or read a Chinese character.

Seemingly not very much, many of the posts I have read about using the Heisig approach talk about knowing X amount of characters or the advantage of being able to read Chinese now before you start the rest of the language.

My position would be that someone who starts with Heisig, even after they have completed the course actually knows diddlysquat (a relatively small amount ;)) about each individual character, or perhaps to put it another way they know the character in the same way that many of those friends in their Facebook or similar friends list are actually their friends.

Add to this the fact that in my experience the main thing that you do know about the character (how to handwrite it) I haven't found particularly useful yet...

Ultimatately you could say that discussing the meaning of "know" and "read" is pointless, those using these words know what they mean particularly if they have been studying Chinese for some time already. Unfortunately I remember what it was like to start from scratch and I would have been misled at that point, and based on some the Heisig related posts my expectations would have been much too high.

Reading

I don't want to go into too much depth here, but just consider the stages that you and others went through to learn to read English (I assume your mother tongue), painfully assembling each letter, reading out slowly aloud, sub-vocalizing ("hey that kid's lips are moving when he reads"), internal voice (many adults still stuck here), straight to meaning (you can read far faster than you could speak and receive pictures and ideas etc.).

The process with Chinese will have differences however I am saying that with Heisig alone you have barely (made the first step). Of course someone may post a comment below that shows I am wrong (I will be interested to read it).

Many Heisig related posts still refer to reading characters however, combined with other acquired Chinese knowledge this may be the case but in isolation ....

Knowing

I could leap into a lengthy discussion of various aspects of Chinese but I will just ask you imagine a hypothetical conversation with a new Chinese friend. She writes out a character on a piece of paper to try to illustrate something, you look at the character and although there are vaguely familiar aspects you come up blank, it looks kind of squiggly and squashed becasue she has handwritten it in a cursive style. Realizing your predicament she writes it out again slowly and kindergarten style (like a Child would learn it). Ahhh bingo "I know this character" you say with relief (you told her you have been learning Chinese for 4 months but so far you feel like a loon). "Ohhh you know how to pronounce it?" she asks, ohh dear, "well actually no, but I know it means XXXX in English". Your new found friend frowns a little and consults her electronic dictionary, "well kind of she replies, do you know it's other meanings and did you know we don't use it on it's own". No you didn't, "do you know any words it is used in" she asks helpfully, no you don't. You begin to wonder that if you had spent the Heisig time on learning more Chinese and listening etc. you may have been able to have some sort of conversation in Chinese by now.

Contrived I know, but I hope it illustrates my point, she could have asked you about a grammatical useage or many other things you wouldn't be able to answer, yet somewhere you have ticked a box that indicates that along with 1499 other characters you know this one.

Wrap up

I think that the clue-stick here is in one of the rationales that the Heisig system itself uses to justify learning the characters the Heisig way, the strong dislocation between the characters and the spoken language. If you learn the traditional characters for example much of what you have learned in isolation from the language would be equally applicable to Japanese and Chinese (two very different languages) and in the case of Chinese could be used to write in two mutually unintelligible dialects.

If you read carefully the introductions to the Heisig books this is made quite clear but many blog posts written about Heisig by people who already have a strong grasp of Chinese or Japanese do not address this at all (they are assuming that the reader has a similar domain knowledge, if that is they even take the time to think about it). The average westerner has no grasp of the Asian writing systems (why should they) and nothing really to base informed decisions about study method on. If you are a beginner then use Google by all means read the enthusiastic posts, but as I would always do make sure you read some opposing views before you make a decision about where and when to spend all those hours studying.

Heisig for Chinese Deconstructed Part 1

2009-09-26T10:51:00.011Z

Introduction

The Heisig method for learning of Chinese Hanzi seems to be causing some controversy at the moment, the title of the first book for simplified Hanzi is "How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters". The intention of this post is not to discuss the detailed mechanics of the method but to simply state some facts about what the method claims to (and actually does achieve). Some information on the original method via. wikipedia describes learning the Kanji, it should be noted that the method was originally designed for learning the Japanese Kanji (which map approximately in meaning and form to a subset of traditional Chinese characters) this was back in the 1970's. I will focus heavily on what Heisig method gives to a beginner in Chinese (it appears to be recommended to a lot of beginners these days).

Heisig uses memorization techniques to allow you assign an English meaning and to learn to handwrite Chinese characters, you do not learn the pronunciation.

A good post to read alongside this one would be Keith's what the Heisig method is NOT post.

My next post will describe the method in more detail and provide more of a critique, in that post I will also describe at what stage I think Heisig method should be used (if at all) and start to introduce an alternative approach for consideration.

How dare I Deconstruct? .....

Someone is bound to question my right to deconstruct a method I haven't followed through, particularly as I am not an academic linguist etc. etc. My response is simply how could I not deconstruct any method that I may intend to use to help me learn language. Personal deconstruction to draw my own conclusion is faster than the effort needed to put together a blog post of course but in the final analysis a blog post is a blog post, not an academic paper. If you believe any of the facts are wrong then please comment. My next post will have more subjective elements than this one.

In case you feel I am over-analysing and "navel gazing" I should point out I am listening to Chinese content whilst writing this and one reason I don't post more frequently is simply that spare time is usually put towards learning Chinese. I am a strong believer in doing and getting stuck in but also believe that a self-learner of anything should constantly examine the learning method.

Reading

Upon completion of Heisig you will be able to assign an English meaning to the majority of Chinese characters you come across. The English meaning will be an approximation of one of the (sometimes many) meanings represented by an Chinese character. You will usually not be able to read even an approximate meaning of the mostly multi-character Chinese words and phrases and in many cases may completely misunderstand multi-character words. The inability to understand multi-character words is compounded by the fact that there is no word separation.

You will have no chance of understanding the many transliterations used in Chinese for names (countries, politicians, brand names, famous people etc.) because these are based on the phonetic (sound) represented by the character.

Your readings of the characters to approximate English meanings will still be based to some extent on analysis, not the fluid instant recognition required for real-time reading.

In summary you will be able to read meaning into simple short phrase and perhaps the odd very simple sentence, apart from that mentioned above the lack of knowledge of measure words and various characters that serve grammatical functions in the sentence will mess with your head.

A person using a combination of Google translate and a mouse-over pop-up dictionary will completely own you in generating an English summary of a Chinese web-page they will require a mere half-an hour of training to kick your butt. If you combine your Heisig derived skills with their tools you won't really perform any better than they can. Of course someone who can speak and write both languages will kick both your butts to the moon and back.

Writing

You will be able to hand-write a vast number of Chinese characters, if given the English keyword (often an English meaning if we are feeling generous). This is not to be under-estimated you have learned one of the significant elements of the character, at some point if you wish to be able to hand write Chinese you will have to cross this significant hurdle. You also have a great party trick...

Somewhat bizarrely you have absolutely no ability to write Chinese on a computer (assuming we discount a writing tablet and handwriting recognition for Chinese). You have gained no advantage in interacting with Chinese writing on a computer (none that I can see anyway).

Wrap up

I appreciate Heisig is not intended to be studied in isolation, however most seem to approach it pretty intensively and taking into account the time requirement for Heisig study and review a learner that starts with Heisig isn't realistically going to have progressed very far at this point (Heisig study time eating into other en-devours as well) unless they do Heisig really slowly (which doesn't appear to be the point).

When to learn Chinese Characters?

2009-08-31T22:53:00.005Z

I believe that it is best to delay formal learning of Chinese characters until you know enough Chinese to be able to start learning to read words that you have already mastered (through listening and speaking), at some point in the future your reading ability will enable you to start learning new words and phrases from reading alone (just like it did in your mother tongue), but initially you should use the phonetic pinyin system to help you with your learning. If this post has a motto it is simply I don't want to learn to read Chinese characters, I want to learn to read Chinese. I think that informal learning about characters from the start won't do any harm and will probably help, including learning about stroke order, and some background about how they are used etc. Formal structured learning at any early stage is at best a distraction of time and energy with little payback in a language that in its written form can be read by mutually unintelligable dialects, at worst it presents an obstacle to actually learning Mandarin. This is my opinion, based on my experiances and research.

I have been too busy recently and am accumulating a whole bunch of things I want to post about, clearly my intention a while ago to attempt to summarize my Chinese learning experience to-date failed, the more I looked back on it the more I felt there was to say. At the moment I am going to develop small series of posts on themes like the previous on language learning not being a new thing, I am spending a little more time now doing background reading and research, eventually I will revisit the posts and go through another stage of refining and drawing conclusions. I want to write a few posts on learning Chinese characters this first one being an introduction. A while ago I posted that the worst thing I did when starting to learn Mandarin was to make any attempt to learn the characters. Many formal courses make their students learn characters (hanzi) right from the start, a traditional approach will involve countless repetition and writing to learn characters by rote. The new student is not in a position to challenge this and often has no choice as their progress is partially monitored by their ability to handwrite the characters they have been given.

To state my situation, I am a self-learner and am learning in a non-Mandarin speaking country with no Chinese relatives, a position similar to that of many English learners throughout the world and a situation that needs to be addressed as a baseline when considering the learning of any language imho. There has been a dominance of input and focus on people living in China, in full-time education and on second generation Chinese living in other countries who have had exposure to Chinese at home (material produced by the Chinese government appears to be particularly focused on this group). Insights from these groups are valuable but need to include the experiances of those learning Mandarin succesfully as a realistic hobby.

The first problem that can mislead the new learner is a statement that will go something like this "you need to know around three thousand characters to read a Chinese newspaper" unfortunately the opposite is not true, if you know three thousand characters that is no indication that you will be able to read anything significant. You will need to know many compound words and different readings first, you will need a reasonable level of Chinese. In fact if all you needed to do was learn a few thousand characters, Chinese would be a ridiculously simple language :) I don't think the realities of the Chinese writing system are usually made clear to the beginner. knowing the characters alone will not allow you read anything significant. Knowing lots of words is better, but will only get you so far. You'll need to learn the language like any other language.

Written Chinese is not phonetic, whilst European languages (and others) represent the sound elements of the spoken language in the written system, Chinese generally represents elements of meaning. This is a crucial difference, an adult learner of English coming to German has already mastered a written system and reading skills that with a little adaptation for language variation can be used straight away to hear German inside their head whilst reading it, even if they don't understand. Encountering a German word they know, they can either go straight to meaning or hop via internal translation (less ideal) either way they can "hear" the word internally. 出口 can be found on both Chinese and Japanese roads to represent an exit, the pronounciation is not similar but when I see 出口 on a sign in Japanese anime I know what it means even though I don't speak Japanese "did I read Japanese or did I read Kanji", in my head I heard chu1kou3 (Chinese), what if didn't know the Chinese but instead knew English meanings for the characters, so read "go out mouth" and guessed exit, then I read neither Japanese or Chinese, I simply read a sign. This non-phonetic system is a crucial aspect of Chinese for a Westerner, take the time to think about the implications, whatever you decide.

Are you a fan of natural approaches to language learning? Chinese children don't start formal character learning until the age of 7/8 (information may be slightly out of date) as is the case everywhere they learn to read their mother tongue with language they already know, it is quite unatural to learn a language from the written form. Arguements could be made that this is not a problem in second language aquisition for languages with a phonetic writing system, especially if the the reading skills you have picked via your mother tongue are directly applicable, but does this approach make sense for a language with a written system that is outside of your experiance? It is a recognised problem amongst Asian students coming to study in the UK that many have good to excellent reading and writing ability in English but poor speaking and understanding because they have spent a lot of their learning time on reading and writing. Why should we be any better if we place too much early emphasis on their written system?

Recently there has been quite a lot of buzz surrounding the Heisig method to master writing and remembering the meanings of Hanzi, this method doesn't teach pronouciation and provides keywords to associate with a character that may only represent a single and/or approximate meaning. I dont doubt that is relatively fast and agree that rote learning is a crazy way to solve the hanzi problem so Heisig method wins on that front. Unfortuanatly the method seems to be being picked up as a good thing to do for beginners. Is it sensible to learn via a written system in a language that is so decoupled from the spoken form? How exactly will be being able to sort of read simple Chinese sentances in English help the learner? The real deal breaker for me is that Heisig will teach you to handwrite the characters but without the pronounciations you cannot enter a single hanzi into a computer, almost all my written Chinese interaction is via a computer, I have met Chinese people who have lived in the UK for a few years who freely admit that their handwriting ability has badly degraded because all their Chinese interaction is via a computer, I have met a Japanese person who laments that the younger generation are losing Kanji handwriting ability because their interaction is increasingly via computer, where is the pressing need to handwrite from the early stages?

If you are on a fossilised course that rates handwritten Kanji or Hanzi in the early stages then Heisig may well be a godsend, if not ......? Obviously I don't 'get' Heisig, it is quite possible I have missed something I have no objection to and in-fact welcome having my stupidity pointed out in comments (so long as you remain reasonably polite ;)). My next post will probably be an attempt to deconstruct the Heisig method (bound to be contraversial) followed by a post describing how I am learning to read Chinese. Excuse spelling/grammatical errors, IT fail has left me without spellchecking and time constraints led me to just dump the post I composed in my head whilst decorating (although some prior web research did occur and I did get a chance to discuss some issues with a Chinese friend).

Learning Languages is Not A New Thing 3

2009-07-23T20:40:00.000Z

Keith kindly left a comment on my last post that allows me to tie up this theme for now.
I hope that some day I will have a chance to learn a language like this. I would find 2 really talkative people to live with and hang around for a year while I listen to and watch everything going on. They would even talk to me but I would not be expected to talk back.

I couldn't have put it better myself, not only would I also be interested in such an experiment, if you think about it this is exactly how a child starts to learn their own language. As time goes by the child is expected to participate but expectations are low and the amount of input is high,

So learning language is not a new thing, not just because people have been doing it for many thousands of years but also because we have all done it before.

Keith takes my thoughts one step further than I was intending with his latest post. Experience tells me that Keith is correct, but that doesn't mean I am right of course. I want to spend some time investigating the research behind the erroneous (I think) proposal that adults are at such a big disadvantage learning new languages.

Learning Languages is Not A New Thing 2

2009-07-21T21:03:00.001Z

In my last related post I started exploring what language learning may have been in the past. Some time ago I watched a film called The 13th Warrior, not a particularly memorable film except for a scene related to language learning that sent a shiver of recognition down my spine. You can watch a clip, unfortunately embedding is disabled otherwise I would have placed it in the post, the language learning scene starts about one minute into the clip, although my journey is far from complete, I have experienced enough that this rings true for me.

Is it realistic that the Arab could learn Viking just by listening? Many people actually think this part of the film is far fetched or even ridiculous, as this guy says Still, the script leaves a lot to discuss as the story is hardly believable at some times (Banderas learning viking language just by listening to them ?).

First you have to realise that this was a long journey and the camp-fire scene represented many evenings (the fades and changing weather are a clue). Although the Arab speaks a little too well on the first attempt (I think we can allow a little poetic licence) we have to remember that he is not just listening to camp-fire conversation, he would be experiencing the stops at settlements, the daily routine etc.etc. in fact he would be in a full-time, completely immersive version of Keith's TV method.

If you have the time I would appreciate your opinions.

Learning Languages Is Not A New Thing 1

2009-07-12T21:10:00.004Z

A recent post from Steve Kaufmann reminds us that people have been learning new languages for a long, long time. It bothers me, it has bothered me for some time that after thousands of years of people learning languages where they needed to, somehow, recently we seem to have come up with so many ingenious ways to mess it up. When I say bothered I don't mean a foaming at the mouth kind of bothered, the kind that some types of grammar pedants get into every time they spy a misplaced apostrophe or similar. The botheration has reached a point where I feel like writing about it though.

As Steve points out:

The invention of printing was even more recent, and it helped spread the written word. But for most people around the world, things did not change. Most people could not read until the previous century.

Now it seems a common concept that Chinese is especially difficult but if you go back a little in history it was not so clear cut, in fact learning fluency in spoken Chinese did not seem to be such a big deal assuming that you had access to native speakers of course, Take Giles, Herbert Allen, 1845-1935 for example you can read a transcription of an introductory lecture to Chinese he gave.

Giles does not seem think that colloquial (spoken) Chinese is particularly hard:

Colloquial Chinese is a comparatively easy matter. It is, in fact, more easily acquired in the early stages than colloquial French or German. A student will begin to speak from the very first, for the simple reason that there is no other way. There are no Declensions or Conjugations to be learned, and consequently no Paradigms or Irregular Verbs.

In a day or two the student should be able to say a few simple things. After three months he should be able to deal with his ordinary requirements; and after six months he should be able to chatter away more or less accurately on a variety of interesting subjects. A great deal depends upon the method by which he is taught.

Giles does think that the written language is very hard but bear in mind that at that time written Chinese would be much further removed from the spoken form than today. If Giles is correct then why would I find so many people on forums who are still of the opinion you must learn the written alongside the spoken form right from the start.

Writing has become connected with the concept of education, to the extent that to some it would seem un-educated not to learn to read the target language, one put down I received was "I don't want to be illiterate like you seem to". But if we assume that the thing that makes Chinese particularly hard is the written form then why not delay that until you have gained some spoken ability (I learn reading now).

