My first Chinese thoughts

今天我很累 [jīntiān wǒ hěn lèi ]. Nothing new there, infact I could probably say 每天我很累 [měitiān wǒ hěn lèi ]. There was something special about this particular day though. And why do I keep nervously checking my wallet?

I have had my first Chinese thoughts recently! not momentous thoughts to be sure, but even the great wall had to start somewhere.

What do I mean by a Chinese thought? Well obviously Chinese things (words and phrases) have been drifting through my head ever since I started learing Mandarin but they were simply visitors, selected and invited in to share space with all the English stuff already in permanent residence. A Chinese thought would be a Chinese word or phrase that started life in my head and wasn't prompted (even fleetingly) by an English thought.

Well last week I woke up and thought 今天我很累 [jīntiān wǒ hěn lèi ]. Only then did I think "what does that mean"? (today I am very tired).

I think this is some kind of milestone, the next thought that happened at the weekend was even more funky. I am just getting over a bad cold and sinusitis and at the weekend was a little out of it (not completly feverish but not making a lot of sense either). My family took the opportunity to do a little shopping and I couldn't even raise my usual miserly interest in what they were buying. Something was triggered in my sub-concious though. Throughout the rest of day I kept absent mindedly mumbling 多少钱 [duōshǎo qiàn] It wasn't until the evening I realised what I was saying and what it meant. It means HOW MUCH MONEY :0

Reverie (wo3 yao4 cheeseburger)

Ok so you can use some of your dead time in the car etc. to listen to language podcasts but what about when you don't have an mp3 player handy. I think it would be great to spend some time daydreaming in Chinese. 我要大 cheeseburger [wǒ yào dà cheeseburger]

My favorite definition of reverie is an abstracted state of absorption. For some reverie is that "Walter Mitty" state where you can daydream that you are the hero, super-stud, rock musician etc. etc. Others use reverie as for more constructive purposes , creative people create things whilst sitting on the bus, programmers and mathmaticians solve problems. This constant reworking and reworking of a problem is to my mind the basis of the sterotypical absent minded scientist, who has taken it so far that they often seem phased out of the real world.

How does any of this help with learning Mandarin? Well assuming that you are disciplined enough to use reverie for a useful purpose (hey you can still put aside a little time to imagine that you are a super-stud ;)) then you can constantly practice your Mandarin whilst standing in queues etc.

My working example came from a blog comment on www.chinespod.com from a Chinespod user called "Mike in Jubei". Mike's comment about wǒ yào cheeseburger made me realise what I had already started doing. Imagine you are standing in a long queue waiting to order a cheeseburger. Think .... 我想 cheeseburger [wǒ xiǎng cheesburger] the queue is long you get more urgent think .... 我要 cheeseburger [wǒ yào cheeseburger] actually you don't want a small 我不要小 cheeseburger [wǒ bū yào xiǎo cheeseburger] but a big 我要大 cheeseburger [wǒ yào dà cheeseburger] etc. etc. I think you get the point. What is more you will probably be prompted to go home and find out what the heck cheeseburger is in Mandarin.

My last thought on the matter, once you get good enough at Chinese you can do all your daydreaming in Mandarin. How about being a super-stud in China? everyone is a winner :).
P.s to anyone who knows me and is saying "yeah in your dreams mate!" thats the whole point :p

Translate literally.

If you want to learn Chinese grammar without learning Chinese grammar (and who in their right minds wouldn't) then 你和谁聊天 [ nǐ hé shéi liáotiān ] equals you with who chat?

A bit obvious this one but may not be immediately apparent if you have never studied a language before. I fall into that category, my French teacher at school used to throw things at my head to make me pay attention but in the end gave up and let me and my friend sit on an isolated desk and play hangman etc. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn French just that I quickly realised that learning lists of words and grammar by rote wasn't going to enable me to speak French. Oh well ...

I have quickly learnt that it is important to translate everything I can understand literally. Chinese grammar and sentance structure is different from English. As a beginner it may be easy to fall into the habit of learning to translate the meaning of whole phrases or sentances and feeling satisfied that you can recognise them. It is important though to pay attention to the individual words and their position in the sentance, otherwise you will pay the price later.

If you translate literally every time you hear something you understand you will learn how the sentances are constructed in Chinese, you will learn Chinese grammar without learning grammar (HOORAY.. a noble aim)and you will get some idea of how to deconstruct the sentances and build new ones all of your own.

So next time you hear 你和谁聊天 [ nǐ hé shéi liáotiān ] then hear You with who chat? before Who do you chat with?

Pinyin (and Yaay I have been noticed ;))

Apart from the podcasts, pinyin (the romanised form of written chinese) is a key part of my learning strategy. I think you should consider it too, most westerners will learn the meaning of wǒ hěn kāixīn before and more naturally than 我很开心. I also got a mention on Chinesepod which is why 我很开心.

