Mandarin has five tones

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???

Pinyin revisited

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

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.

SocialMandarin and Chinese swear words

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

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.

Old Chinese Movies

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

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

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.

Heisig for Chinese part 3 A Comforting Approach?

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

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

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

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.

When to learn Chinese Characters?

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 1

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

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

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.

Tell Everyone You Are Learning Mandarin

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

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

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.

My Chinese Learning Experiences

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 ...............