Study Chinese Online From China

Goals for Fun and Misery

GOALS - and taking breaks. About half a year ago I started muttering to myself about an exit strategy, of course I did this here on Cpod somewhere in the blog or comments. Nobody really picked up on it.

These days I’m goal-less, but it’s not what you think. I actually accomplished my earlier goals! I didn’t give up and I’m sure I’ll still keep growing in my Chinese. I’m not a fan of HSK, nor most tests, so that route won’t work for me.

I’m looking for ideas, so here’s the goals I’ve passed, and those I know I haven’t. Any others out here for me to try?

ACCOMPLISHED
-I recognize most of what’s on the menu (of a standard menu, not high-end fancy-smanz restaurants with weird names for everythign)

-I recognize the signs around me, I can say them outloud. You know important signs like the ‘pi e ka da’ Pierre Cardin furniture store. j/k (I’m in China. I was Lost in Translation when I first arrived.)

-When I feel like it, I can go 3-4 rounds in a bargaining session (those sellers that get to round 5+ still out-gun me)

-I can read 90% of Doraemon comics. I’m working on more ‘grown up comics now. You know, those for junior-high kids.

-I will cry watching a good Chinese drama, or Korean/Japanese drama dubbed and with sub-titles (cry only when they kill off the beautiful female lead or make her life miserable).

-I can understand and engage in conversations with Chinese friends (these are friends who can read ‘in-between’ the lines and figure out what I’m saying, not some random stranger). Some converstations I’m glad I can’t understand.

-I can text pretty much most messages in my mobile phone, in Chinese. Enough to meet up with people, etc. I can’t read the spam yet. Blessing?

-I can handwrite in Chinese, it’s not super fluid, but at least it doesn’t look like kid block printing, and I know where to swerve and re-jig the order of the strokes to make it ‘handwriteable.

-When people aren’t paying attention, they take about 4-6 minutes before they start wondering about my ‘weird Chinese. This is versus the first 1-3 seconds when I first started.

CAN’T DO
- I can’t yell loud enough, ‘xia che’, in the bus to get the busdriver to stop. I don’t really enunciate loud enough (yell) in Chinese. People say I speak like a sweet girl…ugg. GRR.

- I can’t confidently YELL fuwuyuan, or maidan, in the restaurant without feeling that my pronunciation goes to shot. When are we having the Learn to Yell in Chinese podcast that we can safely ‘practice’ in the car?

- I can’t read a newspaper (I can read some articles and the paparazzi photo captions)

- I don’t really enjoy trying to phone in a take-out order.

- I can’t really say the abstract or sarcastic things that I want to, in Chinese. Plus/minus?

- When I handwrite characters, yah I resort to pinyin and getting a picklist off of my mobile.

What other ‘markers’ or milestones do others have? I’d really like to hear from some long-time learners. Those that are 3-5 years plus in China.

I really thought what John said was important, motivation is key and that it’s a long-term process. I also want to say that we should distinguish between long-term and “hard”.

I don’t think Chinese is particularly hard to learn, but like any language, there’s just a lot to learn. In a grown-up busy life, this means it competes with lots of other stuff for my attention.

Having fun, attainable, concrete goals invents segments of time that make the years slip away. I’m in year 2 and it just feels like I started!

http://blogs.chinesepod.com/2006/11/28/study-as-a-journey/

Moving Up in the World

HIT ME ONE MORE TIME - I guess it’s some sort of ‘acknowledgement‘ when your blog gets hit with spam. Today, and over the last week a plethora has shown up on this blog. What a time-sink. As such I’ve re-started the registration requirement for comments.

More importantly, with the computers coming back up, good weather, and some time: Here’s what’s coming up soon:

• The next full-transcript for Chinesepod
• Talking about ‘the parser‘.
• Tactics for using text-messages to study

Reading a Newspaper Online: Can You Do It?

READING THE PAPER - I have to admit I still can’t read a Chinese newspaper. Sometimes there’s a life article that I can sit down, read and enjoy. But for the most part the frontpage headlines are just a jumble of characters. Am I discouraged? Should you be?

Most laypeople will judge a person’s language skills with two questions, Can you talk to people? And can you read a newspaper? :

Here’s why it’s probably a separate track to learning newspaper talk than it is to learn conversational Chinese. The words are different. The 1000 most frequent spoken or fiction words are different than the top 1000 in newspapers.

At Chinese Text Computing you can see various lists of Chinese word frequency, for example in fiction versus the press.

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/

Here’s another list with English definitions and notes, it’s actually a fun list to puruse and sip coffee over. You should be learning words in this order, as these are ranked by frequency.

