Mandarin Segments

Using & Abusing a Language Exchange Partner

2012-01-29T13:57:00.000Z

You already know about using a Chinese teacher as an essential part of your self-study program, and you know my thoughts on choosing a teacher, but one topic that I still want to discuss is that of using a language exchange partner.

For me, having such a partner is not an alternative to having a teacher - it is in addition to having a teacher. They play different roles for me.

I know that there are many people who have cost constraints (or limited choices where they live), and paying for a private teacher isn't an option. Fortunately there are alternatives - and this is where language exchange comes in.

One-way

As a beginner student you could always just grab a coffee with a Chinese friend or colleague, and ask them the questions you have. This was easy for me when I started because I knew several Chinese people working in the same office as me, and I could walk up to their desk, ask a really dumb question and walk off. They were really pleased with my interest in their language, and were generous with their time. My questions - and the desire to practise speaking - grew, and over time I graduated from desk-questions to a quick coffee together.

Even though these people were very generous with their time when I started this way, I became self-conscious after a while about how much of their time I used, so I decided to "move on". Note that they never expressed a concern to me about this, it was just my own concern for their time.

Two-way

I didn't want to dominate social time with my Chinese friends with too many questions, and language exchange seemed to make a lot of sense. I could connect with someone (face-to-face, email, Skype, etc.) and in return for their time to help me with my Chinese, I would offer the same time to them to help them with whatever they wanted.

My first language exchange partner was an email relationship only - she lives in Fuzhou. I would email her questions, or write some text (originally only in pinyin!) and she would answer my questions, or correct my written work. Then she would send me some of her own written compositions, and I would feedback on that. (In those early days I avoided the telephone - I was too shy as a real beginner.)
Over time we became good friends, and I even spent a weekend in Fuzhou hanging out with her, speaking a mix of English & Mandarin. I was one of three white people I saw that whole weekend, so you can imagine I was quite in demand when she took me to "English Corner" the one evening :-) - they loved speaking with a "real Westerner". She and I are still in touch today.
My first face-to-face Exchange partner was with a Taiwanese woman in London - I wanted to practise Mandarin, and she needed help with her Finance degree. We met when I responded to an online post of hers.
We too are still friends, and have met for coffee in London, Hong Kong & Taiwan.

I was much more comfortable with Language Exchange than I was with the interrogation of my Chinese friends. The give-and-take was balanced, and it's a great way to meet new interesting people!

Things to look our for!

Having had a number of language exchange partners over the years, these are some of the things I would recommend you keep an eye on ...

Try to keep the time split fair, so there no sense of guilt or resentment on either side. If you only have an hour, then state up front that it will be half-half, and stick with that. There is always next time.
Their English is probably better than your Chinese - so try avoid your coffee meeting turning into an English social event. If it's too 'social' then you'll find yourself resorting to English, and you'll probably be the one to lose out.
Introduce some variety to keep both your interests up - something to read, topics to discuss, questions about the material you studied since the last time.
From my perspective, although I continue to share with language exchange partners, time constraints means if I have a spare hour I would rather pay for that hour to be focused on my Mandarin learning, rather than losing half of that to speaking English.
You can do it one-to-one as I've described above, but you also always have the option of meeting in large practice groups - details of these groups appear below too.
If you're not happy with your partner, find another. Remember that language learning is meant to be fun!

An exchange for language exchange?

Here are some of the sites I have previously bookmarked - either because I used them or because I once thought I might. Try them, and see which gives the best results. For obvious reasons, they're biased a bit towards UK and HK.

Bilingual Chat: This is an online community of foreign-language learners, for meeting and exchanging.
Language Exchanges: As it says on their site, "The Mixxer - a free educational website for language exchanges via Skype"
Livemocha: This is a full language learning website, but members of the community are usually quite open to exchanging one-to-one on Skype too
Language Chain: This London-only group actually pairs up language-learners, pre-vetting them, and changing partners regularly for you to keep the variety going.
Gumtree: This site is more than just for buying & selling things. Choose your country & city, then take a look in the Community section under "Skills & Language swap"
Global Citizen: Although they teach a variety of language courses in HK, they sometimes arrange language exchange evenings over a few drinks. And if you really want to try a new way of meeting people, check out their 'unique virtual worlds' where you exist as an avatar in a cyber world, and meet people that way
Meetup: Search for 'Mandarin' and your city, and you could find a group near you. And if you can't find one, there's nothing stopping you setting up one of your own! (I've found great groups in both London & HK)
Chopsticks: A language & culture exchange group in London for the more advanced Mandarin speaker, including lectures every now and then
HK Language & Cultural Exchange Group: This group is for general language sharing - meet in a group, or meet others one-to-one

Others

If you know of other places for meeting language exchange partners, or have some advice to others, please write something below. And if you have any horror stories to tell about bad experiences you've had, leave a comment below ...

Choosing a Chinese Teacher

2012-01-12T05:53:00.001Z

Previously I have written in broad terms about how I use a Chinese teacher as part of my self-study regime, and following that I'd like to describe how I choose teachers who are consistent with those goals. If you've used a different basis for making your own decision, please feel free to leave some comments below.

learning online

Although this is not really for me, there are many websites where you can get online teachers, ad hoc or pre-booked with them, and learn via Skype or other video software. A couple sites which I have previously bookmarked that provide this service include ChineseTeachers, TutorChinese and eChineseLearning- and there are a lot more.

I believe this type of site is quite popular, and maybe depending on your lifestyle or location this would be the only reasonable option. But I like the human contact of sitting opposite someone in a coffee shop, drinking a hot latte, and sharing Chinese. I like watching them write on paper rather than type on a screen, and I like their being able to underline words, use arrows to show where my verb should have gone, and cross things out.

So I choose live teaching for myself. For others I recommend whatever words best for *you*.

choosing a Real! Live! teacher

I started off searching the web for Chinese teachers in my area. Especially in Hong Kong, a number of nearby language-specialist schools appear in the results, but I focus on those offering lessons as individuals. This choice was discussed in a previous post - I don't want to be constrained by attending pre-planned lessons or even have to wait my turn to ask a question in small group. And although these school do offer 1-to-1 lessons, they are materially more expensive than 1-to-1 lessons with private teachers.

Then I corresponded with each of the potential teachers I found, asking about costs, and possible times (weekdays/weekends, mornings/afternoons/evenings, and flexibility - because of my travel schedule). Additionally, I filtered out teachers for other reasons:

There were some teachers who were insisting that they'd take me chapter-by-chapter through a text book - but that would have bored me to death so I rejected them.
There were others who insisted on a minimum number of hours a week - I rejected them too, because I'm in charge of my time, not them.
For my most recent choice, I loved the fact that in addition to knowing English, Mandarin & Cantonese - she is currently learning French & Spanish herself, so truly understands the challenges of language learning.

I tried one or two lessons with the 'finalists' :-) and rejected some of those for a variety of reasons:

their inability to speak at a speed that I was happy with
the fact that their pronunciation wasn't always 'standard' enough (one claimed to speak Putonghua but I struggled to get even half of her simple sentences)
the quality of their explanations when I asked questions.

And that is how I decided.

As always, these thoughts reflect what works for me. Make sure you focus on what works for you - and follow that through. Good luck!

I would love to hear from you how you chose a teacher, or chose not to have a teacher. What things does a teacher do that bothers you? What do you really appreciate? And if you're a fan of online teaching, let us know how it works for you.

I have sexy legs!

2012-01-05T16:36:00.000Z

Moving beyond the realm of the world's funniest joke in Chinese, here's something very funny that actually happened to me last week!

As I've mentioned in previous posts, a great way to practise your Chinese it to get a massage from someone who only speaks Chinese, and it's easy to find someone in Hong Kong like that, at a reasonable price.

So last week I was getting a massage from someone who I have not had before, and she was spending too long on my back, so I wanted her to move on to do the rest of the body, starting with my legs.

Chinese digression: The phrase 可以吗? (kěyǐ ma) literally means "is possible?" - and is often used in the context of asking permission, or making a request. So if I used the well-known topic-comment structure, I could say “电影可以吗？” (diànyǐng kěyǐ ma?) - which would literally mean "Movies, is it possible", but ultimately I'm asking "How about we go to the movies?"

So back to my massage, I was wanting to get her to move from my back to my legs, so using the exact format as above, the conversation went like this:
Greg: 我的腿可以吗？ (My legs, is it possible?)
Massage lady: 你的腿很性感！ (Your legs are very sexy!)

This left me very confused for a moment! Was she hitting on me? Did I mishear her? What else could 'xing gan' mean?

Then I realised, the sentence structure "X kěyǐ ma?" can also mean "What do you think about X?" So if I said "diànyǐng kěyǐ ma?" while coming out of a movie, I could in fact be asking "What did you think of the movie?"

So while I thought I was asking her if she could please massage my legs now, she thought I was being weird and asking her what she thought of my legs. She probably thought I was hitting on her!

Comments 可以吗？

Is it "self-study" if you have a Chinese teacher?

2011-12-27T05:10:00.000Z

I mentioned in my last post how my Chinese teacher helped me translate the world's funniest joke into Mandarin. Following that, I got a couple of DMs though Twitter and one email, asking me about how I can have a teacher when I also say that I self-study Chinese ... so I thought I would explain what I think the difference is.

In later posts I will explain how I chose my teachers, and exactly what a typical lesson looks like.

I have self-studied Chinese - I'm clear about that

About 99% of what I know is through listening to podcasts (90% was from ChinesePod and 10% was Popup Chinese), studying books & websites, working through flashcards (read my posts on the topic here), reading comics & children's stories, etc.

I have also learned by having conversations with people, asking questions, having language exchange partners, being corrected by strangers that I'm chatting with ... and having a teacher on & off.

I have not attended classes, lectures, or immersion programs. I therefore am happy with the label that "I have self-studied Chinese" - although I do gladly acknowledge all the help I have received from countless people along the way. (I am even grateful to one my one Chinese friend who, when hearing that I am learning Chinese, told me not to bother - as a foreigner I would never make much progress! Thank you thank you thank you for pissing me off enough to study harder :-)

my teachers

While in London, Athena and I would meet somewhere between once a week and once a month - and even though I haven't had a lesson with her in 1.5 years, we still stay in touch - it's wonderful how well you can get to know someone even when you're talking using really short sentences and simple words!

Now in Hong Kong, my teacher for the last couple of months has been Judy - we're meeting about once a week (though my travel schedule makes that a challenge!), and doing a variety of talking, reading, sentence dissection, etc.

your teachers

I am not saying that self-study is the only way, or even the best way. But for me, I wouldn't do it any other way. And of course people use their teachers in their own way.

One of my friends (he's in his late 30s) is learning Russian, and he meets a teacher every week. She's strict - and he's a little scared of her. So usually the night before their lesson he stays up late, doing homework, memorising words. Their relationship works because it's the fear of the teacher that gets him to study. I don't know how sustainable this is, but for now he is further than he otherwise would have been. I can't work that way, but it works for him.
Another friend (around 30) is learning German, and he also meets a teacher weekly. He doesn't fear her, but he uses her as an excuse. He seems to think that because he has a teacher he doesn't actually have to learn material himself. So he doesn't. He lived in Germany for two years, with weekly lessons, and I've watched him struggle to ask for a menu and a bottle of water in German. I couldn't let myself do this.

If a teacher helps you, then get one. If you can't afford one, then find a language exchange partner. But do what works for you. And remember that it's your life and your language learning. Please don't let a teacher dictate what & how you should do things ... when you stop enjoying you stop learning.

Ultimately you will only know a language when you can speak it, understand it, read it. There's lots to learn, and only you can do that - a teacher cannot do that for you. Successful language learning comes down to a massive chunk of self-study, so spend some time this year finding your self-motivation ...

The world's funniest joke (now available in Chinese :-)

2011-12-11T11:28:00.000Z

I saw an article on the CNN website, where they announce: "The world's funniest joke has been revealed after a year-long search by scientists."