Steve introduces the education element:

Somewhere along the line governments decided that everyone should go to school and read text books. Soon people thought that learning only took place in classrooms.

Gradually our view of language learning changed. School teachers, text book publishers, and linguistics theorists took over.

Ironically Giles actually wrote a book entitled Chinese without a teacher, being a collection of easy and useful sentences in the Mandarin dialect, with a vocabulary, you can read it online. This book is mostly a collection of phrases, not much help in isolation I guess Giles seems to have written it for those in China who needed an intro to get started, I am pretty sure that Giles himself would freely admit that it was poor a substitute for being in China and getting stuck in. The point is that at that time there was no alternative for those not in China so for a little while (relatively speaking) textbooks would have evolved and improved somewhat, would have been presented by teachers in classrooms etc. Now we are at the point however where recent (and not so recent) advances in technology provide a much, much better solution, lots of people don't appear to have noticed (maybe they have a vested interest in not noticing?).

People have been learning languages by listening for thousands of years, when that is an option (which it wouldn't have been for most that read Giles's book) I would suggest that it should be the main option.

Steve Kaufmann and Some Common Sense

2009-06-10T13:51:00.004Z

Reflecting on my early Chinese learning experiences, I initially felt a little frustrated that so much effort seemed to be expended on activities that were obviously of little use (to me they they were of little use anyway). Assuming (as I did) that the best place for a motivated language learner would be in a country that spoke it, mixing it with the natives. Accepting that this was often not possible (as I had to) why did it seem that so many people we advocating or extending traditional classroom methods that were proven to be ineffective (just look around you for the proof).

Being the language learning newbie that I was (and still am to some extent), I didn't know that there were plenty of people advocating more natural approaches, I had already discovered Chinesepod early on, which presented a refreshing alternative to conventional classroom methods. Then I came across Steve Kaufmann (the Linguist). I think anybody learning languages can get some benefit from Steve's opinions Steve has picked up a fair number and variety of languages and is behind the Lingq language learning site, In my opinion he also talks a lot of sense about language learning. There are plenty of examples of Steve talking various languages and his experiences and advice have the ring of somebody who has put the effort and thought into his language learning. This is a refreshing change from savants or people with extraordinary talents. The stories of savants and people with abnormally wired brains although interesting don't help me (I don't ever expect to be able to "taste sounds" etc.).

The LingQ site seems a good place to practice, I only started using it recently as there is now a reasonable amount of Chinese content with spaces between the words (Chinese is still in Beta and the word parser at LingQ can't separate the word from normal Chinese losing a lot of the useful functionality). The are some interesting Chinese dialogues and you can't do much better than text + audio and some tools to help you work with the words. LingQ appears to be an excellent addition to any language learning program, the only problem being that rather realistically it requires time and motivation so unfortunately it is not likely to cash in like the large quantities of less useful merchandise that promises language learning with little effort (ending in the back of a cupboard with the learner little further enlightened)

You could say (I would at least), that a lot of what Steve says is just common sense (more on this in later posts) but look around you and you will see that common sense is not so common after all.

Using Chinese Radio to help learn Mandarin

2009-05-03T13:51:00.002Z

More reflection back to early days (and present) of my learning Mandarin experience. I very quickly discovered that the Internet is packed full of opportunities to listen to Chinese media, if anything the modern learner is spoilt compared to language learners of the past. In the early stages listening to Chinese radio can help to acclimatise your ears to the sounds of mandarin, later on you can use it to practice your listening understanding and learn new language.

One huge resource is Chinese radio, like radio stations in other countries many are available to listen to online, with the right software you can even record for later reference, there are some difficulties though. Many Chinese websites still insist on writing pages that only work in Internet Explorer, utilise Windows media player for streaming, have intricate security scripts that break systems that would otherwise work or just load their pages with so much guff that downloads from some countries are almost impossible due to poor bandwidth. Then there is the problem of reading the Chinese to find a station that may be of interest or to find the page that actually has the audio stream (sometimes deviously hidden).

There is some effort involved, step one for all Chinese media online is to master the use of the excellent Videolan (vlc) media player, which will cope with a wide range of audio and video formats and can be used to save streams also (any other suggestions for media players this versatile gratefully received). You are probably going to have to look quite hard to find stations that you like but a good starting point is this Chinese page that has links to a large number of stations (both radio and television), if you are lucky and have the right plugins etc. many will play in your web-page.

I prefer stations that have chat shows or health programmes/phone ins, there is a lot more accessible language than news stations and music stations, I quickly learnt to try stations that have 生活 life) in the title first and usually avoid stations with 新闻（news) in their title. If a page doesn't play the station (or even if it does) then you can try to view source in your browser to get to the media link. For example one station I like at the moment is a Shanghai story station, the media link is mms://218.1.74.230/sgwy you should be able to paste this into Windows media player or use it to open a network link in Videolan and listen away.

It can be a lottery, sometimes poor network connectivity can mess up all your attempts, but audio is far more resilient to poor bandwidth than video. How you use these resources is up to you. I invested in some wireless headphones a while ago, so right now I can go outside and do some gardening whilst listening to Chinese radio.

The Worst Thing I Did When Starting To Learn Mandarin

2009-04-13T20:39:00.000Z

Another reflective post that will be referenced when I attempt to summarize the second six months of my Mandarin Chinese learning experience. After looking back on the post I made about the best thing I did in starting to learn Mandarin Chinese, I tried to think of the worst thing I did.

Actually the worst thing I did could have been a lot, lot more damaging but I already had suspicions that it was a bad idea (and a number of raging battles on forums). The worst thing I did was simply trying to expend any effort in learning Chinese characters in the early stages. This is a partly personal thing in that I can see that someone who is living in China and has to read basic signs etc. is probably best of starting right away (but perhaps keeping it pragmatic), however learning on my own from England I gained nothing from my initial attempts to learn characters with flash cards etc. I was still at the very start of learning the language at all and a non-phonetic writing system was not going to help whatsoever.

Here is the start of the problem, I was learning characters for words I didn't really know in the spoken form (certainly didn't know in that natural way that doesn't require internal translation effort), when I was reading the handful of characters I had learned what was I actually reading? (not Chinese for sure even if I fooled myself by sounding them out in my head). Even more bizarre in hindsight, why were so many sources and learners advocating learning to handwrite them, a monumental effort for very little gain for most of us. I can vouch that for some people at least (me being my primary example) you don't have to be able to write a character with a pen to be able to sight read it.

Experience has made me a firm believer in listen, speak/read, write. Generally (there is always room for a little flexibility) learn to read what you can already understand well. Chinese is non-phonetic it would seem sensible to delay reading beyond where you would start with a language that had familiar phonetic system.

I am picking up reading in more natural ways (more on this later although basically described here) and although the journey is far from complete I find that most of what I can read just comes straight in without the need for internal translation. As for handwriting I can only write really basic stuff with a pen but that is not a problem I am sure when I am ready it will come much faster than if I pushed at it now.

Not being the finished article (and even if I was there would be danger that I was some sort of savant that had skills not possessed by most) I can only suggest you give it a try, imagine how the rest of your Chinese might progress if you delayed those pesky character until you were ready. Sadly many on courses don't have an option, I guess if you are learning full-time you can get over the damage but I have to wonder how many self-learners have turned away from Chinese because they attempted to read too quickly.

I suspect that as with English there will come a time when new words and phrases come to me first by reading, but my Chinese will already be generally very good at that time.

Tell Everyone You Are Learning Mandarin

2009-04-04T17:51:00.000Z

At some point I am going to have to seriously consider the similarities between learning human languages and learning computer languages/frameworks. Having started a new job and having spent some time on the latter, I am now sure that spending a lot of time with computer related learning reduces my capacity to spend time learning languages in a way that learning anything else doesn't. Currently I am just ticking over watching the odd film or video and trying a little reading hear or there.

I feel one or two more reflective posts on the first three months learning Mandarin post and then I will get around to the next three months (after that probably leap in six month blocks). When I finally catch up to the first three years I will attempt to draw everything together into a coherent whole.

Back to the topic, one very significant thing I have noticed is that from my background learning Mandarin is special (as opposed to learning most European languages for example) special to the extent that it has been well worth while telling everybody I am learning it. Overtime I have received numerous books and materials (including Pimsleur mandarin and a very good Chinese character dictionary from China). I have received Chinese language films on DVD that have been picked up from charity shops and church fetes, including "genuine" Chinese pirated versions of the first two Harry Potter movies. I have been introduced to the occasional Chinese friend of a friend for language exchange.

The work situation is even more interesting, telling people resulted in encounters like this one, and eventually meant I got to spend an evening meal with a Director and a bunch of Chinese visitors. If I had not left my last job there was the very real chance I could have secured some Business Chinese lessons. As I was told at the time "you wouldn't get approval for this for French, we already have loads of people who can speak French etc."

Mandarin Chinese Learning Resources

2009-03-11T19:45:00.009Z

Starting to think about what I need to put together to write up the next next three months of my learning Chinese experiance, I eventually have to get all the way up to three years so it is going to take me some time to complete then I hope I can take my shambolic summaries and arrange them into a more organised whole. Meanwhile I have been organising some of the places where I store Mandarin learning resources. I have added three links to right column of this blog.

My Delicous Mandarin links are simply links I have tagged with mandarin on delicious.com, I have been doing this for a while but am now in the middle of reviewing and checking them.

My Netvibes Mandarin page is a experiment with a different way to collect resources.

My Learning Mandarin Twine is a twine of learning resources, I am hoping that more people will get involved and start participating.

~~I am going to start using a #mandarin_resource tag on twitter.com, maybe it will get picked up and used by other people, hopefully not too many of them spammers.~~ Edit daft idea, the tag is too long, going to use the already used #mandarin #learning, I would like to try to use Chinese character tags also but search.twitter.com doesn't appear to work with them.

There is also the "Learn Chinese" igoogle page at laowaichinese.net.

First Three Months Learning Chinese

2009-02-28T17:36:00.005Z

This guy wants to learn Mandarin for his gap year and asks for tips on Twitter. My advice would be to start listening to Mandarin (any Mandarin at first) to get an ear for it and then to hit the podcasts, that gets him off to a good start

For context I started learning Chinese as a rapidly approaching middle age English man with limited free time, no Chinese connections and only speaking English.

In the beginning there was a void, Ken and Jenny moved within the void and said let there be Chinese.... Okay maybe that is hamming it up a little bit but, looking back at what I wrote podcasts certainly impressed me as a language learning tool and hearing Chinesepod podcasts was a final push that made me pick Mandarin as my language of choice. As far as learning Chinese goes then podcasts are a terrific aid and there are a variety of styles that you can choose from, most are free to listen to (at some level) and many have free transcripts. Sound production quality and website quality varies wildly, but I would suggest take what you can). I listened to a lot, it is fairly easy (especially in the age of cheap easily available mp3 playing devices) to find time in even a busy day to listen to podcasts.

Some observations:

I quickly realized that I wanted as little English in the podcasts as possible and language that was natural speed, The Audacity software was a great aid, it allowed me to remix sound and create my own review files.
You can listen to podcasts in lots of places and at lots of times where conventional study would be impossible
Instructional podcasts require some measure of attention, and even with those that contain natural dialog you are probably better listening to authentic material if you just want to get a feel for the sounds and cadence of the language initially.

There are many Mandarin learning podcasts, I will start adding more and resume maintaining my learning Mandarin Twine. You can find any podcasts added to my Mandarin delicious feeds also (I am going through my Mandarin links, cleaning up and updating) also. I would welcome any further suggestions of Mandarin learning materials also.

In my opinion the biggest obstacle facing most Westerners who come to learn Mandarin is simply that they have not heard the language before. I spent a lot of time listening to Mandarin radio and TV online, listening to films etc, even when I had no hope of understanding what was going on. I think this helped me tremendously. In the early stages it was teaching me the sound of Chinese and I don't think the actual content mattered too much, variety was good though. The really surprising thing is that I see that I did not mention it at all on my blog until much later (I engaged in heated discussions on online forums at the time however). I think the problem was simply that at the time I was not confident that this approach had any merit. I believed it was the logical thing to do but it seemed to fly against common opinion, I was happy to engage in battle on forums but not blogs, although now I see blogging as a way to engage in discussion, there is nothing wrong with putting forward opinions to test them out, it is not a research paper after all.

Of course I have since discovered that other people have a similar opinion. Keith is very interesting as he has learned Japanese in more conventional ways and is now attempting to learn Chinese using an extreme form of listening to authentic content. I will be discussing this subject more in later posts.

Other relevant points:

I had and still have little interest in learning Grammar rules
Chinese writing being non-phonetic, I quickly decided that pinyin was going to be very important to me.
Blogging and using Internet technologies would also play a big part in my learning.

Blogging for language learning

2009-02-23T20:19:00.001Z

This post is part of my Chinese learning experiences series but is not tagged as such, it is something I can pull out and link to so that my next post on the first three months is not too long.

Almost immediately after starting to learn Chinese I started blogging about it, that was deliberate, there are many reasons for and styles of blogging, this one was part of my objective to learn a language primarily from the Internet, also a loose record of my thoughts and discoveries, on the whole it has been a success. I think that blogging about language learning can be very helpful and an aid to the process, reading and commenting on blogs of other language learners is also very useful particularly if you don't have time to blog yourself.

This blog doesn't attract enough comments to be a really useful place to test new ideas and engage in heated discussion or to refine/test beliefs (some are though, but I only average around 30 visits a day which isn't quite enough) but there have been some surprising side benefits, many people have approached me with resources and ideas via email and two Chinese speakers local enough for local language exchange have approached me resulting in some very helpful exchanges :). Besides that some of the comments I have had have been very useful. I had to engage moderation recently though as there were a number of thinly disguised adverts.

Looking back, I can see how much I have missed out, see how rushed many posts were, but I don't regret that, I am time poor, I need to leave some time for learning Chinese (although there is nothing stopping me from listening to Chinese whilst I blog :))

Blogging has made connections attracted help and helped me organize my thoughts. On occasion blogging has represented a statement of commitment that may have helped me through sticky patches.

A blog is a commitment of time, but the connections, feedback and reflection received have more than payed me back, I am convinced that I would have not have progressed as far with my learning without it and like an iceberg much of what I have gained has not been visible on the surface. A long time ago I was even interviewed by the Financial Times(I was that 39 year old programmer) although I was slightly misquoted and they missed out some key points (I am told that is par for the course though)

Reflection is useful, I have tidied up a few old posts that had duplicated first paragraphs and realized I need to make a blog roll of other learners blogs.

My Chinese Learning Experiences

2009-02-22T18:52:00.001Z

As of last Friday I have been studying Chinese for three years. I am going to take some time to reflect on my progress so far, what went well and the the things that didn't go so well. This is going to require a fair number of blog posts ;) and at least a few weeks, I am starting a new job soon and also have lots to write about internet technologies. Each post will be tagged with chinese_learning_experience. There are also likely to be a number of related post that are referenced (one reason I blog is for my own benefit, so I can come back much later and see how my thoughts are organized).

I have a tendency, to write things out of time context, but for this exercise will be posting events roughly as they happened. firstly though I went looking for something to compare my experiences against. I was very lucky to come across an excellent free available book that documents and analyzes the experiences of a number of successful language learners. I have not read the entire book yet but have gained some powerful insights from what I have read so far. The page at the Language Geek site where I found out about the book, the pdf can be downloaded from here. Naturally like language learning some people won't agree about he book, but I think it is a great resource.

Along with the book, I don't think there is one best way to learn a language, but I believe that when learning anything it is a great advantage to be reflective about your learning and to work out which of your own strengths are applicable.

In the beginning there was a void (my brain is usually empty enough to be described as a void) and not a single word of Chinese moved within the void ...............

More on Google for learning Language

2009-02-17T13:09:00.002Z

Following on from my last post Using Google for Lexis, I have a habit of posting thoughts and then searching for what other people are doing, actually I think this is a better way to learn :).

I found http://bbs.english.sina.com/archiver/?tid-805.html using google to learn English.

For example:
"on another hand" 107,000 results "on other hand" 415,000 results "on the other hand" 78,700,000 results
The majority rules..

I also found Jim Stroud at englishcafe.com explaining How to make Google your English Teacher

Unlike Jim Stroud suggests with learning English I have not found any useful functionality with the ~ character when learning Chinese at google.cn, however the * is very useful. Just remember to make sure you are in English mode with your input method, the Chinese ＊ is not the same as * and google will not see it as a character wild card. Basically if you put an asterix in your query then google will substitute any character for the asterix, seeing what comes out the other end can be very instructive.

Google also be used to search specific sites, which can be instructive, for micro-blogging for example you can restrict the search results to fanfou.com by adding site:fanfou.com to the front of the query.

Using Google for Lexis

2009-02-05T20:38:00.010Z

I have been very busy recently, learning and developing new programming skills and knowledge, also landing a new job that I will be starting in March. I am still learning Chinese but have not had much time to blog or think too much about the process.