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

If you’d like to try your hand at reading a newspaper, there’s an online site that gives mouse-over popup of recent headline news, and saves you the trouble of copy-pasting into other translation tools.

http://www.newsinchinese.com/

And of course, there’s always browsing the papers.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/
http://fzsb.hinews.cn/php/

Content or info overload is a challenge with all the resources available online. To help parse things down a bit, I found one way to make ’sound-bites’ or rather ‘text-bites’ that I can read. Get a couple of Chinese RSS feeds and view them via Netvibes, a RSS reader. With each entry it gives you a popup of the first 50-characters of text, this is enough to see the topic and keeps you ‘reading’ the Chinese.

At the end of the day, however, it would be nice to sit down and casually pick u p a Chinese newspaper and read it to relax, just like in English. If I figure out how, I’ll post again!

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Books For Studying Chinese Will Drive You Crazy

BOOKS PASSE - I recently bought some books on learning Chinese, they are targeted at upper intermediate and advanced students. I felt I had to buy them because they explain parts of Chinese that I don’t yet know, and the authors have good concepts and explanations.

The one book has a chapter on how to write about a sequence of events, like cooking a recipe or describing a series of events.
For example, it says

“In describing procedures and processes, the following expressesions are often useful:

首先 first of all
然后 then
随后 soon afterwards
最后 finally

They also then nicely introduce,

“When presenting one’s point of view…it is more forceful to list them…by using the following words and phrases

首先 first of all
其次 secondly
除此之外 besides
不仅如此 not only that

Here’s what REALLY bugs me. I just DON’T GET it. I got in a pretty big argument/discussion with a Chinese person about how my viewpoint was wrong, almost offensive. WHY is there no pinyin? If I already know the word, well then I sure do hope I know how to use it.

If the authors think that I don’t know how to use these words, and they don’t since they are explaining their usage to me, then how do they expect me to know the sounds for the word? I think they are just LAZY, the book publishers want to keep the total pages to a minimum, I don’t know but it’s batty.

Why do authors feel like they need to mix up memorization and recall with explanations? It’s like explaining to me how to tie my shoes while spinning me around.

I’m used to studying online, where I can do this:

首先 然后 随后 最后 首先 其次 除此之外 不仅如此
shǒuxiān ranhou suihou zuihou shouxian qici chucizhiwai bujin ruci

via sites like ADSO: http://www.adsotrans.com/new/

How to Think in Chinese. It’s Important!

STUDY MINI-TUTORIAL

Recently on Chinesepod.com I posted some sentences from the day’s lesson. I found the feedback from Connie, a Chinesepod host, to be extremely helpful. The first examples are my original sentences, and the second sentences are Connie’s correct sentences.

The key here is not to learn grammar, but to see how the English mind orders things differently than Chinese when expressing an idea. First look at the English sentence, but just think about what it means. Visualize the context, the meaning, the circumstances. Then try to express it in Chinese, or your own English. You’ll see that if you try to write down the thought in your own English, it probably won’t be the same exact sentence as mine.

This is because thoughts are separate from language. We’re just used to matching it up with one language, our first language. This is what we must ‘break’ or expand upon, creating a match to another language.

What we are trying to do is make the mind capable of the following, the first we already can do, the second is where we are now, and the third is our target:

Thought—>English

Thought—>interlanguage
(mixed up English/Chinese grammar with Chinese words)

Thought—>Chinese
Thought—>English/Chinese

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I lost my heart. Ohh! I see it…it’s in the palm of your hand.

diū liǎo wǒ de xīn。 é！ kàndéjiàn。 。 。 zài nǐ de shǒuzhǎng shàng。
丢了我的心。哦！看得见。。。在你的手掌上。

Wǒ de xīn diū le. Ò，wǒ kànjian le，zài nǐ de shǒu xīn li.
我的心丢了。哦，我看见了，在你的手心里。

• I was looking at the word ‘dui’ and wanted to use it in a sentence. In my excitement I started off the sentence with that ‘verb’. Chinese sentences never start with a verb, in fact English sentences don’t either. So why did I? If you look closely at my first sentence you’ll see that actually it is a butchered English construction, I’ve left off the “(I) lost my heart.” Chinese for the most part starts off with the subject (my heart) and then says what happened (was lost). I must beat it into my brain, subject first, subject first, think subject. Don’t first think of me, me, me.

• Chinese thinking is very linear and sequential, especially because there is no conjugation. Right? Well there is a sort of conjugation, using ‘le’. It happens a lot with the second phrase when expressing a thought. I forgot, again I think it’s my English phrase-generator that is muddling things up. Chinese goes like this:

(1st phrase introduces the subject)
我的心丢了。
(2nd phrase gives more context about what happened)
哦，我看见了

• My last mistake was actually the easiest to correct, the grammar is correct, just I didn’t use the proper words for ‘in the palm of your hand’. That was because I used a dictionary!