It's actually a joke I'd heard before, and it goes like this:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"

I memorised a joke in Mandarin about 2-3 years ago, and I've got great mileage from it since then - so I decided to translate this one, and will set about memorising it over the next few days. Because of the subtle wording required to make this joke work, I did this yesterday as an exercise with Judy, my Chinese teacher.

In case you'd also like to learn the joke, here it is joke in Chinese. (For an easy pinyin pronunciation of any of the words, here's a shortcut to MDBG.net's version.)

两个猎人在林子里打猎，其中一个突然昏倒了。看起来他没有呼吸，他的眼睛干瞪着。他的同伴打电话叫救护车。他说，“我的朋友死了，怎么办？” 接线生说，“冷静一点，我来帮你。首先确定他真的死了。” 安静了一下，那边穿来了一下枪声。同伴说，“好了，然后呢？”

So what was the first joke you memorised? You're welcome to copy it into a comment below, or at least provide a link if you have one.

I don't know nuffin' or nuffin'

2011-11-27T17:29:00.000Z

OK, I know a little. So I know enough to know that I don't know a lot, although for now I know enough. But like most, I don't know what I don't know. You know what I mean? Oh no!

I. It was quite early on when I learned to say "I know" (我知道)(wǒ zhīdào). That was easy. And 'not knowing' was almost just as easy: 我不知道 (wǒ bù zhīdào).

II. It took a little longer to be able to say "I know everything": 我什么都知道 (wǒ shénme dōu zhīdào). Of course I didn't actually know everything, but even *I* could memorise that sentence.

Yet that sentence bothered me! You see people told me that Mandarin was just like English: subject-verb-object. I eat fish. I photograph people. I know everything. But look at the sentence above: (我)(什么都)(知道): (I)(everything)(know).

So much for Mandarin being just like English. Sigh.

And I'm sure that someone will be able to explain to me why the above still is consistent with English, by referring to compound verbs, adverbial phrases, the genetive case, or even transferred epithets.

But I'm not a linguist, I'm just someone struggling to learn Chinese. And to me, Mandarin is not like English.

III. So imagine how frustrated I became when I realised that basically I know nothing. "I know nothing" 我什么都不知道 (wǒ shénme dōu bù zhīdào).

Breaking the sentence down, it looks like this: (I)(everything)(don't know). My mind translated this as "I do not know everything" - which did not match the actual meaning. My mind was blown: I didn't even know how to know nothing!

Let me just make sure you're following me. In English, if I know everyone in my street, then this means I know every single person who lives on my street. And if I know no-one on my street, then the number of people I know is zero. Not one. However when I say I do not know everyone, what I mean is that I know some people, but not all people.

So the Chinese version 我什么都不知道 (wǒ shénme dōu bù zhīdào) didn't make sense to me - because it seems to relate to knowing nothing, rather than not knowing everything. Very different! But this wasn't the time for logic. 我什么都不知道 (wǒ shénme dōu bù zhīdào) means "I know nothing". Memorise it. And I did.

IV. At the back of my mind I continued wondering how to tell people that I don't know everything. I know something, not nothing though, but also definitely not everything either. Earlier this year I asked Maggie (Hi Maggie!) how to say it. And this is what she said was a good option to understand the difference:
I do not know everything
不是所有的事情我都知道
bùshì suǒyǒu de shìqing wo dōu zhīdào
(not all the things)(I know)

With all due respect to the Chinese language, this feels really clumsy! Item IV is logical I guess, but it's not simple and it's certainly not obvious. Oh but it works. And as I keep reminding myself, this is Chinese. I can disagree as much as I want, but if this is it, then this is what I'll learn.

Apologies: I'm too scared to re-read this post before I press [publish]. I'm worried I'm going be so confused by my own confusion, that I'll just end up clicking [discard] and blame it on the entropy of the universe. Maybe you started reading this post believing that although you didn't know everything, you didn't 'know nothing'. But now you know for sure that you don't know what I thought you should know. But don't blame me. No! What you need to know is it's not my fault.

That's Chinese, you know.

(And if you think this post was long & confusing, make sure you do not click on this link.)

Discovering Mandarin

2011-11-21T16:52:00.000Z

So I was sitting in a restaurant the other day, and I noticed some Chinese writing on top of a nearby building (on the right you will see the picture I took at the time). Unconsciously I found myself trying to read it, which I tend to do all the time. I can't help it.

I had earlier discovered that you reach a point in your Chinese studies where you kinda pick words up along the way, you learn new words without trying.

It becomes partly about discovering Mandarin, and no longer just about learning Mandarin.

Here is my stream of consciousness as I tried to work the sign out ...

My eyes gravitated to 是主 which I immediately (mentally) translated as "is master"
So then my eyes settled on the 耶穌 on the left
I knew I had seen the first character 耶 before, but couldn't remember how to pronounce it, nor what it means
The second character 穌 I know well, from Scotland (蘇格蘭) and soda-water (蘇打水) - but I only seemed to remember how it was pronounced , and I couldn't remember the meaning!
For a fraction of a second, it felt hopeless - I couldn't work it out
Suddenly I noticed the cross in the middle (why didn't I notice it before?) and realised immediately that there was something of a religious theme going on
Right away, my mind clicked that the right probably meant "is Lord" ...
... so the left in all likelihood must be "Jesus"
Another piece of the puzzle fitted in place with the second character being pronounced sū
So I deduced that the first probably sounds like "ye" - making the left half sound like "Yesu"
Got it!

Of course, the next time I see those words I won't have to go through that whole process - which probably took no more than a second or two anyway. But now I know a new word - and I wasn't even trying.

This has happened to me a number of times before - where I saw a word that I'd never known, and based on the context I worked out what it meant - and I've never forgotten it.

防水 (fángshuǐ): I know that 防 means defend (from the expression 防不胜防 which I knew) and 水 is water, and after seeing what they were selling, it was easy to see that every was waterproof. Yes 防水 means waterproof.
In the shopping district part of Causeway bay, Hong Kong, there are a lot of signs with 水晶 (shuǐjīng) written out front - meaning "water bright", which I could similarly work out meant "crystal" from the context.
In a store in Taipei one I saw a sign on the wall which read "手工" (shǒugōng) which literally means "hand work" - and it was easy to deduce that it was indicating that the items there were hand-made. Now I know.
Other words that I discovered without learning included: 法院 (law court), 石油 (rock oil = petrol), 加油站 (add oil station = petrol station), 海绵 (sea cotton = sponge)

Chinese isn't easy, but it certainly seems to get easier over time! And if you've discovered words this way too, please leave a note below, for others to share ...

A clever butcher uses a cleaver

2011-08-11T18:54:00.000+01:00

If you were learning English, then the above sentence might be a good one to stick in your flashcards. Picturing a butcher who wears professorial glasses, holding a cleaver, might make it easier - both visually and audio-wise - to remember the new word 'cleaver'. It's certainly more memorable then the sentence: "Use a cleaver to cut meat."

And this is the logic I've tried to use when finding new sentences to enter into my flashcard deck.

As you would have seen from my post a few months back about finding sentences, I use a variety of sources for my deck. But it was only when I was reviewing this sentence below, that I realised that there was a clever/cleaver trick that I was unconsciously using.

     Lennie stopped chewing and swallowed it whole
     Lúnní tíngzhǐ jǔjué, húlún yànle xiàqu
     伦尼停止咀嚼，囫囵咽了下去
     倫尼停止咀嚼，囫圇咽了下去

While saying the sentence during my daily flashcard revision, I realised that this sentence had a clever/cleaver style of repetition in the words 'Lúnní' and 'húlún'. It's not a big thing, but I realised it was a bit of a mental crutch that I had indeed being relying on when learning the cards - and on a few occasions when I was trying to recall a word in conversation.

I went back through some of my flashcards, and found that so many sentences I'd chosen had inadvertently used this trick, and I've actually tried to be more intentional in this regard.

OK, so now that you know this trick, there really is nothing else to say. If you choose not to take advantage of this, that's your choice. But if you choose to use this, here are some sentences that I've found in my deck which someone was clever/cleaver in constructing.

If you'd like to copy these into your deck, feel free ...

Bees store honey to get through winter

mìfēng wèi guòdōng zhùcún fēngmì

蜜蜂为过冬贮存蜂蜜

蜜蜂為過冬貯存蜂蜜

trick: mìfēng vs fēngmì

     I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow
   wǒ tóu yi pèngdào zhěntou jiù shuìzháo le
     我头一碰到枕头就睡着了
     我頭一碰到枕頭就睡著了
   trick: tóu / zhěntou (although, you really should have noticed this without clever/cleaver sentences!)

     She sat there motionless, nothing can motivate her
   tā yidòngbudòng de zuò zàinar, méiyǒushénme néng cùdòng tā
     她一动不动地坐在那儿，没有什么能促动她
     她一動不動地坐在那兒，沒有甚麼能促動她
   trick: yidòngbudòng / cùdòng

     If you lose a credit card you should report it to the police
     diūshī xìnyòngkǎ yào xiàng jǐngchá bàoshī
     丢失信用卡要向警察报失
     丟失信用卡要向警察報失
     trick: diūshī / bàoshī

     Don't disappoint your parents
     bùyào gūfù fùmǔ duì nǐde qīdài
     不要辜负父母对你的期待
     不要辜負父母對你的期待
     trick: gūfù / fùmǔ

     Mr Li the shopkeeper has two assistants
     Lǐ lǎobǎn yǒu liǎng gè zhùlǐ
     李老板有两个助理
     李老闆有兩個助理
     trick: Lǐ / zhùlǐ

And here are a number of other sentences that appear in my flashcards, but I'll leave you to do the translations yourself if you want to use them. The trick might be around using the same sound, the same character, or anything else that makes it easier to recall one word using another part of the sentence:

这是违法的行为
我花了一些时间决定花钱买哪种花
我们可以推断会议推迟了
我们铸蜡成烛
纤维 / 维生素
租约下个月到期
耳朵, 耳环, 耳机, 耳语, 耳子
个人开户账户申请表
每个透支的支票
对于妇女来说就业就会有牺牲
薪水会直接汇入你的帐户
这个座位很小坐得很不舒服
非工作人员禁止进入
他们企图蒙骗公众耳目 (cheat! sounds like 'qitu')

Just to be clear ... this is not a miracle. This will not take you from a beginner to intermediate in record time. But it will make it a little easier to remember words, and since you're already investing time in learning Chinese, you may as well take advantages of clever/cleaver tricks like this.

Don't butcher it!

How many flashcards does it take to change a lightbulb?

2011-07-31T04:26:00.000+01:00

Some people do it daily (some people wish they did it daily!), and others only do it infrequently, or even never.

For me, spending time on flashcards has become an (almost) daily routine. I have recently already written that you should just do it, about how effective it has been for me, and to tell you how to test whether you should be using flashcards - so take a look if you haven't seen those articles.

In this next in the series, I wanted to go personal (yes, even more personal than writing about my love affair - In fact, I'm going to let you look into my actual set of flashcards, through sample sentences, numbers & dates.

Deck Statistics
Anki has a feature which gives you a whole bunch of facts about your specific deck. Here are some of mine, covering the deck itself, as well as how I've used it.

total numbers

deck created 2.1 years ago
total number of 'facts' is 1530 (a fact contains english, pinyin, simplified hanzi and (sometimes) traditional hanzi too)
total number of cards is 3680 (in the early days, a fact only generated two cards: english-to-pinyin & pinyin-to-english; but after a while I extended it to three: english-to-pinyin/simplified/traditional, simplified-to-english/pinyin/traditional, pinyin-to-english/simplified/traditional)
according to Anki, 76% of my cards are 'mature' (I've basically seen these often enough that they're 'known', 6% are 'young' (I'm currently actively working through them), and 18% are unseen.

activity

In the last week I did 500 cards, averaging about 70 a day. According to Anki, I missed one day in the last week.
My average over the last 3 months is 45 cards a day, and over the last year is 52 cards a day.
Since the deck was created, I have averaged 53 cards a day, and used Anki just under 5 days a week.
Since the beginning, I have added less than 5 cards a day, but this has only been around 2 a day in the last year. (Remember that by entering a single 'fact' Anki automatically generates a number of 'cards' - so I would say this averages about 2 new physical entries a day, that's all.)

sample entries

From humble beginnings ...