My third anniversary of learning Chinese is imminent (fellow language learner Keith gave me a timely reminder in a recent comment), I have lots to write about and want to do a full analysis of my progress and findings, under the current circumstances it may be a little late though. I also blog in other areas, for example web-based stuff at chris-on-the-web.blogspot.com

One thing I wanted to clear was the importance to me of using Google.cn for examining lexical chunks. Although primarily written language the Chinese version of Google provides a wonderful resource for examining and testing language. I use it so much that it is hard to provide examples (if that makes sense). On one Chinese social website a long time ago I had written that learning Chinese was my favorite hobby like so：学中文是我的最喜欢的爱好。Ｉused 喜欢 that has a similar meaning to like. A Chinese friend told me I should have used 最大的爱好 the 大 here means makes it more like saying "biggest hobby" in English. I didn't know I could say it this way but it is easy to confirm a search for my original "最喜欢的爱好" on google.cn yields 21,700 hits which a least tells me the my attempt was valid. A search for "最大的爱好" yields 628,000 hits which tells me that for this useage at least this is likely to be the more natural version. Even better when looking up phrases you get more valuable knowledge from the search result summaries, little snippets you can read "东北男人最大的爱好是什么？什么样的性格？_百度知道" in English "Northeastern men's favorite hobby is what, has what type of nature, Baidu knows".

Sometimes when I am in a more attentive listening mode of watching or listening to Chinese I have google.cn open in a browser window. Did that person say 我怕高 did they mean "I am afraid of heights" I guess so, google.cn confirms it with 719 hits, that may not seem a lot but the nature of the hits indicates this is a good phrase in spoken Chinese.

If you create a new phrase from the words you know, but aren't confident or think you may be translating too literally from your mother tongue you can always look for similar on Google.

Using Microblogging to help learn Chinese

2008-09-20T17:18:00.008Z

As I posted previously social networks can be useful for language learning. I think that micro-blogs are a terrifically useful resource. Micro blogging platforms usually allow users to make short (140 character) posts, these posts are generally public, like blog posts anybody can read them. The short nature of the posts means that there is lot of fairly general conversation style writing. Reading micro-blog posts in Chinese has been a terrific way to practice learning reading and character recognition in addition to picking up some new vocabulary. Making regular short posts in Chinese is also a low stress way to experiment with writing.

You can find a number of foreign language posts in the the popular Twitter platform and in the the increasingly popular Identica, however the best solution is probably to find a micro-blogging platform that is popular in the language you are learning. For Chinese Fanfou appears to be the most popular.

You can follow people in all sorts of ways, RSS feeds can be good way, reading sentances that normally wouldn't be interesting from strangers can take on a different spin when in a language you are learning, you can read them OK. For example 世界上最安全的食品是土豆以后我尽量多吃土豆 (the worlds safest foodstuff is the potato, as far as possible I will eat more potatoes). Sentences that are hard to read or require a dictionary can be saved for later consumption (I like to use Google Notebook for this kind of thing).

Of course with all this Web2.0 stuff and web api's there are many ways to mix this up, here you can see posts to fanfou appearing in "almost" realtime with their geographical location on a Google map.

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

A Few Chinese Basics

2008-09-11T10:29:00.012Z

A photo of a Chinese typewriter, most of the disadvantages of Chinese script have been offset by technology these days, and there are a number of unexpected advantages (photo thanks to george morgan).

Being about to make a presentation to a number of people that includes my experiences of learning Chinese online, I thought I aught to address a couple of questions that are always asked to me.

Yes Chinese reading and writing does really involve learning thousands of distinct characters, unlike languages that have a phonetic alphabet. Assuming you are learning to read and write language that you already know this is not as bad as it sounds.

No Chinese in not hard to read and write on a computer, in fact is about as easy to write Chinese as English for many users via phonetic input systems (usually via pinyin). There are other input systems that are harder to learn (for example wubi). An expert in wubi probably inputs considerably faster then an English typer.

Displaying Chinese characters on your computer used to involve installing something but most systems these days have at least one Unicode font which means you can usually read Chinese and other non-Latin languages (that of course doesn't guarantee that you will understand it). If you are seeing little boxes then is means that you don't have a suitable font, if lots of question marks or garbage that probably means that the program you are using doesn't realize the character you are reading are in unicode or utf8 etc.

As far as webpages go then utf8 is almost certainly the best way to output your content.

Chinese dictionaries are hard to use, if you are looking for an unfamiliar character in a paper dictionary then ideally you need some knowledge of how Chinese characters are written. Characters have a series of common elements called radicals, if you can determine the radical and the number of additional strokes then you can look up the character, the more you understand how Chinese characters are constructed the easier it is to look them up (a bit of a catch 22 for the learner of Chinese). Computer dictionaries are somewhat easier you can cut and paste, look up characters by pinyin sound, and in some cases even draw an approximation. Many paper dictionaries will also allow you to look up a word by pinyin sound, but this only helps if you know what the word sounds like... The bottom-line for a Chinese learner (I many other languages I would guess) is that working with text on a computer for learning purposes is much faster, apart from browser plugins and on-line dictionaries, excellent software such as Stardict can smooth the way.

If you want to learn Chinese I would suggest starting learning to get used to the sounds first. I have also started to put together a collection of learning resources on in a twine, hopefully I will have some more specific advice soon but it will of course be from my own personal viewpoint.

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Social Networks for Language Learning

2008-08-30T15:38:00.007Z

Social networking services can be very useful for language learners, even the trivial aspects that are sometimes annoying in your mother tongue.

Many of aspects of the social networking services seem trivial and superficial, before people leap on this and attack me in the comments I know that they have their benefits also. I am going to be posting more on this on my web related blog and will add a link here when I do, but for now my main gripe is the amount of trivial communication that goes on. Maybe in some sense a lot of this communication is phatic or smalltalk, but this doesn't seem to serve such a useful purpose on the internet (at least in my opinion). Some social networks seem to have developed their own smalltalk that is entirely internet related (some of the more useless Facebook apps. for example).

Once I had to explain to a work colleague what Twitter is all about, when mobile phones became popular many people could see both the good and the bad, part of the bad being the smalltalk and sometimes trivial nature of the conversation, especially if someone was wasting time doing this very loudly in your earshot. The following youtube of clips of Don Joly shows this very well: As I explained to my colleague "unlike with a mobile phone where you can tell somebody that you are on the bus, with twitter you can tell the whole world that you are on the bus!".

Here is the twist though, when learning a new language reading simple content of this nature and sometimes writing it can be a terrific way to practice. Reading a stream of tweets (or equivalent) that are tedious in your mother tongue can have a whole different perspective in a language you are learning.

You can find many different languages on Twitter or better still find a similar service that appeals more to native speakers of the language you are learning. Fanfou.com is a twitter clone use by lots of Chinese users. Microblogging services are only the start other social services also have a different spin when working in language you are learning. Even the Don Joly mobile phone jokes point to a useful practice technique, ever feel silly walking down the street practicing out loud, cover it up by pulling out your mobile phone and pretending to have a conversation in a foreign language (don't go over the top though). Do this in a subtle way near someone you suspect to be a native speaker and they may even try to engage you in a real conversation (at least they now know you can speak their language).

This post will be a small part of the background to my upcoming Bathcamp presentation.

Mandarin Learning Resources

2008-08-29T07:14:00.000Z

I have been experimenting with the service at Twine. Twine allows you to store and share knowledge and still has a lot of rough edges (it is in private beta), however I think it has a lot of potential. I have started a Learning-Mandarin twine which I intend to keep populating with learning resources, also as commenting is allowed resources can be reviewed and discussed.

If anybody wishes to join Twine I have some invites.

Videos and marketing

2008-07-09T18:42:00.003Z

Despite appearances I am still around and learning Chinese. I will have more to say soon. Recently I seem to have attracted a few comments that are just thinly disguised adverts for new Chinese webservices. At least Phillip was kind enough to send me an email about his new website.

http://watchtolearnchinese.com/ is a site that identifies and categorizes videos on Youtube that are useful to Chinese learners. The ones I looked at also had short but useful comments on the content. I do use Youtube to find learning material but it was easier to use this site to stumble upon a couple of interesting advanced videos.

Ultimately though I feel that to have real sticking power a site like this will need user comments, tagging and incorporate videos from other sources. Still when someone gives you a little video discovery help for free that can't be a bad thing.

Painless way to learn to read Chinese?

2008-06-01T14:02:00.009Z

Via an article at Sinosplice I read a very interesting article by Victor Mair entitled How to learn to read Chinese The basic premise seeming to be that learning to read Chinese can be relatively painless and become an acquired skill, the specific example quoted being the experience the author had whilst learning to read from and Taiwanese newspaper that had phonetic markup for each character (bobomofo). This is exciting (how sad am I?).

From experience I have to agree, although after less than two and a half years of self-study Chinese I wouldn't expect anybody to take my experiences as gospel. Where I would differ is that generally speaking I don't use annotated text as such but a whole plethora of other techniques to make reading a relatively painless experience. My reading is improving very fast but still has some way to go (primarily because my Chinese listening and speaking still has a long way to go). Reading has come on so fast that this morning I realized I was cheating too much by reading the subtitles ahead of the speech whilst reading watching a CCTV documentary (I don't understand all of a CCTV documentary yet but usually the gist with largish lumps of complete word for word understanding). I am pleasantly surprised that what I can read is often as fast as reading English text.

Much reading acquisition comes from reading electronic texts with some sort of mouse over annotation, I prefer this simply because there is effort and pause associated with the mouse over action and therefore a subconscious desire for my brain to reduce the incidence of this (without me being aware those little neurons are realigning to make life smoother). In a web browser all the Firefox extensions tend to give English definitions as well as pinyin but a quick modification of a style file means that the English in the chinesepera-kun pop-up is so pale and small I have to squint and press my nose against the screen (my neurons dislike this and re-arrange to reduce the chances of this happening).

The next biggest input to reading comes from many different ways of working with subtitles of which the strangest and most productive is watching English content with Chinese subtitles, every time I mention this, I get derided or ignored but I found it a huge boost to fluent reading (in reflection probably much bigger than the above example). Watching both series of Heroes in English with Chinese subtitles for example was something I did whilst relaxing with my wife (she has no interest in learning Chinese), my mind couldn't help but spend time working out what the subtitles said (not 100% but it gets better all the time).

One of the biggest objections to using technology in this way is often along the lines of "ohhh but it is too easy to cheat, my mind is too lazy", my counter to that is that using more traditional approaches it is too easy to spend time learning Chinese in a none useful way. You may feel you have been busy but the more you remove yourself from the real world actions of speaking listening and reading Chinese the more chance the skills you are picking up are not directly relevant. Besides you can always make small alterations to keep your mind on the game, it is your mind after all. When I sometimes now read printed text (the kind you can hold in your hand) I use a real Chinese zidian (character dictionary, no English) to look up unfamiliar characters, I played with the zidian a little now and again and now am getting increasingly better at identifying radicals etc.and I don't know or care what they are called (how sick is that ;)). If I still don't get it from the pinyin in the zidian or the Chinese definition (unlikely from the definition I know but miracles increasingly happen), then I punch the pinyin into a cheap electronic dictionary designed for Chinese users. Guess what my brain wants to select the character by looking back to the zidian and comparing (lazy brain) but I try to remember what it looks like and actually close the zidian and ignore the original text (those neurons really hate it when they have to look it up again).

Ok the freak show is over. I am sure there are hundreds of reasons why this is really dumb, but if a forty-ish guy, living in the UK, with no Chinese relatives etc, can learn solid speaking, listening and reading skills in approx three years as a hobby (my aiming point at the moment) then maybe some of the things that see obvious to me now will be obvious to other people in a few years time. Technology changes everything when it comes to learning we have to clear the playing board and reset the pieces.

Earthquake

2008-05-31T08:15:00.003Z

I haven't posted this before as I didn't really know what to say for the best. For similar reasons I have been somewhat quiet on Chinese social networks that I have started using for practice, apart from one or two condolence messages. Fortunately family and/or friends of the few Chinese people I know are unscathed

Talk is cheap, I can only hope the best outcome for the survivors

Ultimately it seems that there may be significant change in media attitudes and China-West relationships (apart from the occasional Hollywood idiot), a change for better. This of course is not worth the lives of those that have died, a slower change without the tradgedy would have been better by far.

The best thing I did in starting to learn Mandarin

2008-04-19T09:30:00.006Z

I was looking back and trying to work out what were the significant steps in my Mandarin learning over the past two years or so. Maybe the most significant step was simply spending a lot of time listening to real Mandarin even though at the time I didn't understand it.

It is not easy to remember the exact details, but for the first three months or so of studying a large part was simply listening to real world Chinese at full speed. I was studying on my own so it was up to me to decide what I did, and against all advice this seemed the obvious thing to do. I don't speak French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian etc. etc. but at that time I coould confidently identify all of these language, simply because of exposure over my lifetime. If I decided to study any of these languages I would know roughly what I was getting into, Asian languages all sounded similar though (might as well be Martian). Certainly I also listened to a few podcasts, and certainly I did some background reading about the language and picked up a few simple words. Somehow these preparation meant that I ended up listening to about 15 of the Chinesepod Newbie podcasts and a similar amount of the elementary before I started tackling the Intermediate. Even though my vocabulary was limited I seemed to have a huge headstart on speed, coping with different accents etc.

So what happened? via attentive listening the mush of sounds became a stream of syllables, and I was increaingly able to determine differences in sounds that originally sounded the same to my Western ears. I started hearing a few simple words that I had learned (中国 zhong1guo2 china) being an obvious one. All the time I　was attempting to be attentive, When do I　think sentances are starting and finishing, are there sounds that are common before a pause? can I learn any words from context? what common sounds can I learn so that when I finally learn the meaing it will be obvious. Even at that time I could hear the significance of 个 and was anticipating finding out the meaning of 这个 and 那个.

Finally I enlisted the help of my sons, they dug up some videos from Youtube and played the sounds to me, firstly (because I wasn't actually sure) I proved to myself that yes it was fairly easy for me to identify European languages even vaguely similar ones such as Dutch and German, Spanish and Portuguese. Then I discovered that now I could distinguish Mandarin from Cantonese, and Thai and Vietnamese and Korean and Japanese with ease. Even more interesting the Cantonese apart from having sounds different to Mandarin had at least one tone that was obviously very different (the low level one) so somewhere my brain had already started on the long arduous journey to get a feel for tonal meaning.

What followed was a mastery of Pinyin and relating the sounds to words I heard, the aim was to get to point where I could reliably hear a word in a sentance of real Chinese and look it up in dictionary to find the meaning.

Sound is where it all starts and what you gain from first getting an ear for a language is hard to measure and test (so is unlikely to be emphasized in a formal course). Gaining an ear for language is what you do naturally as a baby with your mother tongue, it seems obvious to me that you should start this way when you study a new languge (and actually because of the prevalance of English media and culture, many foreigners have had this exposure already before they come to formally study English).

I know this view is not popular but it seems to have helped me.

Rolling my own Kevin Rudd Chinese lesson

2008-04-16T09:02:00.003Z

The biggest problem I have at the moment is getting conversation practice, although I am quite forward in attempting to speak Chinese with people I encounter this kind of conversation gets stuck in a rut now because either I meet the people one time only (and cover the same/similar ground each time) or I meet them occasionally in a shop or something and conversations can only really go so far. A particular problem for me is that when younger I had a virtual phobia of phones, I get on fine with them now but to some extent this feeling comes back when I use Skype or similar to chat in Chinese. I think Skype is a wonderful tool and I have used it and received a lot of help but I find it so so much easier and natural to talk face to face.

Recently through a work colleague I came in touch with someone who could help me, we communicated by email and met one evening and now I have a new friend/teacher. I say friend/teacher as I intend to pay for a lesson now and again (the first time I have done this). Other times we may well be helping each other learn our respective languages (I have by far the most to learn ;)). I think that paying for the occasional lesson is an important point though, it delimits a period of time where the focus is on me using and developing Chinese skills and means I can't fool myself and sidestep into being lazy under the guise of teaching or explaining some English.

Now the problem, what is a lesson going to consist of, I managed to demonstrate that I don't need teaching as such and am making fine progress on my own, also both of us being busy one lesson a month or less is the likely frequency. What I need is a focus and conversation practice. I don't even really need my new found teacher to prepare anything before hand (apart from being aware of the kind of subject I would like to discuss and some of the materials I may have sourced).

It occurred to me that my last post regarding Kevin Rudd was an excellent starting point. There are two videos here that could be discussed in Chinese and some of my thoughts on "sounding native". I wanted some harder video dialogs to chew through so I found the following snippet on tudou (and put on youtube for easier access):

As Edwin pointed out I also have access to the the recent Media lesson on Kevin Rudd speaking Chinese at Chinesepod. This boosts the study potential somewhat, I have the three videos, the written comments on Chinesepod, the audio discussion in the Chinesepod mp3 and my own thoughts in English. My preparation will simply be to get comfortable with any new vocab. etc. in this lot and prepare to discuss around the subject. 好极了！

Kevin Rudd speaking Mandarin

2008-04-14T17:37:00.007Z

Been a while since I posted here, I have however still been progressing my Mandarin studies. Actually whilst I intend to continue posting here I am also starting to put together a more structured collection of my learning Mandarin experiences and observations to date.