在你的手掌上。vs
在你的手心里

I dropped my cell phone. Ahh, I found it. Ohh no, it’s broken.

shǒujì diào le。 ā ， zhǎo de dào。 āiyā ， wǒ de shǒujì huài le。
手记掉了。啊，找的到。哎呀，我的手记坏了。<>

.Wǒ de shǒujī diào le. A，zhǎodào le. Āiyā，wǒ de shǒujī huài le.
我的手机掉了。啊，找到了。哎呀，我的手机坏了。

• While we’re used to thinking of English as very much focused on the individual, I find that Chinese is actually much more self-centered! In the first sentence I left of ‘I’, but see Connie’s, the ‘wo de’ comes up front and center.
• In my second phrase, again I have forgotten the nice progression of the sequence of events, leaving off the ‘le’. I got the ‘le’ in the first phrase right, but my freshman Chinese didn’t have a sophmore level second phrase sophistication. Note to myself, think about what happens next, it’s important in Chinese…and my life for that matter.

I can’t find my soul mate. Don’t be anxious, it’s best to look slowly.
àiren zhǎobùdào。
A: 爱人找不到。

bié zháojí ， mànmàn zhǎo jiù hǎo le。
B: 别着急，慢慢找就好了。

Wǒ zhǎobudào wǒ de zhīxīn àirén .
我找不到我的知心爱人。
Bié zháojí，zuìhǎo shi mànmàn zhǎo.
别着急，最好是慢慢找。

• Here’s where I think a lot of traditional academic teaching and examples breaks down. The mind doesn’t really think so narrowly as making a noun always the subject, or a person the subject. In my first sentence the subject is ‘looking for’ 找不到, and thus I should have put it at the front of my sentence.
• Actually, I also think my first sentence is correct, but that Connie saw it as incorrect because I hadn’t introduced the context. If we had already been talking about ‘my soulmate’ I could have used my sentence. But when starting tabla rasa, I need to slowly introduce that idea.
• In the second sentence, the Chinese logic is much simpler and step-by-step than my original sentence.

别着急，慢慢找就好了。
(don’t worry) (slowly look) (it’s best)

别着急，最好是慢慢找。
(don’t worry) (it’s best) (to do) (slowly look)

SUMMARY: There are a couple things to do when thinking in Chinese, first put the subject first. Second, in your followup phrase, express clearly the next event, using a ‘le’ or other connector word like ‘jiu hao’.

When is it right to go offline?

OFFLINE - One of the challenges of modern life is taking stock of things when information becomes overload. There are some who rightly argue that we are forgetting about the basics. With that said, I took some time off recently and bought some hard-to-find online materials (yes I would’ve preferred all of these materials came with companion e-editions!) I’ll post further as I put the books into use. I think I have found the right books to get me over the intermediate-level plateau.

Developing Writing Skills in Chinese
Boping Yuan and Kan Qian, Routledge Press 2003, HK$398

I bought this book because it seems to present information on how to write more formal Chinese, it gives examples of how a written phrase would be written/said in colloqial Chinese. I see this as a nice bridge to improving my Chinese and especially in understanding more of the media around me.

Advanced Chinese, Intention, Strategy & Communication
Yanfang Tang and Qinghai Chen, Yale University Press 2005, HK$550

I bought this text because it has chapters with topics like “How to write a description”. It’s not just an ‘advanced story’ with another vocab list. It gives me the words, patterns and examples necessary to do more conceptial things with Chinese.

Making Out in Chinese
Ray Daniels, Tuttle Publishing 2003, HK$65

This text, well heck it’s just fun.

The Language Instinct
Steven Pinker, Perennial Classics 1994, US$15

This classic, reading it makes me re-think a lot of my study habits. It is easy to fall back into traditional learning approaches because they are so prevalent and ingrained in most learning materials. I have slipped. Reading the book has re-ignited my focus and I will go retool my study habits.

Chinesepod Full-Transcript Upper Inter 9 News

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I’m going to raise the price soon, or maybe lower it…I’m kinda hard to predict.

John: …
Jenny : 大家好，那今天我们要跟大家说一个，每天可能你都需要的话题，对不对？
John：每天都需要的？
Jenny：对我来说，对好多人来说，是一个习惯吧可能，就是新闻。
John：呃，恩。。。
Jenny：新闻。那我觉得这个词其实在中文和英文里呀都特别好，因为光光这一个词呢就把这个及时性都给传播出来了