The first six entries in my deck are: (know / zhīdào / 知道), (formal / zhèngshì / 正式), (about / guānyú / 关于), (accept,approve / tóngyì / 同意), (after / zhīhòu / 之后), (agree / shuōhǎo / 说好).

To a long way down the line ...

The six latest entries are:

profit commission adjustment request / 盈佣调整询问函
There were a lot of groupies at the Michael Jackson concert in Japan / 迈克尔·杰克逊在日本的演唱会招来了许多追星族
to accumulate over a long period of time / 日积月累
Unless you say it so that your word becomes another, then it's no problem / 除非你说的词变成另外一个词，否则没问题
tomorrow;daybreak / 明天;天明
You have to tighten up the handle, it has become loose / 柄松动了，你得把螺丝拧紧

I think you'll agree that I've improved my skill level over the last two years! And don't let this mislead you ... I don't know all the latest ones. For example, I recently needed to know the word 'loose' while talking to someone and realised I didn't know how to say that. So I looked it up in the dictionary, found a good sentence, and entered it into my deck. A few weeks will pass before this sentence comes up to the top of the pack, and then I will 'learn' it through spaced-repetition.

So that's me

If you'd like to share some of your desk statistics, I'd love to see them - whether you're a beginner or really advanced.

Most interestingly, I would love it if you could leave a comment below to say what your first few words were, what your most recent entries are, and what the time period is in between.

And if you've just started a deck of your own, perhaps since reading this series on flashcards, let us know what your first few entries have been.

The 'Redneck' guide to flashcards

2011-07-14T18:58:00.000+01:00

Using flashcards for the purpose of studying Chinese might not be for everyone. I gave my best recommendation in this regard in the first article in the series, but if you're looking for a slightly more 'personalised' recommendation, then this article will guide you on what is best for you.

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy and his "You might be a redneck if ..." series of one-liners.

You know you should be using flashcards if ...

When you find yourself (again!) ordering "diet coke" in English in a Chinese restaurant instead of "Jiànyí Kelè" ... you should be using flashcards.
If you keep getting confused between left & right in Chinese ... you should be using flashcards.
If you keep asking your martial arts instructor if you have good sperm, instead of good power ('jing') ... you should be using flashcards.
If you can never quite remember the difference between 必须 and 必需 ... you should be using flashcards.
If you looked up a word last week but you can't remember the answer ... you should be using flashcards.
If you listen to Chinese music, and there is one word you keep hearing in songs but you still don't know what it means ... you should be using flashcards.
If there is a Chinese character you see all over town, and you keep forgetting what it means ... you should be using flashcards.
If you keep saying 'foreskin' when you mean to say 'briefcase' ... you should be using flashcards.
If you find yourself asking your Chinese friend for the 8th time, "How do you say 'influence' again?" ... you should be using flashcards.
If you don't know which of "我什么都不知道" or "我不知道什么都" is actually correct ... you should be using flashcards.
If you can't remember the Chinese equivalent of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" ... you should be using flashcards.
If you sometimes visit Chinese websites, and you're always seeing a button that says "取消" but you don't know what it means ... you should be using flashcards.
If you listen to conversations, Mandarin radio or Chinese TV and there are words you still don't know ... you should be using flashcards.
If you are studying Chinese ... you really should be using flashcards.

And what about you? What was it in your life that convinced you that you should be using flashcards?

My long romance with flashcards

2011-07-03T01:00:00.001+01:00

In my previous post on the topic, I recommended very strongly that you should be using flashcards as part of your Chinese-learning efforts.

In this post I'd like to write a bit about how my relationship with flashcards has gone, and why I find it one of the most useful tools available to progress one's learning.

SRS

When I started with flashcards, I used a program that was not SRS-based, which was a terrible mistake. A random-card system was fine in school when you were trying to revise the capital cities of the world, but not when you're using it as a tool to learn Chinese words. I would learn a word, and then it wouldn't appear again for weeks, by which time I'd have to learn it again. Or words that I already knew well would keep coming up - wasting my time. So I gave up on flashcards.

But it wasn't long after that I found Anki, which felt so natural that I haven't stopped using it since then.

Setting it up

Some people load up pre-made decks when they begin - for example there are beginner's Chinese packs available that you can you download directly into Anki. However in my case, there were just a few dozen words that I wanted to learn (or so I thought!), so I chose to set up my own deck and start with only words that I cared about.

I built three fields for each 'fact': English, pinyin, simplified Chinese. And for each 'fact', I built two 'cards' - one where the English was the question, and pinyin & Chinese were the answer; and one where pinyin was the question and English & Chinese were the answer.

To be honest, I didn't even look at the Chinese writing, I was a beginner and I stuck with English & pinyin.

Phrases & Sentences

Over time, knowing individual words wasn't enough. I needed to use sentences, and frankly my grammar was rubbish. Some of the words I was adding were coming from the About.com daily words email, and ever-practical I realised it would take just as long to copy a word into my deck as to copy a sentence - and thus it began.

Again, although my deck is made up of words & sentences that I have added myself, you can choose to take the route of downloading a pre-made deck directly into Anki, one of which is called "20,000 Chinese Sentences". Whatever works for you.

I slowly got into Chengyu (I've written about that guilty pleasure before) and have also added a few into my deck over time.

(Here are two screenshots [1] [2] of cards from my deck, if that helps give you context.)

Relevance

To make sure that I was learning words that I would be likely to use in future, whenever I looked up a word in my dictionary, and I felt that I really wanted to remember it, it became automatic to copy that word into my deck too. Took just a few seconds to make another card.

(See "Why a meal is worth more to me than my grandmother" for more thoughts on sticking to relevant learning.)

Earlier on I was just copying the word (including English, pinyin & Chinese), but over time I made sure that I found a sentence that used the word. This gave the word a context, made it easier to remember than just a lonesome word, improved my grammar, and sometimes included other useful words to learn too.

This use of sentences was so valuable to my learning that I wrote an article called Getting Sentenced in Mandarin, about how to track down good sentences.

I don't know if building up a deck from scratch sounds like a lot of effort, but if you're only doing a few a day, and since you're just copying & pasting, then it's really quick.

Do not let flashcards be your excuse. Do not spend so much time building up a deck that you never get around to using it to learn.

Chinese characters

Although I learned to recognise a few characters simply by virtue of the fact that my cards included the Chinese writing, this was incidental. It was only a couple of years ago, when I started to formally learn to read Chinese (here is Day 0 of that adventure) that I changed my flashcard practice. Instead of only using English or pinyin as the questions in Anki, I also set it to show me the Chinese version of the words & sentences I had already entered. In Anki, this change took about a minute to make - it's a great program.

And of course, having moved to Hong Kong late last year, I am now surrounded by traditional Chinese characters - but my deck was populated with simplified characters! Making some easy edits to my deck format, I added an extra field, and then any sentences that I added after that time would also get the traditional characters added too. I don't test myself based on the traditional characters, but I am still able to compare the two systems when looking at the card. And for now, that's enough.

Getting technical

More recently, rather than focusing on words from general conversation, I'm taking the time to build up vocab that I am likely to hear in meetings, or read in documents. Since I'm in the financial sector, these words include things like: assets, credit rating agency, cost of capital, assess, reserves, medical insurance, etc.

The process is the same as I've been doing - I find a word I want to learn, look it up, explore sentences of the various results to make sure I've got the right word in the right context, and then copy it into my deck. Usually it takes a few days or a few weeks before that new entry makes it into the queue for me to start learning.

So that's it for me and deck. I would love to hear about you and yours ...

Flashcards: just do it

2011-07-01T06:47:00.000+01:00

There's a lot of debate about whether you should use flashcards for learning Chinese. And perhaps the advice I should give you is: Use it if it works for you, and don't use it if it doesn't work for you.

Simple.

But I should also state that I have benefited so massively from the use of flashcards, that I really believe you should use it - regardless of whether you think it might be useful or not.

Just do it.

My use of flashcards has evolved over the years, and that's probably why I'm still getting value out of them, starting with individual words (excluding Chinese characters), progressing through to much more complex sentences which include the hanzi.

I use Anki, which is an SRS (spaced repetition system) program that runs on most operating systems. It's incredibly intuitive, very flexible, and free. You may as well install it now, if you haven't already done so, and you can learn more about how to use it optimally in the next few posts I write.

One of the more common arguments against using flashcards is that if you are reading books & newspapers & websites in Chinese, then you will end up learning the most common words anyway, without wasting your time on words that you might almost never see.

But most students of Chinese are not at that level, and therefore most students really should be focusing on accumulating words as quickly as possible. The more words you know, the more you will understand and the more you will be able to say. A flashcard system is, in my opinion, the best way to get there.

So if you're an advanced student, flashcards might not be for you. But for anyone else ... Just do it.

So how many words do I know?

2011-06-04T17:48:00.000+01:00

I've been wondering for some time now how many Mandarin words I know. It's funny though, because I have no idea what my wordcount is in English (and frankly I don't care) but somehow this number for Mandarin is a measure of progress, and I do care.

So here are two estimates of my Mandarin wordcount - which unfortunately do not tie up together at all :-)

Method 1 - flashcards
My self-estimate was around 5000 words, based on almost no science whatsoever.

I noted that with the Anki flashcard desk I have created over the last couple of years, that about 1500 'facts' are mature which I know well, and another 500 are in progress. In the early days the facts were just one word per card, but as I've progressed I've mainly been adding sentences - which itself probably contains somewhere between 1-6 new words. So if I assume on average a 'fact' contains two words, that's 4000 I probably know. Then add another 1000 for words which I know but aren't in my Anki set, and that's 5000.

No science, but I believed to it be true.

Method 2 - statistical sampling
I came across another method on Hugh Grigg's excellent East Asia Student blog, which uses the Known Chinese Words Test of zhtoolkit.com. Naturally, I quickly cleared some time this afternoon, and ran through the test.

Basically it splits "the entire" Chinese vocabulary (36,000 words) into into a number of groups, from very common words to very uncommon words. It then samples 165 words (15 per group) and notes how many you get right each time.

The conclusion of the test is that I know just over 11,000 words. Wow - that's more than double what I thought. So either I thought wrongly, or Chad's method produces very large over-estimates.

Obviously the more words he tests you against, the better the estimate would be. I think users should be given the option of taking a quick test (current 165 questions) or a slow test (say, 500 questions), which would improve the estimate dramatically. Let me show you what I mean ...

The first group is made up of the most common 125 words, where I got 100% (of the 15 questions) right. This starts my total words known at 125. Good.
The same applies to the second group of 125 words - taking me to a total of 250. Still good.
In the third group I only got 80% of the 15 questions, and since this group has 250 words, it adds just 200 (80% of 250) to my total. Still OK, taking me to 450 words so far.
This continues through more groups, each getting bigger, although still only getting 15 questions to sample. Naturally, since the words are being decreasingly less common, you would expect your hit rate to fall - and mine did.
In the last group (words 24,001-36,000) I got 5/15 right, so this is extrapolated to these 12,000 words to deduce that I know 4000 words in this class. I'm flattered.

In the last group, that 4000 makes a massive contribution to my total of 11,050 - but is just based on my knowing 5 words out of 15 tested. Of course his test shows a huge standard deviation in that group (1460!) but given how important this contribution is to the total (because it's such a large group) there really ought to be many more questions to get the deviation to a reasonable number.

Looking at it in a different way, if you split all words into just two groups: the most common 10,000, and the least common 26,000, I find it odd that I appear to known 4000 in the first group, and 7000 in the least common group. Instinctively that doesn't make sense, and yet you can't argue with his method (other than the small sample size).

