Chinese English lessons

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.

Tones

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

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.

Do I need to go to China?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

More content podcasts

Since my last post I thought about other podcasts I listen to that are not strictly instructional but can be used to educate. I am going to actively hunt out more so any suggestions would be greatly accepted. Today I will very briefly introduce Princess Remy and podcast BEIJING

If it helps I will try to be more diligent in keeping my delicious links up to date so you can always scan my Mandarin podcast links for an update.

Princess Remy is a Taiwanese girl living in Germany (mostly). She has been releasing one podcast a day for quite some time and there are approaching 500 podcasts now. Each podcast is a little like a discussion / diary entry and most of the early ones are quite short. Recently she has started releasing less often and longer podcasts for bandwidth difficulties I think (I still haven't properly caught up yet). The podcasts are entirely in Mandarin (well one or two German or English words occasionally in fact she just said "school bus" as I was typing this). You soon get used to her way of speaking, there is an awful lot I don't understand but on a really good day I can just about follow the meaning of an entire podcast. Basically just a nice consistent place where you can keep returning to get listening practice. One day in the distant future I will understand everything she says, which will be nice.

podcast BEIJING is released by an American guy. There doesn't seem to have been one since April but maybe there is an explanation I haven't heard them all yet. Mostly chatting in English but you get to find out a bit about Beijing and there is plenty of Chinese interview material thrown in for a little listening practice.

Learning Mandarin Podcast

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

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

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)

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.

Chinese (not just for linguists!)

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.

More media

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!