Kevin Rudd, that newly elected Austrailian Prime Minister interests me immensely and has certainly sparked off a lot of online conversations regarding the quality of his spoken Mandarin. A short excerpt from one of his recent speeches:

It is fairly easy to find the usual criticisms, he still sounds like a foreigner, his sentences often carry over Western intonations etc.etc. yawn! All the usual fare from the pedants who don't think you are speaking Chinese properly unless native Chinese people peer very closely at you wondering why somebody who is evidently Chinese (because you speak so well) looks somewhat like a Westerner. Most of the manifestation of this belief that I encounter comes from Westerners who are learning Chinese (hmmmm). Now take into account that many European politicians who speak English do so with a "foreign accent" no matter how excellent their level of English (and vice-versa I guess), that in fact despite the millions of foreigners who learn English only a very tiny minority actually could pass for a native born English speaker (or though I have met some very impressive Chinese speakers of English recently). Why is it even an issue that someone cannot pass for a native Chinese over the telephone?

I feel the good news is that eventually it won't matter, the more politicians, sports people, entertainers that can speak and communicate in Mandarin then the more acceptable it will be to have a laowai accent. Stop focusing on the edge cases that have lived, worked, maybe grown-up in China and get down to the business of how does a Westerner become fluent in Mandarin. Here is some more Kevin Rudd being interviewed:

加油，加油 Kevin Rudd.

Market trader Chinese

2008-02-12T21:39:00.000Z

I pass a market stall selling fruit and vegetables and note that two Chinese girls are approaching the stall from another angle. I don't need anything there so move on, but as I do so I hear the stall holder shouting out 新年快乐，你好,好朋友！ enthusiastically.

Nothing too strange except that this is Bath in England and the stall holder is a young English lad of typical market stall down to earth joviality. I have talked to him before as the stall is a good place to buy fruit and veg. but never heard him speaking Chinese before. Granted it sounds a little rough but is fully confident and not lacking any enthusiasm. When I have more time I would will try to find out how much he knows.

Bath has quite a sizeable young Chinese population and the stall holder has at least one impetus to learn Chinese, that is to boost his selling. There may be many other reasons including an interest in Chinese girls (but lets not jump to hasty conclusions).

This made my day, I think it is going to happen more often as cultures meet. For every street seller in a foreign country who has self-learned enough English to sell to tourists; I would wish to see another Englishman who is reversing the trend and returning the favor. One in the eye for those who over intellectualize the study of Asian languages.

No matter how functional his Chinese is there is bound to be one who would stand and say "his pronunciation is off and he has little concept of the finer grammar points". If I was there I would happily punch that "one" in the face......

Strange the things that can lift your spirits when the days are dark.

Reasons for not understanding Chinese

2008-01-17T19:35:00.001Z

When you think you are making progress in a language it can be a little depressing when you come across some that you don't understand and feel that you should have. Actually I have observed and worked out a number of valid reasons not to feel so bad. So next time don't beat yourself up.

You can't hear it properly

This one is two fold: firstly when eavesdropping on passersbys it is very difficult to catch what they are saying, even in your mother tongue (try it), particularly if the ambient noise level is high. The second reason can be when you are watching TV or a film that is intended for English speakers. The director may have included some Chinese talking but expects you to get the meaning from context or convenient subs. therefore the sound man doesn't actually go to the trouble of making sure the voices are clear. You may feel disappointed you missed some basic stuff but replay it and you discover the sound quality of the conversation is so poor you didn't have much of a chance anyway.

You are hearing something out of context

Even if you are good, you are going to struggle with out of context snippets, as above this can even cause confusion in your mother tongue.

They are speaking another dialect

Perhaps even another language. Particularly with Chinese, remember that what you may be hearing is a dialect they are more at home speaking in. Dialects close to Mandarin can be a particular problem, they sound familiar somehow but you don't quite get it. You would need some heavy exposure to get used to it. Having said that I think is is good to listen to target language enough to at least determine whether what you are listening to is in the right ballpark.

They don't want you to understand

Yup it happens don't take it personally, for whatever reason (maybe testing you, maybe suspicion etc.), they are actively trying to mess you up with funky language and or speaking very fast.

They don't speak very well themselves

This happens too, they told you they spoke Mandarin (perhaps didn't expect you to know much) and actually their Mandarin isn't so good, making it harder for you to understand

You weren't actually ready for it

Your are a learner, your window of opportunity suddenly appeared and you missed it, sometimes you may catch it, there are times you will be tired, focused on something else and your second language skills will be comparitively poor.

The language is highly specialised

This will happen a lot, you just haven't any experiance of the vocabulary and context being used, or the film is a specialised genre etc. etc. Think of your own language, which is easier for a foreigner do you think, a standard chat-show or a "gangsta" movie.

Of course you may just need to practice more ;) but even you are feeling bad about an experiance then don't, there is always another opportunity. Don't get me wrong this is not setting myself up for failure just providing reasons to remain confident. I am sure there are many more, do you have some you can share?

A little philosophy, and a good source of Chinese texts

2008-01-08T19:59:00.001Z

I posted before about effortless learning and it created a little controversy. I can understand why as effortless can mean different things to different people. I came across a nice explanation of exactly what it means to me on Steve Kaufmann's website. At the beginning of his book (which you can read online if you follow the link) in the introduction Steve has this from from a Chinese philosopher. Zhuangzi, the Taoist philosopher, is supposed to have lived in China over 2,300 years ago. He encouraged people to achieve their potential through effortlessness, by not resisting their own natures. That is exactly what I meant by effortlessness.

I have an interest in philosophy, but know much more about ancient Greek and both ancient and modern European philosophy. I found this excellent website, the Chinese Text Project has number of texts with English translations. Some of the text also have modern Chinese versions alongside the older Chinese (an excellent way to learn to read older styles of Chinese).

CSLpod (thanks Edwin)

2007-12-27T09:23:00.000Z

Edwin left me a comment that introduced me to CSLPod. Looks like another great resource for me to pull lessons from and reduces to the need to roll my own (although this has it own merits sometimes). The advanced lessons do indeed have news and current affairs topics with transcripts. I had a quick look at some of the other levels also and there seems to some good stuff in there also. It seems that students of Mandarin are really spoiled, we have a lot of resources on the internet to help us.

Rolling your own Mandarin lessons (from CCTV etc.)

2007-12-26T19:56:00.000Z

There is a lot of Chinese content out there, and once you have picked up the basics it is fairly easy to find things that you can study and make your own exercises from. For example CCTV have a site where you can search for small video clips from news articles etc. Sometimes the site is a little broken and specific videos can not load but there is plenty that does work, and much of it has text transcripts. I uploaded the first one I have been playing with to youtube.

New reports seem to be special in many languages and are often fastpaced, I figure analysing and some repeated listening to this kind of material can be useful as part of a learning plan especially if you have some ability to zero into to specific subject areas (I have an interest in internet related matters).

I have the transcript that came with the video on my study materials blog.

Chinese streaming television TUV

2007-12-01T19:00:00.000Z

I have posted about streaming Chinese TV and various programs before. At the moment I am finding the TUV player most convienient. PPLive seems to hog network resources and the choice of channels keeps changing too much (also seems to have lost the CCTV channels).

Basically when I am using the PC for writing or overtime (from home) I have a Chinese TV window open most of the time. Sometimes I pay more attention to it than others but it is amazing how often I find I hear an interesting phrase and start paying attention.

Sadly I don't understand it all but depending on the program these days I can often understand most of it.

You can download TUV player at www.tvunetworks.com

Learning multiple languages 自相矛盾

2007-11-17T09:26:00.000Z

A couple of people have asked me about the languages I am learning, because I occaisionally mention Cantonese and Japanese. Well to be honese the Japanese was fun but it is currently on hold. I think I was enticed by the wonderful feeling I was getting as I started to understand basic Mandarin and wanted to extend that into another language. However it now feel that to truly master Mandarin (at least to the extent of my ambition) I need to give it the main focus of my free time. I hope to maintain the first steps I have made in Japanese to return to it at a later date.

Maybe when you get to an intermediate level in a language the dynamics change and the things you have to do to improve change also. It seems very tempting to start an new language from scratch and get the familiar buzz from those early milestones achived. For me though this can only retard my progress in Mandarin.

Now having said all that I am going to confess to still pursuing Cantonese, this is at a slower pace than Mandarin studies and a different style. I have many reasons. Which I will explain in a later post, but in summary it is commonly spoken by many overseas Chinese, it forces me to stay true to my original beliefs of starting from spoken language (learn to read what you already know and don't directly associate sound to hanzi), it eventually puts me in the same position as many Chinese people (able to speak Mandarin and at least one other Chinese language), and lastly it is fun.

The main problem is that there are not the same resources for Cantonese, so after completing the Pimsleur course, I am hoping I can bootstrap from Mandarin (films with subs. and soundtracks for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers etc.). Also jump in the deepend and use resources like those supplied by Marcelo, for example I know this Chengyu very well in Mandarin and here I have text and audio in Cantonese.

Mojiti again

2007-11-03T18:00:00.000Z

I am returning to Mojiti again. I think it is a great potential resource for language learning. John has also played with it. As John points out it can be a little time consuming particularly at first but I believe it makes a great tool in the learning Chinese arsenal. You can create your own little excercises and projects and at a level that suits you, these are far more powerful and interesting than any homework you might be set in a class or an excercise from a text book.

My next Mojiti project is to finish transcribing the following video, I figure if I post it here I will have to finish it (I have been rather busy recently and only made a quick start so far). I will be fairly hard work, although I know what she is saying (a least a pretty good idea) that is not the same as being able to write a character by character transcript, there are a few areas I am going to find quite sticky. Transcribing in Chinese is most important for me then I will do an English translation set like I did with the last song I did. Basically she is talking about the definition of beauty, the proliforation of beauty products, chat shows talking about dieting beauty products haircuts etc., beauty product adverts, changing yourself this way won't provide deep lasting happiness, if she changed her eyelids (I think) it wouldn't make her any happier in the long run, friends and family will love you for what you are, everyone has their own personal beauty etc. etc.

When I get round to finishing it I will put a transcription on my study materials blog also. This is the nearest thing a self learner like me gets to homework.

Ellen's Chinese podcasts

2007-10-16T18:49:00.000Z

After mentioning Naturegirl's blog in the last post I really should also mention Ellen's Chinese podcasts. Ellen has lots of material on her site and most of it comes with audio. There are different levels of dialog, with text and translations. You also get to hear children's voices, male and female...

I am not sure why more people don't seem to use resources like this, material posted by real Chinese speakers is particularly precious. Ellen gives you some real dialogs often with a lot of humor. Naturegirl's chengyu were a great find, I have just started really taking the study of chengyu seriously and appreciate the example sentences and the fact that I can ask questions.

I get the impression that many learners carry a classroom mentality and are afraid of stepping outside of a set course of instruction. I don't see how stepping outside and spending time expanding your experience can ever cause harm?

Naturegirl found again

2007-10-15T18:11:00.000Z

Strange title I know. but a little while ago someone called Jenny left a comment. I found her blog and it is a great little resource. Sadly I then lost it (forgot to tag it). I thought it had vanished but turns out it wasn't on Blogger.

I found it again when I followed a comment left by naturegirl on The Tower of Confusion blog Visit the Chinese Help blog, there are lots of Chengyu and other bits and pieces that can help us Chinese learners. Thank you Jenny/naturegirl!

Chinese English lessons

2007-10-13T09:19:00.000Z

Been a while since I was looking for Chinese lessons on English. The switch makes a nice diversion though. This one is from Mofile:

Give it time it may take a little while to load. Basically I try to keep cycling through bits of everything. This type of material has well spoken Mandarin that is mostly easy for me now (particularly as the context is very strong). There are some words I don't know and some I can guess. I put these new words in a vocab file on Google docs, and study them when I have time and feel like that type of study. Usually when studying words I just freewheel. For example in one of these I picked up 挣扎（struggle) so when freewheeling I search for it in Google and in the results that pop up try to find interesting snippet that contain the word, snippets that I can read and understand in Chinese. Straight away I spot 内心的挣扎 wow that must mean something like "internal stuggle" in English. Now for sound, I practice saying the sentance out loud a few times, run it through text to speech etc. and then search for the phrase 内心的挣扎 in google. Lots of hits, this is a common usage it seems so I read a couple that I can understand, copy that phrase into a lexis document in Google and move on. Sometimes I may quickly hit the ting database or the Chinesepod dictionary to see if there are any other sound files (not in this case). I would guess that occupied five minutes or so.

Typing this I listen to one that I "studied" last night. I know it pretty well but now, I am half paying attention. Listening to stuff you already know plays an important part I feel, it allows those words (said that way) to drift towards a status of effortless understanding, rather than understanding that requires focused concentration.

I don't use those lists on Google docs a lot, sometimes when I check them it is just housekeeping, weed out all the words and phrases that I look at and think "well of course it is". Also I try to avoid cut-and-paste as I punt these words around in various web places and documents. Typing the characters each time reinforces reading recognition.

I rarely use flashcards, I have fiddled with them once or twice in the past, but reinforcement through real material makes things stick much faster for me. If you find contextual links between material for short periods of time then a lot of dialog gets repeated.

For a while I am going to keep hitting you guys with examples of why I think the whole idea of what it means to study something and to learn something has gone out of the window. In some cases just retaining the concepts of teacher, classroom, textbooks etc. seems to hamper people when studying online.

found something

2007-10-08T19:47:00.000Z

Searching through Chinese vlogs and found something amongst the reams of doe eyed girls miming or singing badly to cheesy songs. Check out the page, there are a number of interesting videos from here. The multi-part story is very good but starts off slowly. I would punt these over to youtube but I ought to get permission first, maybe there are plans to put them on other sites. I would like it if I could annotate on mojiti.com.

study without effort?

2007-10-07T08:42:00.000Z

A comment and response to a comment another blog made me think hard about what learning Chinese actually means now. I can't explain conventionally so here is a recent story, I have many more from further back in time but this one sums up what I am trying to express.

I took some time off work last week to visit my grandfather for his 90th Birthday. I left my wife and children at home and went to pick up my Mother (2 hours drive). During the drive I listened to some music and also listened to some Chinese. I listen to 4 Princess Remy podcasts and some radio podcasts from SBS radio including a 19 minute mini radio drama. The Princess Remy pods I can usually get the gist of quickly but the subtleties don't usually come through except on repeated listening. After a while I may start looking up some of the words, often I have a little trouble with the Taiwanese accent but that is all to the good. I listen to more music, arrive at my mother's house relaxed and stay overnight, most of the rest of the evening is normal family chat, but I pull out my media player for a few minutes and watch a xiaoxin(小新) cartoon (one of the ones I have nailed most of the dialog on, I like them they are funny).

Morning and an early start, still three hours drive to get to my grandparents house, we set off early and stop for breakfast. My mother is doing some shopping to take to her parents I have a little time, I read part of an English newspaper over coffee and listen to an imandarin podcast on the chengyu 自相矛盾. I know this 成语 pretty well so really I am just being attentive to tricky bits, repeating in my head and sorting out errant tones. I pretty much ignored chengyu until recently, seemed pointless until I had basic conversational skills, now I find them very interesting. I like imandarinpod, one of the easiest ways I found to transition into "all Chinese" learning material.

Car journey starts, first I listen to music and chat to my mother and her partner, later I listen to the Remy podcasts and SBS material, including a new show that I had saved. I do a lot of repeated listening to material that I like but usually cycle through many things. I may listen to it once, listen again a week later, listen two weeks later with a dictionary etc. The constant mixing and making connections between different bits of dialogue seems to work. Every time I listen to something it gets easier eventually if I have not got bored and abandoned it, it will seem just like English and I can reuse bits, this is where most of my vocabulary comes from. My mother is interested so I pause bits and summarize them in English, I can't do simultaneous translation (I am not that good especially whilst driving) but I can give her a good idea of what is going on.

We arrive, my grandparents are still look after themselves, however there is much to do and many little things to help them. Mostly busy the rest of the day but in the evening I walk down to the local Chinese takeaway with a family member. I warn the guy I with that I not looking for any spoken practice, I don't like the dynamic of having a non-chinese learner with me when I practice speaking, besides Cantonese is way behind Mandarin at the moment and most of these places speak Cantonese. As we wait for the food I contemplate the sign above the internal door 安平入出 should make sense but I don't get it, then it dawns 出入平安, it should be read from right to left I suppose, meaning something like "enter and leave in tranquility/safety". The food arrives, the guy I am with obviously wants to push me into some sort of demonstration, he takes the food and says "how do I say thank you in Chinese" to the girl. I groan internally but she responds xie4xie4 oh Mandarin! I ask her if she speaks Mandarin in Mandarin, she does, I feel the guy next to me take an interest but I won't be beaten into his agenda, I ask her if she speaks Cantonese in Cantonese, and am greeted with a blank expression so I ask her in Mandarin, she replies "a little" (at this point she seems a little phased out), they all say a little even when they don't I find ;) I thank her for the food and say goodbye in Mandarin. We leave, she presumably thinks I speak better Cantonese, the guy I am with says "that wasn't very long". I smile ruefully and tell him she only speaks Cantonese (there are some advantages, to learning an uncommon language ;)).