Anyway ...
I don't want to get carried away with detail (and part of me wants to believe my total really is 11,000 :-) . Maybe the real answer lies somewhere between 5000 and 11,000 - I don't know. But I would be interested to redo this test every now and then, and see how I progress.

Just to clarify in closing, I'm really supportive of the zhtoolkit wordcount tool, and although I think it can still be improved, it was a really interesting exercise and well worth doing.

So if you're feeling brave, do the test (it really doesn't take long) and let us know your score.

Be counted.

Chinese Scribbles

2011-04-24T04:43:00.000+01:00

About a year ago, I took a week off to hang out in Yangshuo, near Guilin. If you're ever planning time in southern China, this is a must-visit. The photo to the right was taken right out of my hotel room window! (Apologies for the quality, it was taken with my mobile, through a closed window.)

I chose to travel alone for that week, for two reasons. Firstly, I was planning on spending a few hours a day doing volunteer-teaching at a local English school, and secondly I wanted to practise speaking Chinese - and having an English-speaking friend with me would have been a distraction. (If you remember, last January I wrote about ideas for things I could volunteer with while in China, and ended up choosing the teach-English option.)

At the time of my travels, I had scribbled some notes about what I was experiencing - as a Mandarin student - intending to write an article about it for Mandarin Segments. However, I lost those notes, and the article was never written. Until now.

Yes, this morning I found an old backup file from my previous Blackberry, containing some of the scribbles.

This post is just a set of bullet points from my time there, all in relation to learning Mandarin. I would love to hear from you if any of these strike a chord with you too.

I arrived in Beijing, and then took a shuttle to a different part of the airport in order to get my flight to Guilin. As the shuttle bus was pulling up, an announcement came over the speakers which said, "The terminal has arrived." I smiled to myself, pleased that people make mistakes from Chinese to English, and therefore I shouldn't feel guilty if I made mistakes over the next week going from English to Chinese.
In Beijing airport, I overheard one security guard starting a conversation with another, where he started of his sentence as follows, "Gum'r ..." I had heard that expression in a ChinesePod lesson before - it means "dude" - but this is the first time I had heard it in the wild.
(It's actually written: 哥们儿 (gēmenr), or just 哥们 (gēmen) if you're not in Beijing.)
Then, while riding the bus from Guilin to Yangshuo, I learned my first word of the trip, without trying. We drove past a petrol station, and I remember seeing the following characters as part of the name of the petrol company: 石油 (shíyóu). I already knew that 石 means 'rock' and 油 means 'oil' - so I deduced that 石油 must mean petrol ("gas", for the Americans reading this :-). So easy.
Also on that bus, I sat next to a Chinese woman who works in Yangshuo - and we swapped language-learning horror stories. I remember her correcting some of my tones, which I appreciated. And I taught her how to say, "She sells seashells on the sea shore" - you should have seen the joy on her face when she finally recited it free of errors.
While doing some shopping along the famous West Street, I spoke Chinese every chance I got. I remember the one vendor was absolutely shocked that I knew how to read the characters: 孙子 (Sūnzǐ, or Sun Tzu - author of The Art of War), and that I knew the Chinese word for 'pearls' (珍珠, or zhēnzhū- although I only knew that because I knew how to say "pearl bubble tea" in Chinese :-)
Even though we were well within the borders of the People's Republic of China, I was surprised that there was so much writing in 'traditional' and not the 'simplified' script. I remember discussing it with the one waitress at a coffee shop, trying to understand why 'traditional' was being used. A couple of days later I stopped at the same place for another great coffee, and I remember the waitress asking me (in English), "Are you the traditional Chinese guy?" Haha - I've never been called that before.
In comparison with my previous trip to China, it was clear to me that I was understanding a greater proportion of the conversations that I was over-hearing. Small victories ... huge pleasure ...
Then there was the evening when I ate a pig's penis. I passed a stall that was selling everything on skewers - all you had to do is choose what sticks you want, they'd grill it and then serve it. I could easily identify the prawns, the beef, the larvae, and the snake. But there was one I couldn't identify - although I guessed what it was! The waiters spoke no English, but I could understand zhū (pig: 猪 or 豬), and zàng (organ: 脏 or 臟). I asked them to point where on my body I could find this organ (after all, it might have been the spleen, for example) but the girls just giggled and the guys just shrugged. I kept the receipt, and have since been able to confirm that 猪鞭 (zhūbiān) is indeed a pig's penis.
In case you're wondering it's extremely long, thin, and really crunchy due to the cartilage. Yes, crunchy.
I was constantly being harassed by people trying to get me to go on their bamboo boat rides. In other cities, "zhēnde bùyào' (真的不要)("I really don't want it") has normally been very effective for getting these people to leave me alone. But even that was not powerful enough for the hawkers in Yangshuo! But I quickly discovered that my saying "wǒ yǐjīng qù guò le" ("我已经去过了")("I've already been") was all I needed to be left alone.
My first few attempts at this involved saying "我已经去了" - but after two of these hawkers corrected my grammar :-) I moved to the longer sentence of "我已经去过了". I didn't want to give the impression that I had already "passed over" and thus was dead.
Sometimes I would ask a question (like: Where is the stairway?) and they would answer me. I wouldn't understand so I'd ask them to repeat. They would say it again using the same words at the same speed. I'd ask them to repeat, and it was almost like a comedy sketch - it didn't matter how many times I'd ask them to repeat, they would also maintain the same speed and use the same words - no attempt to slow down, no attempt to clarify.
(I normally stopped asking after 5 repeats, and pretended I finally understood them. Then I'd go ask someone else.)
The one evening I met a Chinese woman who was working in Yangshuo and also an Israeli guy who was there for the rock climbing - and the three of us strangers spent the evening chatting. It was rather a surreal experience, trying to explain to her what a Jew is, since she'd never come across the concept before!
Interestingly, the waitress serving us claimed to have a Masters degree in linguistics. It's an easy claim for anyone to make, but on the basis of the conversations we had with her, I would say I really did believe her.
It's funny - when you're learning Chinese you sometimes memorise words that you think you're unlikely to ever use again. In my case, one such word was 翅膀 (chìbǎng) - meaning 'wings'. And yet I am pleased to report that I did use that word, in Yangshuo! I was trying on a pair of trousers, and they really seemed to be "flappy" at the sides. She was trying to understand why I didn't like them - so I pulled on the pockets and explained it's because the trousers have 'wings'. She laughed as she got it - and went off to find a better pair for me.

In general, I had lots of conversations. And I got a lot of compliments. But I'm not deluding myself - I know what standard my Chinese is! After all, when they compliment me after I say "nǐhǎo" (你好)(hello), that was my clue that they hadn't yet done a full assessment. But they were nevertheless very genuine about their pleasure that a foreigner went as far as nǐhǎo, and that felt good.

I also made a lot of mistakes. And yet I felt no embarrassment whatsoever - I was pleased to be trying, and sometimes succeeding.

No matter what your level of Chinese, go spend some time in China - ideally outside the big cities (where English is an easy way out). Go practise - it's amazing how much your confidence and your 'flow' will increase after that.

I look forward to hearing about your experiences ...

MyPaper, my vocab

2011-03-31T07:01:00.002+01:00

I just came back from a business trip to Singapore, where I discovered MyPaper, a newspaper that is handed out for free at MTR stations. (It also has an electronic version of the 'paper' on the website.)

The first thing I like about the paper is that it's available in both English and Chinese. That's really useful for Mandarin students.

The second thing I really like about it is that with many of the articles, it has got a short vocab list at the end of the article. Here are some examples:

So if you're looking to learn current and relevant words, or to practise your reading, try to spend some time at the MyPaper website - I'm impressed.

A Chinese Idiom in the hand is worth two in the bush

2011-03-27T10:19:00.002+01:00

We have Idioms in English.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The early bid catches the worm. Better late than never.   But as many as we have (and as many as you were forced to memorise during your years at school) nothing comes close to the Chinese system of Chéngyǔ (成语 / 成語 - which means 'set phrases').

Chengyu, in the strict sense, are four-character idioms, and according to Wikipedia there are over 5000 of them. Children spend a lot of time learning them at school, so you can be damn sure you're going to come across them often.

This post is not to get you like Chengyu, or even to start memorising them. But it's what happened in my own Mandarin-learning life around these idioms - just an unconnected series of personal anecdotes (although if you can see the hidden connection then well done!).

In the beginning
I had heard about some Mandarin students dedicating a lot of their time to learning Chengyu, but at the time I was thrilled if I could just remember how to say "I'm from South Africa" in decent Mandarin. So I promised myself I would never memorise any. Unfortunately, as your level increases, you can't avoid them - they come up more often that you'd like.

Losing my virginity
My first Chengyu was in a London dimsum restaurant called Ping Pong, which has the ceiling covered in a wall-paper with Chengyu written all over it. At that stage, my reading skills were rubbish, but looking around I saw one that I could actually read!

开门见山 (kāiménjiànshān). Literally, this is: open door see mountain. Can you work out what that means?

Open door see mountain. I had fallen in love with Chengyu. So simple, so direct. Wow - I could memorise millions of these!

I hate Chengyu
A few days later I was speaking with a Chinese friend about my new-found love, and she asked me what that particular Chengyu meant. So I explained my understanding: It was kinda like Nike's "Just do it!" Open the door, see the mountain. It's right outside.

But I was wrong, she explained. The actual meaning is "Get right to the point." This was so annoying, for two reasons. Firstly, she was right - I spoke with several people, and looked up several resources on the net, and she was right. Secondly, my interpretation made more sense than hers. But no matter how much I argued, I couldn't change a few thousand years of habit for the Chinese.

Chengyu were not obvious, they were not simple. And I hated them.

Love at first sight
OK, so I learned to relax when I came across another one: 一见钟情 (yījiànzhōngqíng). Literally, this means "one look bell emotion". Basically, it's just "love at first sight" - which was relatively intuitive, and my dislike for Chengyu started to fade again. (Love is fickle, eh?)

Which reminds me of 好久不见 (hǎojiǔbujiàn), which literally means 'long time no see', and the idioatic meaning is, uhm, 'long time no see'. In fact, even though it's four characters long, it's so literally correct that I'm not sure if it's idiomatic enough to be called Chengyu. (Amusingly, I've got Chinese friends who insist that the West stole the phrase 'long time no see' from the Chinese. OK.)

Have you lost your horse?
Some Chengyu require you to understand the back-story to understand the meaning. So with "open door see mountain", although my definition is better than the actual definition :-) at least now that I know what it should mean, I won't forget.

But take for example, 塞翁失马 (sàiwēngshīmǎ). You can spend as much time as you want with the dictionary, you're not going to get it yourself. If you get the literal translation, you've got something like "block old-man lose horse". What?

Actually, 塞翁 is the name of a person - it has nothing to do with blocking old men from losing their horse. The back-story is in fact well known to Westerners, in various guises. Basically, Saiweng has a horse that runs away, but he doesn't take that as bad news. Months later it comes back with another, but he doesn't take that as good news either. His son then goes riding on the new horse and breaks his arm - which Saiweng doesn't take as bad news. Then a war breaks out, and his son avoids conscription because of the broken arm ... and so on.

This actually remind me of another 'story' I remember from school:
A man takes a ride in an airplane.
   Unfortunately he falls out.
   Fortunately he has a parachute.
   Unfortunately it doesn't work.
   Fortunately there is a haystack below him.
   Unfortunately there is a pitchfork sticking out.
   Fortunately he misses the pitchfork.
   Unfortunately he misses the haystack.

But I digress ...

Do you know that?
I was reading through Carl Gene's excellent blog, and in his one post about love idioms, I saw the following: 藕断丝连 (ǒuduànsīlián), which he describes as follows: "The lotus root is severed, but linked by threads. This chengyu metaphorises the idea of a relationship breaking up, but still being connected in some kind of way."

Nice concept, but frankly I had no idea what he was talking about. Lotus root threads? What? So I did some searching, and came across the following really interesting article, with a whole bunch of pictures.

I did not know that!

