My Chinese Learning Experiences

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

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

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

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

More on Google for learning Language

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

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

For example:

"on another hand" 107,000 results
"on other hand" 415,000 results
"on the other hand" 78,700,000 results

The majority rules..

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

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

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

Using Google for Lexis

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

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

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

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

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

Using Microblogging to help learn Chinese

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

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

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

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

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

A Few Chinese Basics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Networks for Language Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandarin Learning Resources

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

If anybody wishes to join Twine I have some invites.

Videos and marketing

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

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

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

Painless way to learn to read Chinese?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earthquake

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

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

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