The rest of the evening is tied up but before going to sleep I listen to a few Chinesepods I am reviewing the love story ones, there are still bits of vocab and subtleties in the chat that can help me a lot, but these seem amazingly easy compared to six months ago. I don't know whether I am going to really get down to studying the advanced pods from Chinesepod, I dabbled a bit but maybe at this level there is a bigger payoff in just plugging away at sources of real Chinese. Perhaps the discussion in the Media lessons will be worthwhile though. Time will tell. Chinesepod was a big help in getting me to the point where I could pick and choose but now I am not sure about its application in the future.

Next morning is Birthday day for my Grandfather, we have convinced my Grandparents that we are taking them out for a meal which is quite a big deal for them, so we go into the city center for a couple of hours to leave them in peace. My mother keeps mentioning the Chinese, I want to resolve this so tell her that we can return to the Chinese takeaway in the evening. My plan is simply to start a discussion about the sign, I can always pretend I haven't guessed to read it from right to left (sometimes starting by asking something you already know is a good way to start a conversation). I am not happy with this plan but needs must. We visit a Chinese supermarket I come across and buy a few things, all the conversation is in Cantonese. Sometimes now I will try a little Cantonese and maybe they speak some Mandarin but they seem busy/flustered and not good prospects for conversation.

After the supermarket we come across one of those Chinese health shops, paydirt, they always speak Mandarin in these places. The shop is empty, I turn to my mother "okay now it my chance to prove I can speak Chinese". I wander into the shop and a Chinese lady appears. The plan is simple, buy some goji berries (goqizi), I use them anyway, they are usually a little expensive in these place but worth it for an excuse for conversation. Also in these places you can sometimes get a hard sell for expensive things you don't need but speaking Chinese usually circumvents this.

I greet the lady who appears in Chinese, she seems surprised I start by asking for goji berries and things get a little sticky. The conversation remains in Chinese but gets a little bogged down. Seems that buying the berries in this one is more complicated than usual, finally we get to 100g for £5 (quite expensive but I agree). The talk is a little stilted, as she weighs out the berries my mother says something (I forget what) and I say to the Chinese lady 她是我的妈妈，她不相信我会说中文。My mother asks me what I said and I tell her in English "I said this is my mother, she doesn't believe I can speak Chinese. The Chinese lady turns around and says in English "that is exactly what you said". At this point everything changes, maybe for a little while we were in one of those twilight zones where she hadn't quite registered we were speaking in Chinese (it happens).

Now things flow, mostly in Chinese, I recant my learning experiences etc. (she assumes that my wife must be Chinese initially), turns out that she has lived in England for six years, now it her home as she is married to an English man, her husband knows about 500 words but can't make sentences yet etc etc. all in Chinese and at this level without much effort. She asks for my business card but I don't have one, so we exchange email addresses. Apparently I may be able to help her husband learn Chinese (something it seems she would value). The only English is when she assures my mother that I can speak Chinese very well for an Englishman especially after a short period of learning.

I suspect I may have caused her husband some suffering ;), I will await to see if I receive and email for a while if not just send one thanking for speaking practice. I left the shop on a slight adrenalin high and there was no need to visit the Chinese takeaway that evening. Most of the rest of the day was devoted to my grandparents. I had a little time in the evening when they were dozing to read a PDF I had made of one of the Clavis voices of china dialogs (read it on my hand held media player/computer). I pretty much know this one off by heart but and using it to practice reading Chinese characters. Before sleep I watch a Chinese Doreamon cartoon, I find these a little harder than xiaoxin but this one has some interesting dialog.

Next day is a lot of driving. I listen to the SBS material, the Princess Remy podcast s and the Cpod lessons, then lots of music. Normally I wait longer before repeat listening, but I am limited to what I have on my small cheap mp3 player and haven't had computer access for a couple of days (fiddling with the larger media player is awkward whilst driving. I thing about what next.. I have a Harry Potter film in Chinese to watch at home and the film Ghosts (about the Chinese cockle pickers that died in the UK). I am sure Ghosts will be a very moving film but I want to wait until my Chinese is better to do it credit (Harry Potter is of course much easier). Next week I need to return to a place near I work to talk to someone who only works Tuesdays, I want to discuss some issues about chengyu in general, in Mandarin, should really think about any new words I may need at some point....

I have kept things general to protect the innocent and omitted all the many occasions when I talked Chinese in my head to myself, or translated stuff in my head just to see if I could etc. etc. I don't feel I worked hard at learning Chinese these few days I describe. But I did work! at one point I had to work very hard to get to here but I knew what I was doing. Now this is what I mean by effortless learning. I do a little of everything, but grammar, vocabulary lists, flashcards, exercises, tests, stressing over nitpicky details, all play very little part. At the age of 39 I started learning my second language (Mandarin). At the age of 40 I have come a long way and moved into a zone where it is easy to keep going. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to learn a language. The next ones should be easier.

This like most of my blog posts rambles and contains many mistakes. But whilst I am typing I am watching Chinese TV (time is precious) so that works for me

A song subtitled

2007-09-29T14:47:00.000Z

More subtitling at mojiti.com. This time I have also started posting again on my long-negleted study material blog, so you can view the lyrics here.

Customise video online

2007-09-15T18:05:00.000Z

Video and audio together have great potential for learning languages, particularly in combining reading and listening comprehension (their is such and variety of options and combinations with sub-titles I will need to post about them soon. I have been re-mixing audio for ages but only recently starting playing with video text. I put an example on Youtube (see below) but the process takes too long with the tools I have at the moment. This one is taken from the Clavis voices of China project audio and text.

I was delighted to find the site www.mojiti.com this site makes it easy to put subtitles, comments, pictures, animations etc. over other videos that are already online. This is potentially a great tool for language learners and modify videos for language learning purposes. The video below is one I overlayed with subtitles etc. It is the video released by Max introducing his mobile phone in Chinese, all the subs and translations etc. were applied on the Mojiti site.
Not quite fair on Max as I am sure that he is good enough to be thinking in Chinese but it seemed a good way to get the English translation in.

From the mouths of babes

2007-09-10T20:20:00.000Z

Thanks to a comment from Edwin and about learning in the manner of children and thanks to reading a post on his blog. I thought it would be good time to tell about something that happened last Easter.

Learning a foreign language has made me far more observant about language learning and about people speaking my mother tongue (English). I have two nieces, one is four the other is seven, both are very smart and have advanced language for their age. The four year old is extremely brave and experimental here is an example.

Surrounded by a small cluster of adults she "takes the stage" and tells us about some cooking she has done with her mum. It is clear that she realizes the difference in level of adult speech and wants to make a good impression. You can see the concentration and internal preparation as she says "Then mummy helped me grate the limes", there was a pause here, the key word being "grate" she was not sure but she saw everyone understood and continued feeling proud. "We put the lime ???" ahh she didn't spot this one what is the result of the grating "...skin? in the bowl and added lime juice". She found a substitute word a got through it.

None of the adults corrected her about "skin", that might make her feel bad. Perfectly naturally her grandmother asked her "What else did you add to the lime zest?". You could almost see the cogs turning in her head, now she knows that zest would be a better word for the result of her grating. Note she has been allowed to participate and not been overtly corrected, also note that even at the age of four she is equipped with some fairly sophisticated tools to learn her mother tongue.

Her elder sister is not so experimental and does not like to make mistakes publicly. She is also very observant though (again you can see cogs turning when she finds her self in a situation with a bunch of new adults). They live in South Wales and are learning a little Welsh language at school. The conversation turns to language a few times, my brother in law lived in Japan for two years at that time I had just started to learn some Japanese and he was asking question about Chinese. Both girls are proud to show of some bits of Welsh they have learned, they teach me to count in Welsh (nothing boosts a child's confidence more than teaching an adult something ;)).

We heard some Welsh words and a couple of songs. I talked to my older niece about her Welsh. She had been watching me talking about language with her father and quickly set me right "They only teach us some words and songs at school, they don't show us how to make sentences, I can't speak Welsh". She was right of course, that type of teaching wasn't going to make her a Welsh speaker ever.

I think an adult has the advantage of greater concentration, and attentiveness, also perhaps we can make more intelligent filtering decisions, but do we have any better strategies than a smart seven or eight year old child?

The start of a better Mandarin course (hypothetical)

2007-09-09T13:29:00.000Z

I guess I may need to rethink my blogging style, I don't have much time so I tend to brain dump, possibly causing confusion. In my last post I briefly outlined a possible start to a better Mandarin course. I have quoted below.

"Right people here is a whole bunch of Vietnamese, Cantonese, Thai, Japanese and Mandarin audio." Please use it to calibrate your ear to Mandarin language, I will test you on some more audio at the end of the week just to make sure you get it. When you get the feel you can always listen to try to determine where the sentences are, when people might be saying names, what sounds are often co-opted for breathing stops etc. what is the mood of speakers and identify a few common sounds you hear a lot (mimic one or two of these at the end of week, and I will tell you what they mean). Don't worry about meaning for now, but if you think you have guessed something, especially in the video material you can share on Friday. Ok see you at the end of the week, oh and by the way let my know which Mandarin voices you each like the best, we will see what we can do as you are going to be listening to them a lot."

Jenny commented that: But I imagine that many people would give up too quick with your method. They would say to the teacher:“What are you expecting me to hear? How shall I hear out the names. I mean I don't even know that language. So how do you expect me to distinguish Mandarin from Cantonese when I don't know what both are alike“

Here is where I am at. Firstly I would hope that on a university course the students would be at least relatively smart and have some motivation even if it is just to pass the course rather than a passion for Mandarin. How do they work out which is Mandarin? They go online and find examples of the target languages to work with. They use the knowledge gained here to filter what they hear. If they are smart they will realize that they are probably better off spending more time listening to Mandarin so they can positively identify just what they need. Granted some won't get it, I may need to spell it out to them (they lose a few marks :)). Maybe the names are too hard , maybe not, but it is surprising what you can discern if you listen.

For example a colleague of mine spent a little holiday in China, he had no interest in learning Mandarin but when he came back he said to me I kept hearing zhe ge and na ge all the time (although being Northern Chinese it was more like zhei ge and nei ge) what do they mean? He was happy when I told him that mostly he was hearing "this" and "that". You would be surprised how much more interesting stuff can be discovered by someone listening attentively to a language they don't yet understand.

At the end of the week I would expect that those that had worked at it would have a good start to the rest of the course, and started to learn the way that that children do before they can even speak. I bet you that a Chinese (or any other child) will usually react more favorably to an adult speaking the language they are familiar with than a foreign language even before they can understand a single word.

The biggest initial hurdle to most Westerners is that they have never heard Mandarin, first sort that out and give the same ability to identify it as they may have to differentiate French and German (even if they don't speak French and German).

The conventional learning approach is so ingrained that most people cannot think outside of it. The intention of my course would not be to teach people Mandarin but to teach them how to learn Mandarin.

Yup they are going to have to work at it the first week but that is as it should be.

Childlike simplicity

2007-09-08T17:44:00.000Z

I appear to share a lot of views with Steve Kauffman at the linguist blog about language learning. This post on learning like a child to me is the essence of everything.

My experience is that a lot of language learning is actually acquisition rather than learning. Like so many things in life you have to just do it and apply some sort of feed-back mechanism, the feed-back allows you make adjustments so that you improve. There is a learning element or appears to be because you increasingly acquire words and phrases but even that is probably overemphasized because eventually when you begin to roll, meaning of new structures and usage is inferred from usage and experience. I almost certainly learned that 2+2=4 but I know that 120+120=240. I learned (kind of) jin1tian1 guo4 de hao3 bu4, but derived from observation that jin1tian1 guo4 de hao3bu4hao3 (今天过得好不好？) means "how has today gone?". Snap! one moment at the right time and the realization that combination of words can be used in this way is owned.

Children acquire many skills by acquisition, they just need the raw materials, the desire to learn and maybe a few holistic suggestions ("keep pedaling", "look ahead" etc.) What they do not need is a complete breakdown of the bike mechanics, laws of physics and a detailed diagram of every physical movement they need to make. It should be simple. For language learning you still need desire, the raw materials are sound and text and surprise surprise, much of the feedback can be applied by yourself, most of the rest by speakers of the language in action.

Many of the adults who approach language learning cannot let go, some are even offended by the concept that they should learn like children. Right from the word go they want to know about aspirated fricatives and complex grammar. Right from the beginning they obsess about the slight differences in pronounciation they hear (which is right?) and soon they will try to apply the grammar rules they learned to real spoken language and squeal in indignation that they are not obeyed. Somehow they have managed to forget that their own mother tongue only loosely obeys grammar rules when spoken in real situations, forget the regional pronounciation variation in their own language etc. etc.

Linguistics does not directly map to language learning. The science of language is important and useful as is the science of physics but I can learn to ride a bike without physics knowledge. Educational institutions have a vested interest in mixing linguistics into their course because otherwise the course material would look rather sparse, and how would they set and mark exams?

Maybe the perfect Chinese course would be like this for the first week.

"Right people here is a whole bunch of Vietnamese, Cantonese, Thai, Japanese and Mandarin audio." Please use it to calibrate your ear to Mandarin language, I will test you on some more audio at the end of the week just to make sure you get it. When you get the feel you can always listen to try to determine where the sentences are, when people might be saying names, what sounds are often co-opted for breathing stops etc. what is the mood of speakers and identify a few common sounds you hear a lot (mimic one or two of these at the end of week, and I will tell you what they mean). Don't worry about meaning for now, but if you think you have guessed something, especially in the video material you can share on Friday. Ok see you at the end of the week, oh and by the way let my know which Mandarin voices you each like the best, we will see what we can do as you are going to be listening to them a lot."

I can't really see a university going for that though but perhaps I am wrong?

Even more video

2007-09-01T16:56:00.000Z

Maxiewawa left a comment and linked to one of his videos, he seems to have been busy ;). I particularly like this one...

Maxiewawa had made a composite video of people talking about their mobile phones in Japanese. I am on the slow-burner with Japanese, just collecting materials and working out how to keep up a slow and persistent progress, it was good to be able to recognise a few words though. This is his mobile phone introduction in Chinese...

I like getting Chinese from all sorts of sources, there seems to be an increasing number of non-native Chinese speakes putting stuff out there in Mandarin which is great in my opinion. Seeing as my shouji is in many respects the complete opposite of Max de shouji I am hoping to post a video response within the next couple of days. I don't have webcam or a proper video camera so I need to experiment a little first.

Video again (spoilt for choice)

2007-08-19T08:08:00.001Z

A couple of times I have posted about video, just thought I would mention an excellent Firefox extension. There are a lot of Firefox extensions to help download videos but downloadhelper is the best it makes it easy to download video files. Before using this one I sometimes had to resort to analyzing network packets to get video on my hard-drive. AuntySue at the Chinesepod Cantonese forum pointed this extension out.

Just for example from Youtube you can get a few useful Mandarin learning resources.

You can find a lot of Chinese video websites that this extension is likely to work on listed on a Danwei post.

Minimum effort required?

2007-07-29T10:11:00.000Z

There are many activities in life where a certain level of effort is required and without that effort the final objective will never be achieved not matter what the time scale. I can decide to run for fitness, but if I wish to run a marathon in a respectable time then I have to invest the effort in training. Simply running for half an hour once a week may make me a little fitter but even after ten years of this I will not be ready for that marathon.

I believe that to learn a language you have to be prepared to work hard, either at a certain level all the time or occasionally in concerted bursts. If most people (there may be exceptional minds to which this does not apply) don't do this then they will only ever achieve a superficial grasp of the language, no matter what the timescale.

My understanding of the mechanics and chemistry of human memory is somewhat superficial (I haven't made that concerted effort to master this kind of knowledge). However there does seem to be an element of "use it or lose it". This use it or lose it principle would suggest that if you only learn in a casual manner then you will reach a point where you are just "treading water", a lot of your effort will be reviewing things you originally learned long ago or the new things you learn will be offset by the old things you are forgetting.

Seconds out, round one..

2007-07-07T17:59:00.000Z

As I intimated in the last post, as news goes this is a little stale being two months old. But it is far too significant to leave out.

Language learning can be like a sport, even like an extreme sport. There is the training and preparation and eventually the adrenaline rush and thrill of the event.

A couple of months ago I found out that the manager of our Beijing office was coming over for a few days. In the past I avoided talking to him, I couldn't see the point if I was only going to exchanging the odd phrase or two (there are other places to practice that). This time however I sent him an email. I explained that I had been learning Chinese for a little over a year and would like a chat if possible.