Chengyu joke
两个裸男坐在石头上，打一成语

Brilliant, isn't it?? (Actually, I couldn't see why that should be funny. See if you can work it out, even after you've read the explanation!)

My most recent Chengyu
And to wrap up the article, I'll mention that recently a colleague of mine was visiting HK from our Beijing office (he's German, fluent in Mandarin), and the topic of Chengyu came up. He immediately announced that his favourite (and indeed his first) is ...

画蛇添足   (huàshé tiānzú) - literally "paint a snake, append a foot". Its meaning is to do with over-doing it, or to do something superfluous to ruin the effect. That's a great Chengyu (although I still haven't had the chance to use it)!

Chengyu tools
So that's my life's relationship with Chengyu, an apparently unconnected set of stories. I'd love to hear about your experiences, whether failures or favourites, so drop us a note below ...

In the meantime, here are some other sites that might interest you:
     Wikipedia article on Chengyu
   Chengyu Dicionary: by Chinese-Tools.com
   MDBG idioms: all 250 entries where the word "idiom" appears
     Ten Chinese love idioms by Carl Gene
     Twenty actually useful Chengyu by Carl Gene
Ten Chinese idioms to do with animals by ChineseHacks
My Chengyu Top Ten by Sinosplice

In space, no-one can hear you learn vocabulary

2011-02-20T06:44:00.001Z

There's a great little character (actually it's the same size as all other characters :-) that comes up really often in Mandarin, so it's worth spending a moment with it.

If you're a beginner, the content of this article may be new to you; and even if you're intermediate, then there are probably still words that are new.

Overall in the WordPack context, this is an example of what we discussed recently about being an active learner, when reasonable beavers co-operate.

The root of all time & space
Our starting point is 间 (間) which is pronounced 'jiān'. You can get the full definition at MDBG, but for our purposes, it comes down to "time & space".

Space
When 间 (jiān) is used to mean 'space', these are some of the resulting words:

空间 (kōngjiān) space (literally empty space)
房间 (fángjiān) room (literally house space)
洗手间 (xǐshǒujiān) bathroom (literally wash hands room)
雅间 (yǎjiān) private room
田间 (tiánjiān) farming area / village (literally field space)

Time
When 间 (jiān) is used to mean 'time', these are some of the resulting words:

时间 (shíjiān) time (perhaps literally this is: time space)
日间 (rìjiān) day-time (literally sun time)
夜间 (yèjiān) night-time (literally night time)
北京时间 (Běijīng Shíjiān) Chinese Standard Time
格林尼治标准时间 (Gélínnízhìbiāozhǔnshíjiān) Greenwich Mean Time, GMT (ignore the literal meaning here, this is more of a transliteration)

Special Mentions
I've put these into a separate group because they have a bit of an 'angle' on them:

之间 (zhījiān) between
外层空间 (wàicéngkōngjiān) outer space (literally outside stratum empty space)
空间站 (kōngjiānzhàn) space station (literally empty space platform)
网络空间 (wǎngluòkōngjiān) cyberspace
三维空间 (sānwéikōngjiān) three-dimensional space
坐标空间 (zuòbiāokōngjiān) coordinate space (maths)
拓扑空间 (tuòpūkōngjiān) topological space (maths)

How many of these words will you remember next week? Are you really progressing over time?

Reasonable beavers co-operate

2011-02-10T06:00:00.011Z

The meeting

I was in a meeting in Taipei recently which was being run in Mandarin. Although I was able to follow the general flow of the discussion, the extensive use of technical terms meant I was really missing the meaty bits.

There was one word which, during part of the debate, kept coming up: "hé li" (although I couldn't quite get the tone on the second character, given the pace of debate).

Back at the office, I looked it up in my usual MDBG dictionary, and saw a few words that matched 'heli', being:

   合理    hélǐ    rational / reasonable / fair
   河狸    hélí    beaver
   合力    hélì    cooperate

These words

These are all good words, I decided, and I didn't want to forget them. So I copied them into my flashcard pack. However, rather than copying them as separate words, I thought their similarity made them easier to learn as a pack (in the usual WordPack logic), like this:

   合理 / 河狸 / 合力
   hélǐ / hélí / hélì
   reasonable / beaver / co-operate

(And amusingly, each time one of these words come up, I immediately hear the sentence "reasonable beavers co-operate" in my head. Now I'll never forget!)

This article

I wrote this short article, not specifically to teach you these three words (although it would be a pity if you didn't take the time to learn them quickly now), but to challenge your thinking ...

When you come across a new word, what thoughts go through your mind?

[no thoughts]
Oh, that's a new word (... now what's for lunch?)
I will come back and memorise it later
I'll quickly memorise it now
Do I know any synonyms for that word?
What other words sound the same?
Let me try make a sentence with that word
I will use that word at least once today (and also once tomorrow (and also once next week (and also ...)))

Just to be clear, I don't have the time to do this with every new word I discover, but I do it often enough that I definitely have a materially larger vocab than I would otherwise if I didn't practise active learning.

The Truth

How active a learner are you?

Heisig: my just desserts

2011-02-03T05:41:00.001Z

I was reminded recently that there is a large gap between knowing individual Chinese characters, and being able to understand what the entire phrase or sentence might mean.

This is already an idea I know well, I certainly mentioned it a few times in my series on learning to read using the Heisig system, and I've left numerous comments on others' blogs to that effect.

Nevertheless, I felt this example was 'extreme' enough to be worth sharing.

As you can see from the photo attached, there is an item on this late-night dessert place, which says:
南北杏木瓜雪耳

(By the way, I did screw up a bit by initially confusing the 杏 character with 否. Forgive me?)

Anyway ... so doing what I normally do, I tried to work out what the dessert was. Actually, from my Heisig days, I knew the meaning of every character, which are as follow:
= South North apricot wood melon snow ear

I had no idea what that was! (All I could guess was that there was melon in there.)

It's easy enough to put this through a dictionary, but even here, it doesn't get much better, because I'm still left with:
= South North apricot [papaya] snow ear

Upon discussing this with a HK friend, it turns out that the expressions are Cantonese in nature, and so knowing Mandarin (or using a Mandarin dictionary) isn't going to help much. But I persisted ...

Now, using human input and a Cantonese dictionary, I discover that the grouping should be as follows:
(南北杏)(木瓜)(雪耳)
(almond)(papaya)(white fungus)

Aside: According to Wikipedia, apricot kernels are sometimes used instead of bitter almonds, but it seems to be accepted in HK amongst those I spoke to that when they see 南北杏 they generally take it to mean 'almond'. White Fungus, in this case, does indeed look more ear-like than mushroom-like.

So there we have it. (Although *I* didn't have it. No, I ate some kind of warm red bean soup instead. Mainly because I didn't need a dictionary for that one!).

Chinese seems hard, but it's actually harder than that! :-)

Can you recall any specific words that you learned along the way where the word or phrase looks *nothing* like the characters which make it up? If so, please leave a comment below.

Who's on First?

2010-12-30T17:02:00.000Z

Gym has been helping me improve my Chinese since I moved to HK. (And my Chinese would be even better if I went more often!)

While running on treadmill, not only am I listening to Mandarin music, but I'm also watching the (silent) TV screens. Actually, I'm not even looking at the picture - just reading the subtitles as they flash past. It's too fast and too complicated for me to work out what's going on, but it's good practice for the characters that I know ...

This time there was one character that kept on flashing past - I couldn't remember seeing it before, but sadly I also couldn't remember it well enough to reproduce it - which meant even a few minutes with a dictionary came up with blanks. (Forgive me, I was concentrating more on the burn in my thighs, and less on the shape of Chinese characters at that time.)

I got to work this morning, and asked a colleague what this character meant - and after a few failed attempts, she recognised it as 甚. She pointed out that it is usually associated with another character: 甚麼.

The dialogue then went as follows:
     G: 这是什么? (zhè shì shénme?) ("This is what?")
(Yes, I've been learning Simplified characters, so I talk in Simplified too :-)
     E: 这是甚麼   (zhè shì shénme) ("This is 'what'.")
(Note the identical pinyin, which is why I was confused ...)
     G: 我问你: 这是什么? ("I'm asking you: This is what?")
     E: 对我告诉你: 这是甚麼 ("Correct, I'm telling you: This is 'what' ")

If you haven't worked it out by now, the word for 'what' in Simplified is 什么 - which according to the dictionary is written as 什麼 in Traditional Characters. However, there is a variant of this word in Traditional which is 甚麼.

This is what?
Yes, this is what.

Kinda reminded me of the old Abbot & Costello sketch called "Who's on First?". If you don't know it, you'd better see it!

Have you ever listened to a story that sounded like it was going to have an amazing climax, but didn't? Ah yes, well this is one of those :-)

Neither Coke nor Water

2010-10-27T16:39:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I really don't understand why people can't understand my Chinese.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I use the wrong words, the wrong tones, the wrong facial expressions a lot of the time. But still, if you don't understand a person, don't you sit there trying to work out what they might have meant?

Of course, it's not just with Chinese - this is an English problem too. Let me start with an example that happened in Boston USA about a year ago. A small group of us were sitting in a restaurant (including my cousin, who had been living in Boston for 10 years).

The waitress asks us what we'd like to drink, my cousin orders a coffee, I order a "Sam Adams" (the beer is actually called "Samuel Adams", but this waitress is so smart, so she managed to work out what I wanted), and Charlie orders a water. She orders water using her English accent, saying "water" very clearly.

"What?"
"Water."
"Sorry, what?"
"Water?"

The waitress is really struggling to understand the word "water", in spite of the fact that she just asked us what we'd like to drink. "Wheelbarrow" would not have made sense, but "water" seems quite obvious.

My cousin interrupts: "She wants water." Lynn says this with a Boston accent, which sounds more like "wadder" than "waw-tuh".

"Oh wadder? Sure, no problem," and off the waitress goes.

Seriously. This really happened.

And so to Chinese.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen. I'm in a restaurant, and wanting to order a Diet Coke. Dammit! I can't remember the Chinese word for diet Coke - so I say kělè (可乐)(可樂)('cola'). This part she understands.

I remember that the word for "lose weight" is jiǎnféi (减肥), which kinda rings bells. I know it's not quite right, but it's close ... so I take a guess by asking for "jiǎn kělè".

She doesn't get it. I clarify by saying "méiyǒu táng" (no sugar), then I repeat "jiǎn kělè". This is not going anywhere, and after another minute of trying, I give up and just order a normal coke.

Now the truly frustrating part is that the word I was looking for was "jiànyí kělè" (健怡可乐)(健怡可樂). When I looked that up back in HK, I was dumbfounded - because she knew I was looking for a type of cola, it doesn't contain sugar, and it sounds like "jiǎn kělè".

Wouldn't "jiànyí kělè" be an obvious guess? I guess not.

tom-A-to is different to tom-ah-to, but people can work that out.
water is almost the same as wadder, but people can't work that one out.

And I know that what I speak is is waaaaay different to proper Chinese, but still ....

Now blogging from Hong Kong

2010-10-03T18:58:00.001+01:00

Hi all

I was shocked to notice that I haven't posted in nearly two months! Thanks for the emails from those of you who were wondering if I was still "around" ...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had plans to move to Hong Kong. And in fact, I have moved to HK. Indeed, this is me now, blogging from Hong Hong.

The picture you see to the right is from my current apartment window, in the heart of Wanchai. This coming weekend I will move to my permanent apartment further east.

In the last couple of months I got tied up with the process of moving, using up some leave that was still due to me (in the US & South Africa), and coming across here. I've also been settling in HK, doing 'domestic' things grocery shopping and getting haircuts.

I've not had that much opportunity to practise my Mandarin (well, more than London, but less than I would want) - except for the last two days which I spent in Shenzhen for China's 61st birthday. I've also been having to re-learn some of my reading, because HK uses the Traditional character set, whereas I learned the Simplified set - but I've done this learning "in the wild" and not from books.

So, following soon, I'll be writing more articles. I've got so many ideas in the last couple of weeks. Keep an eye out for my next post called "Neither Coke nor Water".