I have finished the phase "learning how to learn Mandarin" and think I have discovered enough to proceed with some confidence. As you have probably gathered ;) consuming podcasts will be high on the agenda. Incidentally I had a big Yaay!! wo3 hen3 kai1xin1 moment yesterday when I saw a post about my blog on the Chinesepod weblog. Watch this space guys I hope soon to be contributing back to the Mandarin learning community!. Some of the helpful comments from the guys who commented reminded me of how crucial pinyin is to my strategy.

Pinyin is a romanisation of written Chinese, I won't go into all the background and technicalities as they do it much better here. In summary as you probably know there isn't a chinese alphabet as such but there are thousands of characters that represent syllables/words. Pinyin uses an alphabet that westerners would recognise to spell out chinese phonetically. Bear in mind that the phonetics are consistent to pinyin but may or may not match those that you would expect for your particular western language. Pinyin is I believe the standard accepted romanisation for Chinese so unless you want to study older dusty acedemic texts (best left to older dusty acedemics imho.) I wouldn't recommend other schemes.

What if you only want to learn spoken Chinese? Then learn pinyin alongside, for most people it will be a vital aid.
What if you want to learn the Chinese characters? Then learn pinyin alongside, for most people it will be a vital glue between spoken and written.

Here are the reasons why I think pinyin is the best thing since eeerrrrr.... language podcasts....

• Pinyin gives you something to visualise when you hear a Chinese word, and what you visualize ties in with how it is pronounced (a nice little feedback loop). when you are first learning a sound you translate it each time you hear it, eventually you will just get the meaning without having to explicitly translate, but unless you are very familar I find that you picture something however fleetingly.
• Pinyin captures the chinese tones, when you start you have enough difficulty just hearing the tones and I find that my untrained brain tends to remember sounds ok. but looses the tone information. Remember the pinyin alongside and you have a fighting chance.
• When it comes to learning characters the pinyin is another mental tag that you can add and may in some cases act as a bridge between the sound and the character.
• On a computer many chinese character input methods are achieved via pinyin.
• If you don't know pinyin how are you going to look up a word that you just heard

If I write 我很开心 for example it has no meaning even if you can speak and understand spoken Mandarin you need to actually know the characters (black and white or a least dark grey and dirty white). If I write [wo3 hen3 kai1xin1] or [wǒ hěn kāixīn ] with a little knowledge of pinyin phonetics and the tone marks, you can tell that I am very happy!

Mandarin chinese progress report

A quick summary of what I have been doing and some of the subjects I will be posting on soon. Despite appearances I haven't just been messing around with podcasts. I am also sorting out some webspace so that I can post more detailed articles and tools etc.

You can also read my next progress report and find out how I am doing further down the line.

I seem to have posted mainly about podcasting so far, but podcasts have been the most help to me and they deserved a lot of focus. I have worked through the first twenty five or so podcasts from Chinespod and am reviewing the material (I am going to sign up to their subscription service for a little while to see how that goes). As part of my review I am remixing collections of the dialogues at a faster speed and without the english. I run each dialogue three times, leaving gaps during the third one to practice speaking in.

I am also working through the podcasts supplied by Serge Melnyks I find the dialogues a little harder as Serge is on his own so it is easy to lose track of who is speaking. I am going to try remixing the dialogues to make one of the speakers sound like a different person (sorry Serge). I won't be able able to share any of Serges material at the moment as I am not sure of the copyright position but I am about to contact him to see if he would consider a Creative Commons licence like Chinesepod.

I have also been learning the pinyin (Romanisation, a crucial help) for the words I have learnt and the simplified Chinese characters. I will be posting much more on this shortly.

Along the way I have discovered a few very useful tools (again, much more on this to come.

In summary I feel to be making steady progress towards my goal despite the immensity of the task :).

Chinesepod does a video trial :)

Those excellent guys at www.chinesepod.com have released a trial learning video detailed in their weblog.

Those excellent guys at www.chinesepod.com have released a trial learning video detailed in their weblog. I really hope this continues because it adds another dimension to language learning.

Part of the video follows a couple of guys who are learning Chinese as they attempt to bargain for goods. The fact that they are learning themselves is a bonus because you can see which bits the native Chinese speakers get straight away and when they struggle to understand. The video also has dialogue from native chinese speaker for key phrases etc.

The real "AHHHAAAA" moment for me though was the section on colours, not too surprisingly the colours are much much easier to learn if you are simultaneously bombarded by objects that match the colour.

I hope if this idea is pursued it will also be released under the Creative Commons licence. As described in my series of posts on podcast remixing this would add a huge new potential in video remixing.

Podcasting the future of language education? Pt3

Apart from remixing the material provided in language podcasts to suit your own needs there is real potential for a much more sophisticated solution. Once you have a critical mass of audio material it should be possible in theory to link this to a query engine.