Now here was the problem, almost every other time I have talked Chinese face to face I have had some control over the circumstances and some context to start conversation from. Now I am in an open plan office, some of my workmates already make fun of my Chinese learning they know that at some unknown time this guy will be around and they can't wait to see me struggle (its a guy thing, I am just as cruel to them when I get the chance ;)). As the day draws on my mouth feels a little dry, there is a tingling in my arms and my stomach is lurching a little.

Suddenly when I am least expecting it a smiling Chinese guy appears and shakes my hand. My heartbeat is thudding in my ears, I can hear knives sharping in the background. Dry mouthed I stumble through the worst Chinese greeting I have ever uttered. Kindly in English he asks me if I know about the tones yet. Damn this won't do at all....

World shrinks, open plan office vanishes, people vanish, there is just me and a smiling Chinese guy. I tell him I know about tones and apologize we start to talk after brief introduction, we talk about language learning, about Westerners learning Chinese about families ...... I talk in a slow measured way, that belies the huge amount of mental processing going on for each sentence I have to construct (this was the hardest part).

At some point early on he looks at me slightly incredulously and says "you can understand me, I can understand you". It was a surreal experience.

Eventually we had to finish, I discovered to my surprise that we had be talking for almost 30 minutes, and also realized that there was almost no English used. Obviously he was used to speaking to foreigners that may not have a good grasp of Mandarin but even so this experience felt like a huge milestone had been surpassed.

I asked a workmate if he was entertained to which he replied "once you have listened to a couple of guys speaking Chinese for 15 minutes it starts to get a little boring". Since then no one has made fun of my Chinese learning efforts.

That evening I was exhausted mentally but very happy. The feelings I had, the nerves that vanished, the total focus etc. were just like those I have had in past when putting on gloves and a gum shield and sparring with the expectation that I could get a little hurt.

Since that time I have actually tailed off a little, actually speaking to people. I have the confidence to know that I can quietly spend a little time building up more vocabulary and comprehension, then get back into playing the sport...

Blown away (overload)

2007-07-07T11:27:00.000Z

I have big problem, I want to blog, but can't. I feel like one of those NASA probes that lands on a comet and they get so much data back it takes years to process.

The overload mentioned in the title isn't an overload in language learning, just an overload in insights, new discoveries etc. Language learning has already started to change my life and mind in so many wonderful ways.

This blog isn't really a diary, it is not a record of everything I do and I don't even care about keeping things in the right time line. It is nice to comeback and track some of my thoughts overtime though and sometimes is it good to put a little back by attempting to make suggestions that might help people in similar circumtances to myself.

So much to say ..... where to start ..... OH I know, hang on I will be back.

Video pt.1

2007-06-10T19:41:00.000Z

Been very busy recently, language learning has not taken a back-seat (still remains a high priority) but blogging certainly has.

Increasingly I am looking to video materials for learning resources. Partly because it is a change of pace, and partly because as my Chinese improves I can actually watch things to relax (and learn at the time, you can't get better than that :)).

Looking at video from a strictly learning point of view, apart from the above, what can video offer over listening or reading? I knew there was another element but it was difficult to explain. Recently I got hold of the Disney film Mulan, very useful as it has Cantonese and Mandarin soundtracks. I skipped through it quickly and played a couple of bits just to see how accessible the Mandarin was. One place I stopped on was a scene that has been played out in lots of films. The invading army captures a couple of enemy scouts. The scouts are mocked and scared a little and then released to deliver a message to their leader. At this point you are thinking "Hmmm usually it is considered good practice to just send one enemy scout back" At this point the leader of the Huns scratches his beard and says "送信需要多少人？" a rather evil looking henchman replies "一个" with a murderous look and draws back his huge bow.

OK so what is my point? well the Hun says "Hmmm how many people does it take to deliver a letter", his henchman replies "one person". Simple language and with the right visual information you can enjoy lots of comprehensible input. Perhaps you are thinking that it is somewhat relative whether the language is simple or not, however consider the same story written down, I can guarantee that I am going to stumble over the language and have to resort to a dictionary at the moment ("drawing a bow" etc. etc.) I wouldn't have a clue". The same scene couldn't have been rendered as just sound either without considerably more information.

Video gives me more learning modes and more options and sometimes I can hit a sweet spot where I am still learning but in a fairly relaxed way (if audio content becomes so easy that I don't have to concentrate much, is also usually stops teaching me anything). The video acts a little prompt to help me absorb new patterns of speech.

I want to speak more about video soon, but for now: you probably know about watching Mandarin video on youtube, however there is much more available on Chinese sites. This page has a load of links.

Turning Chinese?

2007-04-18T18:28:00.000Z

Apologies, a bit of a random post this one, things move so fast and my work has been extremely busy recently. Chinese learning is changing but I have climbed over a few foothills and am now surveying the mountains I have to climb to finish the journey.

Skype has lost favour as a method of learning. Although I learned so much from Skype, there are many disadvantages. The sound quality is often not so good in one or both directions and the lack of face to face communication with body language etc. makes a huge difference. I must get back on Skype to keep up with a couple of friends though.

I want to post more on here about what I am doing and how I am doing it. My approach is unorthodox but seems to pay off, maybe others will find some use. I also need to get back to posting in Chinese on my other blog :). Writing in Chinese is useful but I have mostly been doing it in emails recently. My knowledge of Chinese characters is coming on now, with the need for scratching away or spending a lot of time with flashcards. My plan of learning to read what you can already understand and learning to write what you can already read seems to be paying off. I still can't see how anybody could think it would be good idea for a Westerner learning Chinese for the first time to start learning the hanzi straight away?. Of course I suppose anyone who has learnt that way has no option but to think it is best. Maybe I too am stuck with what I did but so many things seem to make sense. For example the feeling of learning to read hanzi and going straight to Chinese in my head, never having associated an English meaning to the character (except via translation from the Chinese).

I have started learning Cantonese (in my own way). I think I will have fun with that. I have experimented a little in the past but waited until a couple of things occurred. Firstly my feel for Mandarin tones is good enough now that I can feel out the Cantonese tones without damaging what I already have. Secondly, I will pace Cantonese well behind my Mandarin studies, I find I am translating Cantonese to Mandarin to understand it, rather than English. That feel right and seems to indicate it is safe to learn them both now. I think I will have fun with Cantonese, it will also give me some completely different opportunities to practice speaking. As usual it is mostly a listening and absorbing excercise for a while, but my recent Chinese friend (who sadly is returning to China after such a short time) can also speak Cantonese so I got a little initial Cantonese pronunciation practice.

I will probably be a little busy finding out a new language partner for face to face practice. A complicated business but I hope it won't take too long. Actually I discovered I have three huge advantages now. Firstly many Chinese people seem to find it hard to learn English in an English speaking country (probably because most of residents are not learning Chinese so naturally don't feel like spending a longtime discussing the finer points of language learning). Secondly I can speak very standard English, which makes it easier for them to understand and they feel more confident that they are not picking up a weird regional accent. Thirdly I have advanced far enough with my Mandarin that they know I am serious about their language and culture and not just messing about, trying to look cool etc.

I am using Chinese as an excuse to break old habits and patterns in my life style (brewing oolong and jasmine tea at work instead of having coffee etc. etc.). Also using it as an excuse to re-appraise all the worn out thoughts and philosophies churning around in my mind.

Anyhow back to some serious study.....

Tones

2007-03-31T20:35:00.000Z

The tones in Mandarin are considered one of the main problems for Westerners, who come to learn the language, and they have certainly caused me some problems. I think it is hard for someone who has grown up with a tonal language to understand the difficulties of those who have not.

I can say that I have made considerable progress. I try to do little things all the time to improve my feeling for the tones. Initially I was in the same boat as most beginners seem to be, I could hear the tonal difference of syllables but instantly forgot them (I am too used to this sort of audio information being used to carry emotional content in sentences, not changing the meaning of sounds). I also know for a fact that I am still a long way away from the natural ability of a native speaker.

Now I can usually discern tones in clearly spoken Chinese and can often reproduce tones myself. There are difficulties in sentences with some sounds and I have to spend a little time getting used to a new word (in isolation the word it usually easy but in a sentence it is often not so easy). I also have a few blind spots with common words, for example I can say ying1wen2 in isolation but often pronounce it ying2wen2 in the middle of a sentence.

Rather than going crazy over tones I tend to work on them a little all the time. I am constantly attentive to them, and try to do little things to improve. For example if using an online dictionary to check a word I think I have heard, I commit to adding the tone marks when I add enter pinyin (getting these wrong and wasting more time, tends to focus the mind). I sometime concentrate really hard on identifying the tones in Chinese I listen to, even if the words are obvious.

One day, I think I will achieve something close to the natural ability with tones that a native speaker has, I just don't know when. I don't think there is a magic bullet for most of us, just a gradual development. Initially you don't know enough words to get them mixed up anyway (it was quite a revelation when I first mistook lian4xi2 for lian2xi4 when the context was confusing, of course I was also focused on trying to understand the other words).

Some people equate musical ability with tonal language ability, I am not so sure, I can easily tune a guitar by ear, but only to itself, I don't have perfect pitch. I think a general continual attentiveness and time is all that is required. I think even a skilled musician will have problems the first time they encounter a tonal language. We are all different though, I would be interested to hear of other peoples experiences.

I was trying to think of something that may cause Chinese speakers a similar problem when they learn English. Maybe some of the more subtle sentence inflections, for example the hidden 'but'. When a statement is made in English with a slight inflection that tells a native speaker that the word 'but' should be added. "I like what you have done (but)." maybe the sentence that follows takes a non-native speaker by surprise in some cases if they take the first statement at face value?

iMandarin podcast

2007-03-18T16:52:00.000Z

I discovered a new podcast recently. The people behind the iMandarin podcast seem to be releasing two a week. I think the podcast is intended to promote their residential training and possibly online training, however the podcast and part transcript with examples is free to download and use.

Many of the podcasts discuss an aspect of Chinese life or culture and there is much discussion after the dialogue about aspects of the language used. Almost all the podcast content is in Chinese.

I like them very much, I can understand most of the content first time through (with some concentration), and most of what I do not understand I can get on repeated listenings. I am just going to use these for a bit as a "busman's holiday" (a slight variation on what you normally do as an alternative to a rest) before I start a serious assault on the Chinesepod advanced lessons.

There are a few improvements that could be made to the podcasts, there is only only presenter, I think the background music could be dropped and they could probably drop most of the little English (sometimes the choice of words to repeat in English is somewhat strange). However this is just looking a "gift horse in the mouth" (being overly critical about something that is free). I think many people who were comfortable with the Intermediate cpod podcasts could gain a lot from listening to these also. And if below that level or wanting some reading practice you can always work with the transcripts.

All Change

2007-03-09T22:10:00.000Z

Ok so now I have two other blogs connected to this one I thought is was time to move to one of the newer templates etc. Still a few things missing (like the other learner blogs), but I will restore these and appropriate feeds etc. I am even toying with the idea of adding a photo 真吓人!

Actually I am undergoing a little bit of a strategy change, my previous English blog post have been little more than disordered brain dumps (not so much written as regurtitated). I have to see how I can get it to work with the Chinese blog as that develops, but I am kind of hoping that eventually there maybe material that could be useful to a Chinese person studying English (including audio). I think with this internet game it really can be the case that the more you give out, the more you get back :). Special thanks to all the people (both Chinese and English and many behind the scenes) who have helped me on my journey so far......

Do I need to go to China?

2007-02-21T13:21:00.000Z

I really, really, really want to go to China. That is a fact, indisputable and undeniable. Another unfortunate fact is that it is not likely to quite some time (zhen zao gao!). Okay so assuming I can be all grown up about it, rather than crying like a baby (Whaaaaaaaaa!) there is another problem. A number of people seem to be firmly of the opinion that I will not be able to learn Chinese unless I go to China or a Chinese speaking country. What if they are right? Personally I think/hope they are wrong and here is why I think/hope this.

I have encountered a number of non-native English speakers who have learned pretty good or even excellent English whilst only living in a non-English speaking country. If they can do this, why can I not do the same with Chinese. Granted that they may have a considerably larger exposure to English in their home country than I have had to Chinese, however there is plenty of material out there on the Internet now, so I can make my own exposure.

Whilst there are plenty of examples of Westerners who have learned very good Chinese whilst living in a Chinese speaking country, there are also many that learn nothing or next to nothing, so being in China does not mean learning Chinese.

The Internet also provides many opportunities to connect with and talk with Chinese people that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. In addition the few Mandarin speakers I have met in the UK regard it as a novelty if a Westerner attempts to speak Mandarin so they are very helpful (this may change if learning the language becomes more popular and they get fed up with the attention).

I concede that I will miss out on some cultural issues and standard day-to-day interactions until I go there, but there again even a trip to an American city where they speak English would result in some measure of culture shock until I adapted. So is there really any reason nowadays why a Westerner cannot learn Mandarin from their own country?

Mandarin progress report 4

2007-02-03T17:59:00.000Z

Well this my fourth progress report after just over one year of study. I can honestly say it is working, but still a long long way to go. I still don't have any time for books or grammar. Obviously some of the questions I may ask are grammar related but I do not spend any time studying grammar for grammar's sake.

I finally learnt enough spoken Chinese to warrant a more intensive (although anything is more intensive than none at all) study of the characters. I did learn to write about 150 of them as part of this excercise but now have decided for me at least that writing doesn't help me learn to read and this year I want to learn to read Chinese. I have no idea how many characters I can read confidently it could be anywhere from 250 - 400. When I am confident it is at least 500 I will probably take one of those online tests to make sure I am not fooling myself.

My speaking is improving rapidly but still has a long. long way to go. Listening skills are way ahead of everything else at the moment. I listen to Chinesepod intermediate and upper intermediate amongst other things, I generally don't bother with the texts and can understand most of the chat and dialogue after a few runs through. Each lesson at that level is still chock full of things to learn though so I think I will be browsing and revisting these for sometime to come. I have also used some of the transcripts prepared by Goulnik and two prepared my Lantian as a boost up and reading practice. I also listen to the podcasts at Chineselearn online these are different to Chinesepod as they are structured. The first course of 60 lessons has been pretty easy for me as it starts at beginner level, but I learnt a couple of things and it was a nice review. I feel the course is well thought out. Occaisionally I listen to Serge's podcasts as he gives pretty comprehensive lessons on many helpful subject areas.

I use Skype frequently and have recently made a very special friend. Genuine connection with people is a huge boost to learning Chinese as then you are driven to learn more so that you can share more communication with them.

I am reading much more Chinese recently, I use text to speech, followed by annotation followed by dictionary lookup (in that order) to get over my limited character recognition skills. I can often read a lot of some student texts or simple chatty blogposts or simple dialog subtitles but obviously main stream Chinese is still a huge, huge challenge. I don't tend to read stuff that takes a lot of dictionary work too often. I am cruel to myself and am only really satisfied with fast scan recognition anything I have to stare at for a while I count as partial failure. I strong believe a sense of immediacy is important. Sometimes I chat in text in Chinese, or a mix of Chinese and English, this is good practice but I don't like the MS IME very much so I do not feel that I am fast enough (frustating those few times when I instantly know exactly what I want to say. As I hoped my reading ability is racing ahead to catch up with my listening ability. So for me at least I was right, and for those that thought this idea was bonkers :P (sorry I am dealing with being almost 40 by being a little childish at times :) ). At this point I truly believe I have lost nothing by delaying study of Hanzi and probably gained a lot.

Writing is very very new to me, I have started with e-mails and blog comments and am quickly moving on to a Chinese only blog. My next theory is that my writing will race ahead to meet my reading ability. I try to write fast and limit myself to few dictionary lookups. As a result I think my writing is relatively childish and contains many grammatical errors. I am happy with this I think if I can get enough correctional feedback my writing will improve. Most of the feedback from Chinese people would seem to show that my writing is easy to understand (if often incorrect) so I guess my expectations of childlike writing are met :))

When I can I watch and listen to Chinese radio and TV and films etc. Now I understand a lot, lot more so I actively seek out content I can understand more of and leave content that is impenetrable (therefore more chat shows and less news reports). My extensive listening seems to mean that now I am un-worried by fast speaking or a number of accents. What usually stops me understanding now is just not knowing the words (sounds daft I know, but I know what I mean :)). Often in various circumstances I have found myself understanding a stretch of Chinese without thinking about it and I think "oh how nice they put some English commentary in there (John Pasden stylee)", then I do a double take and realise it was all Chinese. Of course then for a little while I think a miracle has happened and now I can speak Chinese, until a stretch comes along that I have no hope of understanding and brings me down to Earth with a bump.

I think this is pretty honest appraisal of my progress so far, obviously pride will have made me over-estimate some things and modesty underestimate others (they rarely maintain a true balance). I now really believe that in 2008 I will be able to say wo3 hui4 shou1 zhong1wen2 without a single yi dian3dian3 and only a tiny prick of conscience. Hey that means I will be able to watch the next Olympics in Chinese :).

Chinese only blog

2007-01-28T15:41:00.000Z

Things are lining up for my system of Mandarin study this year. A big part is going involve outputting considerably more Chinese and learing from my mistakes (a huge learning oppourtunity there).