If you're still reading, drop me a note below to say hi. (And if you're based in HK, let me know - it would be fun to meet up.)

Getting Sentenced in Mandarin

2010-08-09T00:26:00.000+01:00

This is another article in the Life Sentences series. In my opening post, I wrote the following:

"Copyright acknowledgement: Over time I have collected a variety of sentences, and loaded them into my flashcard system. By this stage, I no longer have any idea where they came from. Some are of my own construction, or from friends who have emailed or instant-messaged me. Others have been copied from websites along the way. To make sure I give credit where due, the following sites are the most likely external sources ... "

The purpose of this article is to say a few words about why I bother getting sentences, and where.

Why?
Originally I used to just read the sentences and convince myself that I 'got' the structure, but over time I realised I didn't - so I then started adding entire sentences into my Anki flashcards collection. There are two major benefits to this:

Chinese sentence constructs can be really different to English (as mentioned in my previous post). You can't just memorise lists of words and do literal word-by-word translations, it doesn't work that way.
You should make sure you're using the words in the right context. In English, for example, there is a difference between jealousy & envy, disinterested and uninterested - and you'll want to use the right words in Chinese too.

Where?

Daily sentences

Whether you're a beginner just learning words, or an intermediate learning sentences, it's worthwhile subscribing to mandarin.About.com's Word of the Day. Here you can see a sample for yǐngxiǎng (影響)(影响). Almost every day, I pick a word or sentence from the email, and enter it into my flashcard system. Highly recommended.
There are several pre-made databases for the Anki flashcard system, one of which contains 20,000 thousand sentences. Whether you set it to one new sentence a day, or many, is up to you - but start that habit today.

Rolling your own sentences

The jukuu.com website is basically designed to take words that you input (English, Mandarin, Japanese) and track down sentences which use that word. I find that lots of the resulting sentences are too long to interest me, and often of a technology theme, but you can still get some great sentences to copy into your flashcard system. Here's a sample using the word yǐngxiǎng again.
The nciku dictionary is one of the better web-based Mandarin/English dictionaries, and it also has a sample sentence facility - take a look at the yǐngxiǎng examples.
I only discovered Engkoo.com while in the final draft of this article, but so far I'm very impressed. The sentences tend to be quite long, but the front-end is quite polished. You can see the yǐngxiǎng examples here.
iChaCha offers yet another option, neat presentation and nicely short sentences. You can also see the example sentences for yǐngxiǎng.
Of course, you always have the option of simply entering the Chinese characters into your favourite search engine (I'm now using Bing, but you may still be using Google). It certainly takes more effort than the above options because it requires a lot more reviewing of the results to find good sentences, but maybe that's your preference.
I have a little paper dictionary called Collins Chinese Dictionary (in colour), which often gives sample sentences for the words I look up.
Finally, I have installed the free Pleco dictionary on my iPad, which usually gives example sentences for looked-up words. For yǐngxiǎng it provides about a dozen sentences.

Pre-loved sentences

Sometimes when I'm listening to Chinese podcasts (usually ChinesePod or Popup Chinese) I hear a sentence that I really* like - whether because it contains useful words, or has an interesting structure, or simply because I think I will use it often. I then enter a version of that sentence (English, pinyin, hanzi) into my flashcard system, and wait for it to come into the queue.
When emailing or instant-messaging (let's pretend that's a verb, OK?) with a Chinese friend, they might use a sentence which strikes me as likely to be of common use, or it may have interesting vocab or sentence structure. So I sometimes paste sentences like that into my flashcard collection.

If you use other sites for finding sentences, or even completely difference methods, then please leave a comment below. I hope you find this useful ...

* JP, I know you're reading this. One of the sentences coming through my flashcards at the moment is from an old ChinesePod QingWen episode with you, Connie & Amber. From that, I took this sentence: "难怪你那么佩服JP" :-)
** Some links are affiliated.

Karate Kid - the qi force

2010-08-05T23:22:00.000+01:00

I recently watched the new Karate Kid movie, with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. It really is a good movie - but this post is not a movie review.

This (very short) post is actually about Chinese writing systems.

The movie is based in mainland China, where the Simplified Character Set is used. And throughout the movie you see writing in this Simplified set, as you'd expect.

But there is one scene (no, this is not a spoiler) where Jackie Chan is explaining the concept of life-force or qi, and he writes the symbol as follows: 氣. Of course, this is actually the Traditional version, whereas the Simplified version is: 气 (and you also get a Z-variant: 気).

OK, so Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong where they use Traditional characters, and I accept that the above version looks more 'appropriate' for a scene in a movie.

So I begrudge that it is the right thing to do for Karate Kid. Although, to be fair, my heart did miss a beat when I saw the technical goof.

Small things amuse small minds. (Go on, don't be shy to tell me that in the comments below ...)

I'm moving to Hong Kong!

2010-07-25T10:46:00.000+01:00

No, this is not a lesson to teach you how to say that in Mandarin. This is an announcement: I'm moving to Hong Kong.

This probably won't come as a surprise to most of you that I'm interested enough in Asia to want to go spend some time there. For the last five years, I've been travelling to Asia up to half a dozen times a year, and it was through these business trips that I (by mistake :-) ended up learning Mandarin. And my interest in the language, the people, the culture, has continued to grow.

I work for a large international company, and I put it out there that I'm available for an Asian opportunity. I had done this before, over 10 years ago, when I was working for their South African operation, and got transferred to the UK. And now it's time to do it again. My bags will already by unpacked by mid-September.

There's a lot I'm going to miss about London - it's an amazing city. And I'll obviously miss my family and friends too (you know who you are - because I know you're reading this). But there is also so much that I'm looking forward to.

Of course I'll try pick up some Cantonese too, but HK gives plenty of opportunity to improve my Mandarin. One of the big changes is having to re-learn my reading skills, because I've been focusing on Simplified Chinese, yet HK uses Traditional Characters. But that's another story for another blog post.

For the readers of Mandarin Segments who are based in HK, please leave me a comment, or send me an email to say hi. And for those passing through the city, let me know when you're coming.

Anyway, I better go pack another box ...

Reading Chinese (in Japan!)

2010-07-10T14:15:00.000+01:00

Another trip, another (Mandarin) discovery ...

I have just spent a couple of weeks in Japan - my last trip having been three years ago. At that time, I probably knew only about 12 Kanji (Japanese characters, which were originally borrowed from Chinese about 2000 years ago), whereas this time I know about 100 times as many characters.

I was curious to see how my Chinese reading skills would work in Japan.

Here is the background:

I have been studying the Simplified Chinese character set - whereas of course Kanji would be closer to the Traditional Chinese character set
I am referring here to recognising individual characters, and piecing together enough of them to get the general meaning of what I'm reading
After all, I'm not a fluent Chinese reader, so I couldn't exactly expect to manage Japanese without a hitch.

And here are some quick observations about my experiences understanding:

In spite of the above points, I was still able to follow much of the Kanji which I read in signs, menus, posters, etc.
Even when signs were a mixture of Kanji and Hiragana (the one phonetic alphabet of Japanese), I sometimes found that the core meaning came from the Kanji. (For example, if you look at the picture below (sorry for the bad lighting, I took it in a shrine) in the right-column you can recognise the characters 帽子 (hat) and 脱 (take-off) -I'm sure you can work out what you have to do!

Sometimes the Kanji means exactly the same as the chinese, for example 注意 (zhùyì, see below)
And whereas the character 天 (tiān) is used in day-based words in Chinese (昨天: yesterday, 今天: today, 明天: tomorrow), in Japanese the 天 doesn't appear, and instead 日 is used in it's place
Sometimes the Japanese have different words for common objects to what the Chinese use, even though you can still read the Japanese version and work out what they mean. For example (Chinese/Japanese): 'car' (汽車 = gas vehicle / 自動車 = automatic vehicle), 'emergency exit' (紧急出口 = urgency exit / 非常口 = extreme doorway), 'no smoking' (吸煙禁止 / 禁煙), 'train' (火車 = fire vehicle / 電車 = electric vehicle), 'push' (on doors) (推 / 押), 'fire extinguisher' (灭火器 vs 消火器) etc.

Finally, here are some fun observations:

The Japanese love the word 注意 (zhùyì, meaning 'notice' or 'caution') - I saw it all over the place - either stand-alone or at the end of the sentence
I discovered that the Chinese word 先生 (xiānsheng, or 'mister') is the same word as Japan's "sensei". Similarly, Japan's "onsen" (the famous style hot baths, usually from spring water) is written as 温泉 (wēnquán), which is of course "hot spring" in Chinese
In China the word for 'tap' is 水龍頭 (water dragon head) whereas in Japan they call it 蛇口 (snake mouth)

Before I knew that 自動車 is the Kanji for 'car', I was seeing the following words (see below) a lot: 自動車x除x. I read this as "automatic vehicle blah blah" - and for some odd reason I started thinking about those automated parking lots in Japan, where you drive onto a platform, and that takes your car away in a space-efficient manner. When you return for your car, you select the bay number, and it comes out again, almost like a vending machine :-) So I had assumed the sign below made reference to there being one of those automated parking bays being in the vicinity - only to discover that it's not meant to imply 'automatic car-park', but rather just 'car-something'. (I'm sure the above paragraph is confusing to you, the reader. Please treat it as a stream-of-consciousness description of little import.)

Conclusion? Learning to read Chinese has use even outside the Chinese-speaking countries. It was fun to see that for myself.

If you know of other differences or similarities between between Chinese and Japanese, please drop a note for us below. And if you don't, then pretend you do and just make something up!

Life Sentences - a new series

2010-07-08T07:48:00.001+01:00

This is the first part of a new series about sentences in Mandarin Chinese.

For a few months now, I have been on a new journey in my Mandarin learning. The previous one was working through Heisig & Richardson's first book (simplified or traditional, affiliated links) on learning how to read and write Chinese. I made it through 1500 characters in about 3-4 months, and I had great support from all of you as I did so.

But now being able to read & write characters, and having learned a whole bunch of compound words (through flashcards), I have extended this into understanding how Mandarin sentences are constructed. In my opinion, this is the least intuitive part of learning Chinese, and it's what keeps me from having coversations which flow as smoothly as I'd like.

Don't believe people who tell you that Mandarin is the same as English: subject-verb-object. I mean, it is. Kinda.

The problem is that when you first get past "I drink beer" (我喝啤酒, wǒ hē píjiǔ) (subject-verb-object, in both cases), things get a bit fuzzy and non-intuitive. But once you've got a feel for Chinese sentences, it starts to come back into focus, and you realise that to a large degree (again!) it is S-V-O.

Just to show you what I mean about this being non-intuitive, take a look at the following sentences, which are arranged as follows:
   English
   Simplified Chinese
   Traditional Chinese
   Pinyin
   Literal translation

S1. What should I give him as a gift?
我该送什么礼物给他?
我該送什麼禮物給他?
wǒ gāi sòng shénme lǐwù gěi tā?
(I) (should) (give) (what gift) (give him)?

S2. She enjoys sharing her experience of learning the Chinese language.
她很喜歡跟別人分享她學習中文的經驗｡
她很喜欢跟别人分享她学习中文的经验｡
Tā hěn xǐhuan gēn biérén fēnxiǎng tā xuéxí Zhōngwén de jīngyàn.
(she) (very likes) (with others) (share) (her) (study Chinese)'s (experience).

S3. People who want a tattoo must go to a proper tatto parlour.
要文身的人, 必须去专业的文身店｡
要文身的人, 必須去專業的文身店｡
yào wénshēn de rén, bìxū qù zhuānyè de wénshēn diàn.
(want tattoo)'s (people), (must) (go to) (professional)'s (tattoo parlour)

Certainly not intuitive, but definitely learnable.

The purpose of this series is to get you as quickly from the "newbie S-V-O" to the "more advanced S-V-O" phase, without getting too stuck in the middle. And this is as much to document my learning for myself, as it is to share my learning for your benefit.

To make sure you don't miss out, ensure you subscribe to Mandarin Segments. I look forward to your active participation.