Apart from remixing the material provided in language podcasts to suit your own needs there is real potential for a much more sophisticated solution. Once you have a critical mass of audio material it should be possible in theory to link this to a query engine. I would expect that this would be a subscription service (it would take a fair amount of maintenance and setup). Suppose you could enter a query such as "dialogues on eating out, upto intermediate level, with english translations and seperate vocabary for any words above basic" You press submit and are rewarded with an mp3 that contains all of the above.

This service would require in-depth tagging of podcasts so that a seperate process could pull out segments that met search criteria. It sounds a little like science fiction but I am sure it will happen at some point despite the technical difficulties.

A limited version of this is available already at sites such as ITConversations. For example you can create a clip url for a conversation on free culture by Lawrence Lessig.

I hope to draft a more comprehensive article on the subject of remixing podcast material which will include details on how to use Audacity to perform editing of audio files. I need to organise some webspace to work with this blog first though.

Podcasting the future of language education? Pt2

Having had time to think about it a little more I am sure that listening to podcasts is going to be the main tool for me learning Mandarin. Apart from the wide-ranging material there is a key feature that I am not sure is being fully explored yet, the fact that the podcasts released at www.chinesepod.com are covered by a Creative Commons licence means that they can be remixed.

Having had time to think about it a little more I am sure that listening to podcasts is going to be the main tool for me learning Mandarin. Apart from the wide-ranging material there is a key feature that I am not sure is being fully explored yet, the fact that the podcasts released at www.chinesepod.com are covered by a Creative Commons licence gave me food for thought.

The Creative Commons licence means that you can remix the material and freely distribute (but you must attribute the original creator and distribute under the same terms). With software such as Audacity (which is free) you can easily remix your podcasts, now why would you want to do this?

• Make them harder (to aid with revision) trim out the English and /or speed up the language (you can do this without changing the pitch).
• Build up a revison mp3 of just the dialogues from a collection of podcasts.
• Build an 'Uber mp3' of a particular subject, for example make a mix from three different podcasts on the subject of food.
• Mix and match podcasts from more than one source.
• Build a vocabary mp3 of words and phrases you need to practice

There are many many more things you could do. Of course you could do this with CD courses (for your own consumption at least), but I have the feeling that there will be an awful lot more upto date material available via podcast. With enough material you can treat the audio elements of your study in the same way as you might text (cutting, pasting, adding your own content etc.). With the Creative Commons material you can even swap it with other students. I have some thoughts about where this will eventually lead but I will leave that for post three.

Podcasting the future of language education? Pt1

I think that input and exposure will be the key factor that determines whether I can learn to speak Mandarin, as I don't live in China or at the moment have any contact with Chinese speakers. I suppose that I could learn to read and even write Mandarin from books and other printed material. But no matter how hard I study, I will surely need to listen to Mandarin to understand the spoken language and once I can hear it in my head I can progress to making myself understood.

I think that input and exposure will be the key factor that determines whether I can learn to speak Mandarin, as I don't live in China or at the moment have any contact with Chinese speakers. I suppose that I could learn to read and even write Mandarin from books and other printed material. But no matter how hard I study, I will surely need to listen to Mandarin to understand the spoken language and once I can hear it in my head I can progress to making myself understood.

Podcasts are an amazing way to pick up input. There is far more material available than on a CD or two included with a book and it looks like the material is going to keep on coming and is more likely to be upto date. It is easy to fit podcasts even around a busy schedule.

The best I have found so far are the huge number of podcasts available at www.chinesepod.com and the growing number available at the blog of Serge Melnyks. There are many many hours of listening practice which are going to be a great benefit to my learning.

Do try, I am sure you will find both useful.

Thinking about podcasts and language learning has given me a couple of ideas, but I will leave those to develop for my next post.

Useful links, del.icio.us (mmm tastes good).

This post could come under the category of learning to learn Mandarin. My main resource for learning Mandarin is the Internet, so obviously links to online resources are very important. I was starting to build a list of useful links on this page but feared it would eventually get too big. Luckily I discovered the service at del.icio.us, which allows people to store links online.

This post could come under the category of learning to learn Mandarin. My main resource for learning Mandarin is the Internet, so obviously links to online resources are very important. I was starting to build a list of useful links on this page but feared it would eventually get too big. Luckily I discovered the service at del.icio.us, which allows people to store links online.

For a brief time I was skeptical but quickly discovered the benefits. I can access my links from any computer and share them with other people. The acid test was when I searched for links on their site for Mandarin and found some gems that I had missed, even after weeks of searching on Google.

Try it out I am sure you find something useful to help your Mandarin study. Or you could start with my links or their mandarin links. If you set up an account and start building some good Mandarin study or Chinese links then post your del.icio.us user name in the comments.