Well now is the chance to gasp in amazement as an English man prepares to butcher the Chinese language (sorry in advance). I have set up a Chinese only blog. The interface needs a little work however the idea is that I only blog in Chinese. I will provide links to English translations but in a seperate location, this way it may be of a little interest to Chinese people learning English or at least if butcher the Chinese version too much then my meaning will be captured somewhere.

Errrr.... that was it, sorry nothing more to see or read here.

Mandarin Brain Slices

2007-01-20T17:13:00.000Z

Today is my Chinese learning first birthday :). This next year of study will be very, very different. To mark this I have been for a little while moving my written work etc. to the Internet via Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Now I have worked out that I can apply a little polish (not too much). And publish them via the Internet and another Mandarin-Slices blog.

The idea of a brain slice is not so much that of a learning resource because they will not always be polished enough. Also they may be seriously out of sync. with my current studies, I have plenty to catch up with. This is my vision of Internet student 2.0 begining to be realised, a vision that started ever since I discovered delicous links and has a long way further to go......

Some of the brain slice may be useful little study resources for other people, some not. This is your chance to rifle through my Mandarin study school bag. It may take a little while to catch up to some of the stuff I could post but I waited until I had a least four to illustrate the type of things (both long and short) that will be included.

I will of course be more that delighted if other Mandarin students allow a little peek into their school bags too. Learning online is at the brink of huge changes........

good start to 2007 B

2007-01-17T19:30:00.000Z

I kept thinking that my approach must be wrong because people keep telling me it is (you have to have a class, you have to have a teacher, you have to go to China, you have to start learning to write straight away, you shouldn't spend so much time listening to real Chinese etc.) Either that or I have some kind of freaky mutant brain. Whilst I could accept that the approach might not suit everybody I couldn't believe I was that freaky (maybe you can though ;)). If it wasn't for people like Mashood (who might not be doing things exactly the same way but seems to have similar ideas), I probably would have doubted my sanity.

Anyhow I found a little while ago that I am not unique (which rhymes with freak) after all ....

I came upon the site of Steve Kaufman. The site is The Linguist Steve has learned many languages and also now runs a company that teaches English. Steve has a lot of posts on his blog and podcasts. He is not afraid to speak about his ideas in many languages either. I particularly like the stuff he does in Chinese (I can understand a fair amount of that as he probably speaks slightly slower than many native speaker and slightly simpler).

The link I gave above is to the blogs on the site, which is what is of most interest to myself. For example there are a series of podcasts where the Steve talks to another language guy in four languages. Here is the Mandarin version. I particularly like this one as I could pretty much follow the meaning all the way through. I as still a little hazy about some of "language ego" stuff but I will make time soon to have a crack at transcribing it.

I have spent sometime reading his stuff, listening to his podcasts etc. I find that most of his conclusions about language learning agree with a lot of things I have find out for myself (he must be very smart ;)).

There are a few issues I need to think about and may disagree with (I would be highly suspicous of myself if there weren't) but on the whole he seems have a brain that my brain can at least sympathise with. I am sure I will post more about The Linguist as time goes by.

A little fun

2007-01-16T19:36:00.000Z

Before things get too serious. I found this on Chinablast If you need a transcript (one of the pigs in particular needs to speak up a little) then follow the link it is one of their active, small transcription projects.

Educational? Well I can say that I will never forget the word wu1ding1 for sure. Nothing else new in this for most people however it is fun and it provides a little practicing in linking these question words in an unusual perspective :).

good start to 2007 A

2007-01-06T11:10:00.000Z

Had a great start to Chinese learning yesterday lunchtime. I need to practice speaking a lot more this year and Skype is a wonderful way to practice (possibly essential for someone in my position), however Skype has the drawback that there is no body language. I find talking face to face much easier and even on a good Skype connection face to face talking seems easier to understand in comparison. There are probably many reasons for this but some simple reasons are fairly obvious. For example if you are talking face to face you may see that someone isn't understanding what you are saying straight away and rephrase the sentance or substitute a word, but on Skype you may have finished the entire sentence before you know there is a problem.

I had a little face to face practice early on with a guy who was finishing an MBA at Bath university but he has left now and it was a little early on in my learning. Luckily I have found a fairly reliable source of Mandarin speakers for a little occasional practice.

Problem: where to find Mandarin speakers I can meet up with, I met one weekly for a while who was finishing an MBA at Bath university and it was great. However he was nearish my age, married and had similar time constraints so it was easy to make arrangements that suited us both. Young students a (almost literally) generation away and whilst I don't mind talking to people of all ages I might either weird them out or they might get frustrated that we are running time schedules and constraints that appear to come from alternative parallel universes.

I tried some takeaway shops and a Chinese supermarket but they spoke Cantonese. I have made a very useful discovery though. There are a multitude of Chinese medicine and health shops across the UK now and at least two of the different chains operate in a very similar way. At the most basic they have a Chinese medicine practitioner and an assistant. The Chinese medicine person is a Mandarin speaker (it says so in their job adverts) who may speak English and the assistant is proficient in Mandarin and English (also says so in their job adverts ;)). I practiced a bit away from home when I was visiting other towns or cities (these things are all over). The assistant is usually a girl who will respond with gushing enthusiasm when you attempt to speak Mandarin (although one was very nervous and shy but that seemed to apply across the board Mandarin or English). The power in the back is often a Man who will not go out of his way to speak Mandarin with you (you might not even see this person).

There are two of these places near where I work :). I went shopping for the first time this year and noticed a change of staff in one of them (I had already had some basic chats and ordered my wolfberries in Mandarin with the previous assistant). I went and launched into Mandarin (checking that the assistant spoke it even though I was sure she would). Unfortunately she was very withdrawn (also with other people that just spoke English to her but I guess I would feel like that in a foreign country too) but the power in the back room was a lady this time as soon as she heard my Mandarin explanation; that I want to practice, she leaped out and engaged me in approx 20mins of wonderful conversation in fact the best most fluent conversation I have ever had. Yes we used some English but mostly Mandarin and she was smart and kind enough to dumb down her talking to a level where I had a fighting chance to understand.

That conversation is like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, granted the rest of the tunnel is still very very very long but I have seen the light, and I walked out of there on clouds (I was shockingly mentally exhausted though). I have an open invitation to return to chat. Even better just before Christmas I had finally managed to convince the older gentleman in the other place that I could actually understand and speak at least a little Mandarin (rather than just being a freak coincidence derived from the mumblings of a mad Englishman) and he told me I was welcome to return for a chat also.

Great, some face to face conversation, it is much much easier than Skype which I find a little awkward, this just increases my admiration for the great Chinese people I have talked to on Skype who can speak English so well (particularly Ellen and Keyu). Now I have a goal, first to get invited behind the counter for a cup of tea (I know they make it back there I have caught a glimpse), secondly to bring the shy assistant out of her shell if I can.

If you are English and bemoaning the lack of casual conversation opportunity then why not see if you have one of these places near you?

The brain and language

2007-01-04T12:46:00.000Z

Learning a new language is a big issue and involves a huge investment in time. For me it makes sense to spend at least a little time studying the learning process, if you find something that makes even a small improvement to the way in which you study it will pay off hugely over time. Whilst looking around for something to teach me more about the brain and language I discovered this video on Google videos. Just the ticket to get started.

IMHO Google video rocks as you can download easily from it unlike youtube where you have to jump through hoops using things like the unplug plugin for Firefox, even then you need a media player that will play flv files. There is a lot of Mandarin stuff on google video and the mp4 download option means it is easy to convert or play directly on mobile devices. Yes I do know Google bought Youtube but at the moment the interfaces and content are seperate.

The same people have also produced a long video in both Mandarin and English about the Nanjing massacre. This is obviously a very heavy subject and at the complete opposite end to the spectrum from the girly talk I mentioned in my last post. However the documentary is over an hour long and the presence of both an English and Mandarin version makes it a potentially valuable study resource.

English version

Mandarin version

I am acutely aware that emotive issues like this, the holocaust, the bombing of Dresden etc. etc. are open to much interpretation and many viewpoints. If you want to get a perspective on the many viewpoints issue you could do worse than watch the Japanese film Rashomon, also available in Google video. Apparently like a lot of good old media it is now public domain (happy days).

Rashomon (not Chinese but worth a watch)

Mandarin girly talk

2006-12-29T10:11:00.000Z

Sorry not sure what else to call it, "girly talk" seems to fit the bill (don't want to cause any offence). In a previous post I mentioned about having listened to quite a lot of Mandarin spoken by young Taiwanese women at one point. I put considerable effort into listening to this kind of thing a little while ago but I think once I get to the point where I can understand most of it I will have to stop (or go insane ;)).

If you investigate other videos posted by this YouTube user you will find more than enough "girly talk" to keep you going. Other types of talk that merit some ear training are: little children talk, old people talk, north versus south, Beijing talk and news presenter talk. I am sure that there are many more to discover.

BTW what is with the cutsy expressions? Every Taiwan girl on TV seems to need a trademark "custsy" facial pose :). The face posing and that aaaahhhhhhh sound are slowly eroding my soul, be aware. To strike a balance I am of course aware that we have more than enough similar material in America and the UK.

Christmas thoughts

2006-12-28T18:47:00.000Z

Have had a pretty relaxed time this week, and probably done less Chinese than at any time over the preceding Year. Spent most of the time with my family and doing odd jobs around the house. Hope everybody else had a good time too. I haven't completly abandoned thinking about Chinese though and am refreshed and looking forward to picking up the reins again. I also received an interesting present.

My youngest son, who is nine years old had got hold of some chile seeds for me to plant next year and had gone to trouble of writing Chinese characters on the envelope for me. This made me think about the initial hurdles for a westerner approaching Chinese in a fresh light. Over the preceding couple of months my son had been asking me questions about the Chinese study I was doing. With a bit of help from his mum he used the internet to find how to say "happy christmas" and knowing more than she did insisted that there was a site where he could see animations of the characters. He also insisted that he was going to use the correct stroke order (as far as mum was concerned he could just copy them anyhow). Having spoken to me about it he knew to draw the characters proportionatly, assigning the same amount of space to each one. The result was four characters that looked very authentic.

When I was presented with the envelope I was very pleased but explained that I was not sure how to read it (I had a sneaking suspicion though as I recoginsed the character for kuai4). With a big smile he turns over the envelope and I can see he has taken the trouble to write the pinyin on the other side (he knows that I know comparitively few characters and that the pinyin is a way to write the corresponding sounds. So now I could read the phrase "sheng4dan4 kuai4le4" or "happy christmas". He also told me the characters on the front were traditional (he realised he was presented with a choice on some characters and pick the ones that looked prettier).

All my family have had exposure to Chinese simply because I have been learning it, they have picked up little bits of information over time. They would understand a few simple phrases (overexposure to my practicing), they know roughly what Chinese sounds like (a few bits of media like cartoons I have found they have watched with english subs), they know about tones (one of them can actually mimic them pretty well when pretending to speak Chinese), they know roughly how the writing system works and they know that there is a bunch of tools on my computer and the Internet to help with Chinese learning.

Basically if any of them decide to learn Chinese in the future, they will have quite a significant boost having picked up a lot of background information. The lack of this backround knowledge is the first major hurdle that and adult in the west has to overcome. I guess (prettly wildly ;)) that maybe this cost me two to three months of progress compared to attempting a European language.

Chinablast and more Remy

2006-12-21T13:08:00.000Z

Some interesting thoughts over the last day. Brendan's comment to the last post made me think a bit more about implications of understanding quite a lot of what Princess Remy says (by no means anywhere near all). I did some searching and found a brilliant site in the process (actually re-found but it had only just started the last time I saw it).

The site is Chinablast and it is a place where people can collaborate on the translation and transcription of various Chinese medium. I think this is excellent.

If you search Chinablast you will find that two of the Princess Remy podcasts have been transcribed and translated, that is a excellent resource for any Mandarin learner and makes those two podcasts accessible for a wider range of levels.

Two things are made clear in the comments. First as noted elsewhere on the web, Princess Remy does not speak very clearly. Secondly the speech is conversational therefore when written the sentences are often ungrammatical. I think that Princess Remy sounds fairly clear to me because I have spent many many hours listening to Chinese media (in particular in this case Taiwanese girls chatting about makeup, hair fashion and pet dogs etc.). I have listened to all sorts of stuff right from the start even when I could understand only one word in a hundred.

I feel very confident for next year. I have occasionally taken some stick for my seemingly strange approach but now I am really sure that even if it is not "THE WAY" it is a "VALID WAY" at least for me. More importantly I seem to be making the most progress in my main priority which is engaging with speech before writing. Lots to do but happy to know I haven't taken any completely wrong turns.

So those times in the evening when I didn't feel like doing anything constructive and instead of sitting down to watch some trashy English TV, watched some trashy Taiwanese TV on my computer, have paid dividends.

Learning Mandarin Podcast

2006-12-17T20:36:00.000Z

I want to keep my learning experiance as much based on sound as possible, especially in the early stages. Podcasts of various types are a crucial aid and especially relevent to me as I get a lot of time where I can listen but not read or interact with a keyboard. Some Podcasts are learning podcasts and some are just material that can be used in a learning context.

I think that the Learning Learning Mandarin Podcast is a good example of a useful source of material.

The Learning Mandarin podcasts are not instructional as such. The usual format is that the host April discusses an issue, either something that has happened in her life of something newsworthy etc. Some of the earlier podcast feature interviews with Mandarin learners. Examples of topics discussed are two podcasts about traditional versus simplified characters and a podcast about the game (if it is a game) Second Life.

April speaks clearly and at resonable pace. Also the vocabularly seems to steer away from anything overly difficult or obscure. I can't understand much of it but some of the podcasts I could understand big chuncks of and I can often pick up the gist of the topic. If not there are plenty of easily recognisable words and phrases to work with.

The nicest touch is that you can purchase transcripts of the podcasts, the one I bought was just $1 (I could purchase via Paypal). This enabled me to download a PDF that contained both characters and Pinyin for the entire dialogue. I am not at my happiest when studying from text alone but alongside audio is great.

On Characters 1

2006-12-14T20:32:00.000Z

There has been a huge number of comments regarding a post Ken Carol made on the Chinesepod blog. Some very passionate views expressed. Many people will know that I am strongly against the idea of learning Chinese characters in the early stages. Sadly (or perhaps otherwise) the comments were petering out and then Henning made a comment that I thought I ought to reply to. I have replied but am not sure that many people will read it. So that some of my views are fairly clearly stated I have decided to copy my comment here (in itallics). Prabably very bad to do this out of context but I am tired and don't want to loose the thoughts I had.

No it is not too late even for me

Somewhere in many places amongst the litter of comments, blog posts , forum posts etc. I have stated many times that I am not ignoring characters. I have also posted about translating, my reading strategies etc.

Of course at some point early next year when I release character based material some people who understandably haven’t read that huge volume of potential places where I might have posted will scream “hypocrite” meibanfa, the problem with this medium is that you cannot post an entire methodology in every comment.

I started learning 11 months ago, for almost three months I just listened (didn’t even feel the urge to open my mounth and try the sounds) then I started attempting sounds and scratchy character stuff. The character learning at that time did terrible damage to my progress so I stopped. At about six months I started gently working with characters again (I was ready) I had also got stuck into to talking over Skype (obviously badly ). My beef is with the idea that you should start with the text or even run them simultaneously (many people believe this). It may surprise you to know that I have spent a little time learning the basics of looking up characters in a Chinese only zidian, that I can comfortably write about 120 characters and read around 300 or so, that the characters I can can read I can read at full speed (well subtitle speed anyway). Not a lot of characters I realise but I am the path to real reading. I haven’t really used anything apporaching traditional methods methods so far and have spent comparitivly little time learning the the characters, as long as I stick to soee basic rules. I generally do not attempt anthing I cannot hear well, I generally try not to learn to read anything I cannot listen and speak, and I never try to learn to write anything I cannot read without thinking. This feels so natural.

I have horror stories from my first attempts, the character 尖 (point, pointed) I picked up because of something I was studying. I could write it, I knew it was xiao3 over da4 etc. I came to use the word with my Skype partner and all that popped in my head was the character (usually I just have sounds and meanings in there) even worse there was no sound associated in my head. This was like a slap with a wet fish. In the example used by Eugenio way above I know tian2 田 already. Why do I know tian, well because I had learned nan2 男 which is of course field over power (the power of the man hoeing the field or whatever) aside from the fact that this is both sexist and out of date this should be the character for tractor . I hadn’t actually wanted to know the character or word for field that was unwanted collateral damage there were other words that would have served me better at that time.

Chinese is my main hobby now, I have a full time job and a large family, I study it very hard considering so maybe an identical me studying in evening class would have been ready for characters at one year or even one and a half. Who knows maybe a younger fulltime studier would be ready at three months. The fact still remains that starting with that baggage at the beggining seems very strange.

I have spent a lot of thought and undergone a lot of self analysis regarding my studying and the progress I make. I am in very unfertile ground, living where I am and having limited study time. If I had a Chinese speaking partner for example I know that even now I wouldn’t have touched a character. Heaven forbid that I ever start thinking in characters :O.