Copyright acknowledgement: Over time I have collected a variety of sentences, and loaded them into my flashcard system. By this stage, I no longer have any idea where they came from. Some are of my own construction, or from friends who have emailed or instant-messaged me. Others have been copied from websites along the way. To make sure I give credit where due, the following sites are the most likely external sources:
   About Mandarin
   JuKuu
   iChaCha
   Engkoo
   Bing Search
   20,000 Mandarin Sentences
   Nciku Dictionary
   ChinesePod
   Popup Chinese
   Collins (paper) dictionary

Articles in the Life Sentences series so far:

Getting Sentenced in Mandarin: where to get sample sentences

To see all posts in the "Life Sentences" series, click here.

I was Chinese for 1.5 minutes today ...

2010-06-16T01:01:00.000+01:00

I had lunch today with a friend from New York. He knows I'm learning Mandarin, so he got his one work colleague - a Chinese person - to teach him a couple of phrases before coming to London. The dialogue went roughly like this ...

NY: This is the phrase I learned ...
Greg: Go ahead.
NY: wǒ shì huàn héchà
Greg: Uhm ...

So in my mind, I'm trying to work out what he said. And the thoughts are buzzing through my head ...

The sentence clearly begins with "I am" (wǒ shì) - I can hear that.
Next is huàn, which sounds like 换 (change/exchange). There are probably other versions of huàn, but right now I can't think of others. If I can work out the rest of the sentence, then maybe this part will make more sense. I'll come back to it ...
What on earth is héchà? I've seen a few words lately that begin with 合 (join/together/...), like 合适 (héshì=suitable), 合资 (hézī= joint venture), but what is héchà??
No, I really can't work out what he said. Let me ask him ...

Greg: Uhm, sorry. I give up. What are you saying?
NY: wǒ shì huàn héchà ...

(Dear readers of Mandarin Segments, have you worked it out yet?)

NY: "I like to drink tea."
Greg: Oh ... you mean "wǒ xǐhuan hē chá" !
NY: Yes, that's what I said.
Greg: !!!

And this, ladies & gentlemen, is the moment when I experienced how Chinese people must feel when foreigners speak to them in Chinese. The words are wrong. The tones are wrong. And they (just like me) have no idea what is being said.

But I was flattered that he had bothered to memorise a short phrase for me, and it led onto an interesting conversation about tones.

And you know what? It's not so bad to be Chinese and hear a foreigner make mistakes when trying to speak Chinese. Why was I so nervous to try in the beginning?

You're not nervous, are you? I can say for sure, having been Chinese for 1.5 minutes, that you have nothing to be nervous about!

You're welcome to leave comments in English, but for fun, why don't you leave comments in Chinese - whether using hanzi or pinyin? Keep it as simple as you like, and take a risk. How many of you will dare?

Quickies don't work for me

2010-06-10T07:00:00.039+01:00

I recently got back from two weeks in China (having visited Yangshuo, Guilin and Beijing), and I wanted to share a quick observation about my ability to interact with people in Mandarin.

Am I the only one who experiences this? I'd love to hear from you - either way - so please leave a quick comment below.

Basically, when I have a conversation which lasts more than a few minutes, I have a relatively high success rate: I can understand them, they can understand me, and we can cover a decent range of topics. But when the conversation is just a quick one - one of us asking a question and the other required to answer - the success rate is definitely not as good.

For example:

I might ask someone for directions - and they reply back to me with a series of rapid sentences which I just don't get. Sure, I hear words like "qiánmiàn" (forwards), "yòubian" (on your right) and "ránhòu" (thereafter) ... but it's too much too quickly, and I invariably have to ask them to repeat themselves more slowly.
Interestingly, when I first engage them in a short-ish conversation first, and so give them the opportunity to gauge my vocab and listening-skills, then I have a much greater success rate in understanding the directions which I then ask for - because they will have calibrated to my level.
Similarly, when I enter a shop, and the assistant comes up to me and speaks a few sentences - I often have no idea what they're saying. Again, too much, too fast. It might be something as simply as "Thanks for popping in. We've got some great special offers, but I'll leave you to look around yourself for a while, and then when you're ready please come speak to me again." Or maybe they're just asking me not to touch anything because I might break it.
Also, when getting into a taxi (especially in Beijing) and telling the driver where I want to go, I guess his assumption is that I can speak Chinese well - because they then launch into a one minute speech, which usually goes right over my head. (When I tell them that I didn't understand, usually the younger drivers will try again more slowly, probably using simpler language, while the older drivers either tend to say it again just as fast, or they simply shrug and remain silent.)

Is there a moral to this story? Probably - I can think of a few. But why don't you take a moment, think about what this means to you in relation to your own Mandarin studies, and then leave a comment for other readers.

The two most common mistakes of Mandarin podcasters

2010-06-03T00:57:00.001+01:00

I listen to Chinese podcasts to learn Chinese, and I accept it's perhaps a little off-colour to be commenting on their English. But there are two very common mistakes I hear these podcasters make - which (oddly) seems to be as common with the native-English podcasters as with the Chinese - and I really need to get this off my chest.

1. pronunciation
The word is "proNUNciation", and not "proNOUNciation". I know it's a little confusing because the verb is "proNOUNce", but when it becomes a noun it loses the "O". Yes, the spelling actually changes. Given that this word is often heard on language-tuition podcasts, this mistake occurs regularly.

(And if you don't believe me, look it up in a dictionary :-)

2. mnemonic
Again, this word is commonly used, and often pronounced incorrectly. The correct phonetic pronunciation (proNUNciation, BTW) is "NE-mon-ic". It is not "NOO-mon-ic". Maybe you're thinking of a word like "pneumatic", which does indeed begin with "NOO-...". But not this one.

(And if you don't believe me ... )

There, I've said it. I feel better now. Thanks for listening. (And if you can think of a mnemonic for getting the pronunciation of "pronunciation" correct, let us know :-)

Happy Birthday, Mandarin Segments!

2010-05-30T01:00:00.021+01:00

Mandarin Segments is 1 today!

Happy birthday!
生日快乐!
shēngrìkuàilè!

During the last year, I have posted 63 articles
There have been hundreds of comments left on this blog
According to Feedburner, I have many hundreds of subscribers (and this excludes all potential subscribers from China, because BlogSpot remains blocked there)
I have had around 10,000 unique visitors, according to StatCounter
My monthly visitor count has grown consistently over the last year.

A special thanks to you, the readers. Thanks for reading the articles, for leaving comments, and for sending me emails.

If you have any special requests for the coming year, please let a comment below ...

Mandarin is not "antidisestablishmentarian"

2010-05-27T08:28:00.001+01:00

This article answers a question that most of you have been thinking about since you started learning Chinese: How does Mandarin link together the following: Mary Poppins, long English words, mermaids, and total indifference??

I took a huge amount of pride as a child being able to say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and in later years my long-word-of-choice was antidisestablishmentarianism. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what either of them meant, but because of the nature of the English language, I'm now able to note the following:

antidisestablishmentarianism:

   anti-X --> against or opposite to X
   dis-X --> against or opposite to X
   X-ment --> generally makes a noun out of X
   X-arian --> having a nature of X
   X-ism --> the system of X

Putting it all together we are not surprised to see that the dictionary provides the following definition: "opposition to the belief that there should no longer be an official church in a country". Other than the church referenc, it's quite logical.

But Mandarin doesn't always work that way. And this is part of the reason, I suspect, that so many Westerners have difficulty learning the language. (In other words, sometimes you have to learn something, and not just rely on intuitive extrapolation to guess it.)

Of course, you do get words like 'diving' (跳水, tiàoshuǐ, literally: 'jump water'), 'mermaid' (美人鱼, měirényú, literally: pretty person fish) and 'chameleon' (变色龙, biàn sè lóng, literally: change colour dragon) (see this great blog for more unusual examples) - words which are neatly "built up" out of their components. But below is an example I was thinking about recently which demonstrates my point:

   无 (wú): not / without / un-
   所 (suǒ): place / actually
   谓 (wèi): to speak / to name / meaning

Our first attempt is to piece together 所 and 谓 - which gives us (according to the dictionary)
   所谓 (suǒwèi): so-called

It is not impossible to reverse-engineer using the definitions above ("actually" & "to name"), but if you hadn't learned the word already, you're probably unlikely to guess its meaning. That's OK - we see this a lot in Chinese.

But the next step is simply to put the "not" in front of 所谓. This should be straight forward, and I would expect the word to mean something like "not so-called". Right? But instead we get:
   无所谓 (wúsuǒwèi): to be indifferent / no matter

What?

Sorry, but even knowing the meaning of all three characters and knowing the meaning of the "meaty" part of the word, there is no way I would guess it has this definition.

This is not an excuse not to learn Mandarin. It certainly doesn't prove that Mandarin is impossible. It merely means that sometimes you have to go past the 'intuitive' - and just learn it.

If you have words that you find non-intuititive, please mention them in the comments below. I'd also love to hear from some of you who have never commented to MandarinSegments before ...

The taxi driver who taught me everything

2010-05-24T00:20:00.000+01:00

During my recent trip to China, I spent 40 minutes in a taxi to Guilin Airport, and I got an important perspective on language learning - both a kick up the butt and a gentle pat on the head. (No, that was me doing it to myself - not the taxi driver!)

The conversation started off well, and we spoke (in Mandarin) about language learning, working in different countries, the most interesting things I did in Guilin, and so on. I felt good, I understood what he was saying, and was able to communicate my thoughts to him. This lasted about 20 minutes.

Then the conversation moved on to traffic-related topics. We were still doing fine while talking about traffic jams, dangerous driving, accidents, injuries vs deaths, and so on. But it started to go wrong at the time when he was trying to say "driver's licence" - a word I did not know. Eventually he showed me his, I said the closest word I could think of (证书, zhèngshū, certificate/credentials) to confirm.

He agreed, and we were on track again.

But not for long.

At this point I really wasn't following him anymore, and I spent a fair amount of time saying 'ting bu dong' ("I don't understand what you're saying"). My mind started to wonder, and I started thinking about what the various English words that might be relevant here ...

roadworks, tar, pedestrians (yup I know that one), diversions, petrol (know this one too), oil (again), accelerator, brakes, parking (ting che), headlamps (I can take a guess this one), toll gates & toll fees (words that probably end in 'men' and 'fei') ...

This reminded me that to truly become fluent in a language, there really are a lot of words you need to know - there are so many words I don't know, even about cars & traffic (which is just one topic out of millions). So many more.

For a while there I became disheartened. At that stage I started talking to the taxi driver again, and he was saying that one day he would want to learn English too. And I realised that whatever language you learn, you would have to learn all these words.

Sometimes I just find myself convinced that Mandarin is ridiculously difficult, and it would be so easy if I were learning another language. But of course that's not true. Ultimately, if you're learning a new language you have to learn lots of words, sayings, and sentence structures.

So stop complaining and just get on with it.

How committed are you to your studies? How many new words did you learn today? And in the last month?

How to subscribe to Mandarin Segments (for free!)

2010-05-19T09:00:00.001+01:00

Are you already subscribed to this blog, thus getting updates automatically? (Or do you have to remember to remember to visit MandarinSegments.com on a regular basis?)

Make it easy on yourself, show an additional level of commitment to your Mandarin studies, and have the updates delivered to you automatically. This is especially true for any series on this blog - where you don't want to miss an article.

You have various options:

this is the raw RSS feed - for however you manage your usual updates
subscribe using your existing feed reader (for example, if you use Gmail, MyYahoo, Newsgator, etc.)
have new articles emailed to you as soon as they're published here.

Remember that the above methods will only give you access to the main article. There are usually excellent contributions from other readers, which will definitely add to your understanding of the topic. So once you've got the article update, make sure you go to the online version too - to read their comments, or perhaps to leave your own.

Finally, you can always follow me on Twitter (@MandarinSx), where I will mention when a new article has been published, and provide other updates along the way.

