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.

Peer to peer downloads

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

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

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

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

Hope you can find something useful...

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Even more media! (phew)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

time........

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More media

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!