One shocking thought I had early on is if Japanease can use essentially the same set of characters to write a completly different language, then surely that is a strong level of abstraction between the spoken form of Mandarin and the written form no matter what cunning cultural arguements there are to attempt to knit them together. We had men hoeing fields in ancient England too and also kept women firmly in place under our roofs for a peaceful environment although we might have even called it a home without a pig (maybe a yang2 羊 sheep under the roof in Wales ). Taking the above into account isn’t there a strong case for stating that actually you don’t get the full culture hit unless you learn the meta language actually in Mandarin (zhe4ge4 zi4 you3 tian2 de yi4si (aaiii zian4zai4 wo3 ming2bai2le), did that make anybody sweat a little??. Should we really be learning the true language of characters in English? what do we loose by attempting to be oh so smart and educated and un-childlike.

Yes I may be ‘psuedo-intellectual’, I may be misguided etc. but a valid arguement is valid no matter what the source and I think I have at least one here worthy of further thought. I hope I have a least demonstrated that I don’t take any of this lightly.

Henning you started with sound too, ok you hit a wall but would you have changed things?

It did also occur to me some learning to read too early may actually be reading in Chinese but thinking in English (which seems a terrible idea to me). Ohh well.

Other learner blogs and RSS

2006-12-08T13:39:00.000Z

There are a number of other Chinese learner blogs out there that I keep track of. It is always nice to know that you are not alone. The problem is that with these and forums and podcasts it is hard to keep up to date. Also for me a significant factor of my learning Mandarin is that I am learning online. This post is about how I handle all this information, how I intend to handle it in the future and my intentions for becoming a webstudent 2.0 :).

RSS is one of the key mechanisms that allows you to keep track of many sources of changing information on the Internet. If you are not familiar with it you can find out more. If you use RSS efficiently you can keep track of much more information than you could if you were just revisiting sites of interest in your webbrowser. Apart from Chinese learning I also monitor a lot of feeds to do with Web Development, Java, Science, etc.

Now there is too much information even for the RSS methods I was using. I have started using both netvibes (for a more graphical layout and presentation of my feeds) and google reader (more down to earth view). Both of these free services seem to deal well with Chinese characters (some other online services don't). Having these feeds managed online means I can use any computer. In particular the google reader allows me to arrange feeds in folders and then publicise them. Using a public folder I can go to a page generated by google that shows me that information from all the combined feeds. Even better the combined feed has its own RSS feed which I can pull into netvibes.

For an example I have combined the feeds from the chinesepod blog, the comments from the chinesepod blog and the chinesepod forum. You can view the output here and even grab the rss feed for this page yourself if it will help. Warning this is a very busy feed and the presence of comments means that some of the entries will be confusing and out of context. If you are trying to keep up to date with these areas though a feed like this can be a huge aid.

I have also been keeping tack of a number of Mandarin learners blogs in the bottom right handside of the my menu. The combined page for the more active of these can be viewed here. The biggest problem with the google reader I can see so far is that if I add another feed to a combined feed a bunch of the newstuff starts at the top, eventually it shakes out. Google reader in still in beta so perhaps has a few minor teething problems.

Automated translation (google it)

2006-12-04T20:01:00.000Z

There have been translation tools that attempt to translate from one written language to another available for sometime. I remember even about eight years ago getting hold of a free version of some software that attempted to translate between Spanish and English. It was fairly useless but the output did provide some laughs for a Spanish speaker I was working with at the time.

Recent developments in the Google translation tools have impressed me somewhat more though.

Despite leaving it until almost the age of 40 before attempting to learn a second language, there are a number of moments in my life that I can identify as specially relevant to language learning.

I remember my father telling me a 'supposed true story' about a computer translation program in the 60's. The story goes that they developed a Computer program to translate from English to Russian. They fed the program the phrase "out of sight ,out of mind" and after some time it spat a result in Russian that was equivilent to "invisible, imbecile". My father knew even in the 70's when he told me that this was a joke in the armed forces (I don't know if they had a phrase for urban legends back then) and I even found a reference to it and similar versions on the web.

I believed him at the time (I was just a kid ;)) and even then it struck me how hard it would be to translate languages. "out of mind" is similar to "out of your mind" and can often be seen as "out of your mind with (worry, fear, anger etc)". The meaning of even that part of the phrase is hard to fathom unless you just know it.

Translation tools can be handy for short phrases, but tranlating either way is not reliable for learning purposes as the results are often really bad.

I still run the odd phrase through a translation tool every now and again (usually one I already have an expected answer for). I have notice recently that although still far from perfect the Google translation tools can be surprisingly accurate. Apparently Google is using their knowledge of the Web to 'brute force' the problem and is deriving translation information from the huge numbers of translated documents they have indexed.

A simple but illustrative example is given with the short phrase (wo3 hui4de) which I usually see in subtitles and Chinese media to mean something like "I will" or in some circumstances "I can", often provoked by someone else asking for something to be done. Google translates to "I will" :), babel fish translates to "my meeting" :(.

I am going to keep watching, but anything that is getting better is a good thing in my opinion.

It is worth looking at the translation page on the excellent MDBG dictionary though because although it uses babel fish it also break the Chinese you enter down in to word sized chunks, allowing you to make your own mess of the meaning.

Peer to peer downloads

2006-11-25T15:06:00.000Z

Most people know about downloading media from peer to peer networks so I won't go into too much detail. There are the usual issues of "should I be downloading copyrighted material?". "am I sure that I am taking the right steps to ensure that I don't catch any nasty viruses?". As this is a blog about me learning Mandarin Chinese I will let you deal with those issues.

Firstly you will soon realise that there are a lot of Chinese users online that have no qualms about copyright issues. As there are a lot of Chinese users online you can bet that there is a lot of Chinese media online too. You can download and watch Chinese media without sub_titles, with sub_titles, with English sub_titles or even English media with Chinese sub_titles (sounds crazy but great reading practice).

I used to use bittorent initially but have found it a lot easier to find things on the Emule network (acutally the client is built on the old edonkey).

The easiest way to find things the Emule network that I have found is at the verycd site. For example a link to the Water Margin series (Chinese). It is probably best to understand the software first if you have never used it before. Also remember the links you may find are not direct downloads they just connect you to the users currently sharing a particular file. I can take a long time to complete a download.

Hope you can find something useful...

Even more media! (phew)

2006-11-21T21:51:00.000Z

Thanks to an orginal tip off from Mashood I have also been playing with streaming peer to peer TV channels. And to get hold of some targeted media I have also resorted to bittorrent and the Emule network. There is too much for this post already so another will follow with more information on Emule and bittorrent.

Again apologies for not posting full tutorials, my free time and Chinese language learning just don't allow that much attention to detail. I will provide a few links where possible though and that give you a better start than I had.

Peer to peer TV sounds crazy, but very simply if you connect normally to a TV stream you have maintain enough bandwith to that single nework location for your media player to output the picture and sound. On a peer to peer networks bits of the stream are being distributed amongst many people. The peer to peer software will be grabbing bits of the stream from lots of different places and also sharing the data you have with other people likewise. The more people sharing the stream the better! you may not all be watching quite in sync. but that is just like time-shifted TV on TIVO etc. but on a smaller scale.

This peer to peer TV seems to have caught on mostly in China so the software is Chinese and most of the media is Chinese also (perfect if you are learning Mandarin). There is some heavy European interest, not surprisingly many Europeans are using the p2p TV networks to watch football.

I have tried PPStream and PPLive the two links I have given you are information pages on football fansites. It is best if you do some google searches to get all the information you can. Thanks to a tip from Pepper I have also tried the TVU player. Assuming you have a reasonable network connect you should be able to get a wide variety of Chinese television from one or all of these.

My quick impressions are as follows: PPStream does the trick, you can find a version to download that has English menus and there is a lot of viewing choice. The downside is that most of channels work best when a lot of Chinese people are online, it often slowed down or interrupted other online stuff I was doing and a few of channels never seem to be available.

PPLive was harder because at the time I tried it I could not get hold of English menus. However often I found I could get channels on PPLIVE even when there wasn't enough data coming down through PPStream (maybe more Chinese people use it?). Also PPLIVE didn't seem to intefere with other network performance.

TVU player is clunky looking however I think this is the most accesible of the players to start off with. It is easy to use and although it has considerably less TV stations there is plenty of choice and it does what it says on the tin. I am currently watching an early episode of 24 dubbed in Mandarin with subtitles as I type this :) (Keifer Sutherland sounds very weird as a Chinese guy). Hot tip time: I never waste an opportunatiy if I am at home posting/reading forums etc. I am almost always listening to Chinese audio or even watching chinese TV. This is one reason why my English grammar and spelling appear so bad.

Now for the best bit, in a previous post I pointed out that you can use Videolan player to record streaming media. Well each of the players described above works by turning your PC into a local media server, so if you connect Videolan to the correct port on your PC you can record it. The address you need for the TVU player is likely to be http://127.0.0.1:8901

If like me you are attempting to learn Chinese from a non-Chinese speaking country then I think the biggest initial hurdle is that you have no idea of, or ear for the language. Unlike some learning experiances you have nothing to lose by diving in. You won't fall off and hurt yourself, your brain will not explode. If you don't understand any of it then put that aside and concentrate on getting a feel for what it sounds like. I bet that if you are English like me you can easily tell the difference between German, Spanish and French language, even if you don't understand them. This is your first and essential goal for Chinese. Step 1 find a way to test if you can learn to easy tell between Chinese and Japanease, then do the same with Cantonese.

mandarin streaming media mandarin student chinese

Chinese (not just for linguists!)

2006-11-08T12:46:00.000Z

I will be returning to the Chinese media again shortly, but first a rather warming interview that Ken Carrol at Chinesepod conducted with Professor Cyndy Ning.

I agree wholeheartedly with many of sentiments expressed. Since I started learning Mandarin I have been surprised by the general impression (often not explicitly stated) that it is somewhat different to other languages. Not a language that is for Westerners that are mere mortals, but rather for those who can elevate themselves to a higher plane of existence.

I happen to think that Chinese is just another language that can be learned just like many other languages. My main obstacle as a European simply being that I have not built up any background exposure already at the time I start to learn.

I happen to believe that a late thirty something Western guy with a full-time job and family can (if committed) adopt learning Chinese as his main hobby for a while and learn to understand, speak, read and write reasonable everyday Mandarin in far less time that a University student will finish his/her course in Chinese language. Without the Internet it would be a different story, but with it you don't even need to attend Chinese classes.

I happen to think that I don't really need to study any complicated linguistics or learn any complicated grammar terms to do so.

I keep happening upon many people who happen to think that I am sadly mistaken.

If you happen to agree with me then listen to the interview it will make you feel better. If you don't agree with me then listen anyway it could be one of those things that help you wake up and smell the coffee (it might happen).

Disclaimer: if you are a linguist or a grammar fanatic then I wish you well, but please don't add to the impression that an average guy can't learn Chinese just because they want to.

time........

2006-11-04T18:09:00.000Z

Feeling somewhat like Bilbo Baggins when he screams "time" in The Hobbit. My requirements for studying of Chinese are changing drastically. The importance of time is becoming more and more evident.

Job, family and all that comes with approaching middle-age mean a lack of time in real-terms. If I had been wildly successfully in the earning stakes I might have been able to carve out some free time for my-self but sadly not.

None of this seemed to be a problem during the early stages of learning Chinese as there was a lot of dead-time in which I could learn just by listening. This is still the case to some extent but I find more and more that I need or want to sit down and actually study a little bit too. My favorite situation being some juicy text and accompanying audio.

I also need to talk more and although I am getting some wonderful help from Skype, to fit it in I need to do silly things like get up at 5:30 in the morning. Some of the younger people I encounter seem to be available to chat on Skype for hours each day (a completly alien concept :)).

I need to re-think my strategies somewhat. I have posted and interacted in forums a lot, usually whilst listening to Chinese. Now that time would seem better suited directed to studying.

Not a whinge as such (although I would like more free time :)). I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel. The lower intermediate lessons at Chinespod are more accesible to me now so I can learn from them just by repeated listening. Also at some point I will get more out of just listening to Chinese radio etc.

It does kind of highlight that all of us have to customise our own lesson plans (assuming we are self-learners) to fit our own life-styles. And there is not a day goes by without some sort of Chinese learning going on, even if just within my own head (a vastly under-rated classroom).

This blog is negleted but normal service will be resumed shortly and I feel a podcast coming on (after all it is all in the sound).

More media

2006-10-11T19:32:00.000Z

An overdue follow-up to the previous post about streaming Chinese media. And I think I will need another follow up to this one (hopefully not so delayed).

Chinese media is really, really important to my learning strategy, as I am not in a Chinese speaking country and have to work hard to find Mandarin speakers to practice conversation with.

First things first, if you are anything like me then listening to as much real Chinese radio etc. and watching as much Chinese TV, films etc. is going to be a huge part of your learning. I learn and have learned so much from exposure to the language. Sometimes I get something right, just from a gut feeling, not because of any rule I learnt from a book.

Assuming you want to watch/listen then where to start. Well you can read the previous post to this one first but in my opinion a super tool is the Videolan player. This will play most any sound or video file you chuck at it, as well as Windows media streams and Realmedia streams. Videolan will also work on many operating systems and best of all (something I didn't realise for too long) you can record media streams with it.

Videolan player is a bit tricky to get the hang of but worth the effort you have to remember that it does a lot of stuff (like distributing streams over your own network if you wish) that you probably don't need so the real art is learning which bits to ignore. Learning to use videolan (google for help) is time well spent though. Explaining the intricacies of recording is a little beyond my time allowance but here is a link. This link is for mac osx however you can extrapolate. I found it best to save as an asf file with an asf extension, I can play the resultant file in media player or Videolan (and why bother with media player). The Videolan software is written for techies and tells you how to do stuff from the command line, everything you need is available from the menus though. So now you can record media streams or media files that are delivered as a stream. Both the previous links were mentioned in my last post in more detail. I think you are going to have to do some digging though to dig up the resources that you can connect to and that you like.

In my opinion Videolan is a better option than the SDP recorder mentioned in the last post. Although SPD's recorder may have some useful timeing features. Techies can use scripts and cron to manage timed recordings on Linux or similar though :)

Now the Tv and the media streams you will find will be variable in quality. Many will also be hidden in webpages that that use media-plugins to play them (often inaccessable to non-windows users). This is why I highly recommend that you ditch your current web-browser and use Firefox (if you are not useing it already). Firefox is a valuable aid to learning Chinese, the first reason being the whole host of excellent extensions you can get for it. The one you want now is called Unplug, learn how to use this one, it will help you track down media links. Also even if the links you want are not concealed but on a page of Chinese that you cannot read this is an excellent tool to track them down.

Listen to Chinese, watch Chinese, at all levels of undertanding. More than most languages Mandarin is a stream of syallables. Each syallable has meaning even if coloured by those around them. However much you can understand, aquiring the ability to hear those syallables in normal Chinese seems to be a no-brainer to me. Without this you will never understand even if you have enough vocabulary.

The next post will be very soon and focus on the Streaming peer to peer TV channels (thanks to Mashood) and more media via bittorent and e-mule (straight to the desktop this time). Enjoy!

Chinese TV streaming/recording

2006-09-22T17:25:00.000Z

A post by Pandagator introduced me to a nice new tool for saving streaming video media. I have experimented with a number of ways to record Chinese TV, and have a number of streams to watch. This one however has the benefit of being both free and not too technical.

There are a number of places where you can obtain streaming Chinese TV. My best sources came from this page of links. Note that most Chinese sites seem to prefer Windows technology so the media is targeted for Windows media player. Also the connection is not always reliable. Sometimes you can get a good connection, sometimes the server at the other vanishes from sight for a while or returns a busy signal. Your quality of connection may depend on the time of day or on your geographical location. On a good day however you can watch Chinese TV programs and listen to real Chinese (well real TV Chinese anyway).

The bad news is that non-windows users have a technical headache to get the TV ( problem I still haven't solved, but I mostly use Windows now), the connection is usually unrealiable, and you can only watch what is being streamed to you, so if you see something good it is a one shot only, you cannot replay.

I have managed in the past to record using methods that are either technically awkward or errr... distinctly dodgy. Sometimes I have recorded 7 hours or so and then picked through it for goodies afterwards. It is a great way to listen to Chinese. Another huge advantage of recording is that you can often record streams when the connection is too poor to watch in realtime (the player just keeps trying to buffer).

The opensource program (SDP) detailed by Pandagator really works though, it is a bit rough around the edges but well worth learning how to use.

You will need some media urls to use with the application. You can start with the one Pandagator detailed NTDTV although bear in mind that this one is funded from outside China and may have a political agenda, it does usually have a strong connection though. Some sources will play in media plugins on the webpage but you can usually find the urls you need by viewing the text source of the page. You can also track down urls from this excellent page. These are not realtime streams but saved CCTV programs designed to be played via a stream. CCTV also provide pages with text for the dialogues :):).

A nice multi-platform media player you can play your recordings on is VLC. VLC is well worth having anyway especially for those moments when you download some interesting media file from somewhere and media player coughs up a codec not recognised error.