The "sleeping cats" guide to pinyin pronunciation

2010-05-15T13:58:00.000+01:00

How much does pinyin confuse you? Which is the worst part for you?

In this short post, I show how "cats & zeds" will help you overcome a common pronuncation mistake. (PS. I know Americans say "zee" not "zed" - but for this to work, pretend you don't.)

Pinyin is the system which provides a method for pronouncing the Chinese characters using a Roman alphabet (and tone marks). It was developed by the Chinese for the Chinese - and let's face it, although it's the system we use in the West, if Westerners had designed it, I think we would have used different letters to represent the different sounds.

c is pronounced "ts", z is "dz", zh is like "j", x is "sh" (kinda) ... sigh.

For me, the parts I got wrong in the beginning were mainly 'c' and 'z', and even today I find myself stumbling over words like "cúnzài" (存在 - to exist) when I talk too fast for my brain.

You might have a similar problem. In fact, you might not even realise you have the problem!

For example, when I meet other students of Mandarin in London, and I listen to sentences like "I live in London" (wǒ zhù zài Lúndūn), the 'zai' is often pronounced 'tsai' and not 'dzai' - so I know I'm not the only one.

Perhaps this might help ...
    cats & zeds
    [c]a[ts] & [z]e[dz]
    c is prounced 'ts' & z is pronounced 'dz'

Test yourself - how do you pronounce 汉字 (Hànzì - Chinese character), 现在 (xiànzài - now), 菜单 (càidān - menu), 词典 (cídiǎn - dictionary)?

So cúnzài would (phonetically) be [ts]un-[dz]ai. Got it?
Cats & Zeds. Got it?

Good.

Chinese words which contain letters?

2010-04-11T23:13:00.000+01:00

I remember doing a ChinesePod (affiliated link) lesson about going Dutch (i.e. splitting the bill), and I was surprised to find out that the Mandarin word for this is "AA zhì" (AA制).

Yes, honestly - the actual Mandarin word contains the letters "AA". Very odd. (You can research why this is, and what the AA stands for, if you want ... there are plenty of different opinions out there.)

So I got to wondering ... what other Mandarin words contain English letters? (And I'm not referring to 'cheats' like the word 'DVD'.) So I compiled a list of some words, but would really appreciate any additional suggestions you might have. So leave us a comment with others that you know ...

   AA zhì (AA制): going Dutch / splitting the bill
   A piàn (A片): adult movie / porn film
   B chāo (B超 - or 'B型超声' in full): type-B ultrasound
   BP jī (BP 机): beeper
   kǎlā OK (卡拉 OK): karaoke
   M (M): menstruation (as in: 你有M吗?)
   niú B (牛B): awesome / cocky
   N xíng bàndǎotǐ (N型半导体): N-type semiconductor
   N zhǒng (N种): n-type (anyone know what this one is?)
   T xù (T恤): t-shirt
   X guāng (X光): X-ray

FYI creating this list wasn't as easy as ABC. i.e. It took some effort. But it's now A-OK (AFAIK). So TTFN. (And of course I'll BRB.) OK?

A (flowery) connection between Chinese & English

2010-04-05T00:20:00.000+01:00

There are a number of reasons why I find learning Mandarin a bigger challenge than the other languages I have learned. Basically, Mandarin and English are just so damn different.

There is almost no overlap in how words sound in English vs Mandarin. (Just open up a Spanish-English dictionary to a random page, and see how much similarity there is!). Also, sentence construction is very different.

And yet, every now and then, I come across something which links the two languages, but it is difficult to explain how that came about.

I'm not referring to words like 'microphone' (麦克风) - which is pronounced "màikèfēng" - this was intentionally created as a loanword from English.   No, I'm talking about something odder.

Take, for example, the word 花 (huā) which means 'flower'.

It has another meaning, and that is "to spend" - which I first heard in a ChinesePod* lesson. In English, we talk about "spending time" or "spending money". And this is the interesting thing ... in Chinese, when using the word 花 (huā) - is is also used both for spending time and for spending money.

For example:

   Spend your money where it's needed most
   钱要花在刀口上
   qián yào huā zài dāokǒu shàng

   Spend a lot of time
   很花时间
   hěn huā shíjiān

This realisation hasn't improved my Mandarin learning - oddities like this aren't common enough to rely on. However, by the time you've finished reading this, you'll probably never forget: 花 (huā) means flower, to spend time, or to spend money.

If you're feeling brave, can you work out for yourself how to say "I spent a bit of time deciding which flower to spend my money on". My version** (with Yen's support) appears below.

_____________________

* affiliated link
** 我花了一些时间决定花钱买哪种花

If I lived in Asia ...

2010-04-03T03:21:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from two weeks in Asia - and without a doubt my Mandarin has improved during that time. It does so every time I go - and although some of the benefits fade over time, other benefits are retained.

So I got wondering ... how much better would my Chinese be if I actually lived in Asia?

Now before I begin, you've probably already come to a conclusion yourself. You've probably convinced yourself that your Chinese would also improve if you lived in Asia. But don't be so sure. Let me explain ...

In support of My Asian Explosion

Firstly, I need to point out that I was in Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan & Singapore) on business. I most certainly cannot hold meetings in Mandarin - the financial issues I talk about are way beyond my knowledge. Additionally, some of my colleagues at these meetings come from different countries and so don't necessarily speak Mandarin. This means a very large proportion of my time was spent talking English - so the benefits I'm about to describe do not come from huge amounts of talking Mandarin - there are actually more subtle benefits.

a. constant exposure

Wherever, I looked, there were signs, menus, adverts, papers, magazines, business cards, ... I couldn't help myself. I would practise my reading, try work out what signs meant, test my ability to recall my Heisig-stories, and so on. Some characters, for example, kept coming up - but I couldn't recall the meaning. So I looked them up, and now remember them clearly because of how often I saw them.

b. bilingual signs

All over the place, there were signs which had both hanzi and English - which is a neat way to learn new words, particularly because they're actually being used in context. At train stations, the room-service menu ... everywhere. Learn words just by opening your eyes!

c. transliterations

The above point was about learning the meaning of certain hanzi. However, in this case, it was useful to look at road signs, where I could see what characters were being used to create similar-sounding words with hanzi. Using Mandarin pronunciation, the above sign (告士打) is pronounced "gào shì dǎ". Not quite the same, but it provides a bit of a reminder of how certain characters are pronounced.

d. self-learn new words

In this case, I knew the first two hanzi spell "Wanchai" - so skip those. Now I had to work out 法院 (fǎyuàn). I already knew that the word 法定 (fǎdìng) meant legal/rightful, and that 医院 (yīyuàn) means hospital. So it didn't take a genius to work out that 法院 must relate to a place of law i.e. law courts. The English writing above confirmed my guess. This kind of self-learning words came up many more times, like 目的地 = purpose place = 'destination'.

e. speaking & listening
Of course, it isn't just exposure to written Chinese - there were plenty of opportunites to practise my listening & speaking skills. At the hotel there were doormen/women (in Taipei, the one woman was so impressed I could speak Chinese, she rushed off to get me a cup of tea to drink while I was checking in), elevator & train announcements, waiters & waitresses, and people sitting at the table next to me (like the two Chinese women where one was saying that the other's mother must have had an affair!).

e. general revision
And of course, even if I see words that I already know, by seeing them over & over again, I move from 'see-interpret-understand' to 'see-understand'. This is something I recently wrote about here.

My Asian Explosion might never happen

Ultimately, it looks like it's all about exposure, right? And if I lived in Asia, my Chinese would be much better, right? And all I have to do is move to Asia, and my Chinese will improve, right?

Hmmm, maybe.

But maybe not. When I stop to think about it, I realised there are a few flaws in my thinking ...

a. There are plenty of foreigners who live in Asia, who can't speak more than a dozen words of Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean, or ...). That proves having access to all the above "benefits" is only part of the deal - you actually have to access this all to get better.

This comes down to motivation, which I've written about here.

b. Is it really so difficult to increase my exposure to Chinese material? Sure, if I'm in a taxi in Taiwan, I can see lots of signs outside to practise my reading skills. But if I were motivated enough, wouldn't I carry around a printout from a Chinese website, or a Chinese book, or a copy of Heisig?

I already listen to quite a lot of Mandarin music, I plug into Chinese podcasts when I travel, I have Chinese fridge magnets (more about this in another article), and I have a few language exchange partners which I meet every now and then. I have a Chinese cartoon book next to my bed, and a few Mandarin movies.

So I guess I've already partly created a Mandarin environment. But I could do more. Yes, if "living in Asia" were the key to improving, I could easily make an effort to artificially create an Asian-like environment.

This comes down to motivation, which I've written about here.

Conclusion
So although my Mandarin skills do improve when I'm in Asia, it's not just about exposure, but it's about doing something with that exposure. And extending that idea, if it's my motivation that allows me to do something, then with the right motivation I really should be able to increase my exposure - even here in London - and so boost my Mandarin learning.

Like so much in life, it comes down to motivation.

Is there something you can do now, to improve your learning? Listen to a podcast, learn a few words, label objects around your home in Chinese, subscribe to this blog. And don't forget to enjoy yourself.

In the meantime, leave us a comment ... what do you do to increase your exposure to Chinese?

Back from Asia ...

2010-03-30T01:18:00.000+01:00

Hi all

Well, I'm back from Asia - having spent the last couple of weeks in Hong Kong, Taipei & Singapore on business.

On the right here you can see a picture of me at a late-night Pearl Bubble Tea place (珍珠奶茶) (zhēnzhūnǎichá) in Taipei, near the main station. Medicinal purposes only, of course. :-)

I made some purchases while out there, including two Taiwanese TV series, a couple of Chinese movies, some Mandarin music, and a few cartoon books in simplified Chinese. I can't wait to get the time to start working (playing?) through them.

Ten months ago I came back from a business trip to China, unable to read any Chinese, and with a much more basic conversational skill. Being there at the time really gave me the incentive to boost my learning, which is why, upon my return, I started actively using flashcards, looking for a method to learn to read & write (I chose Heisig) ... and I started this blog.

And now I am pleased to see that the difference in my skill level was really obvious. I could read lots of the signs (although knowing the individual characters didn't always help me work out what it actually meant!) and my conversations were very much more, uhm, substantial. I'm very pleased.

And for the record - I've not been much of a student. I've only put in about 30-45 minutes a day, most of which is just listening to podcasts while travelling to and from work. But I was at least consistent.

Also, being in the environment, I was thinking lots about learning Chinese - and I drafted the skeleton of a number of articles which I intend to fully write up over the next couple of months.

I'd love you to follow along, so make sure you're subscribed - using the usual RSS feed, via email, or even on Twitter.

Speak soon
Greg

Something happened to my Mandarin!

2010-03-01T23:08:00.000Z

Have you seen it too?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed something has changed in my Mandarin. I'm focusing here on the difference between (mentally) translating, and (intellectually) understanding.

I would love to be able to tell you that I woke up one morning and discovered I was perfectly fluent - but that's not true. And I don't know exactly when it happened, but given the level of the material & discussion partners I've been working with lately, I can see signs of it now.

Basically, I'm understanding without understanding. Bruce Lee would have been proud of this statement ("The art of fighting, without fighting"), but it makes sense if you think about it ...

I'm sure you know what it's like in your Mandarin world too ... when someone says 你好 (nǐhǎo) to you, you probably don't have translate nǐhǎo='Hello' (thinks: "Ah, they're saying hello to me. What friendly people."). You just know they mean 'hello' and you respond to that.

OK, so in recent months I've mainly been listening to elementary-level podcasts (ChinesePod equivalent), and I could understand most of what I heard. The conversation was at a slow enough level that I could pretty much translate sentences, word-by-word, and understand it all as I went along.

But my language partners have been speaking a bit faster to me, and I've been listening to intermediate-level podcasts, and although it's too fast for me to be able to mentally translate word-by-word, I still find that I'm reaching the end of the conversation with a rough idea of what I'm hearing.

Of course, there are plenty of cases where I can understand (without translating) most of the sentence, but because I don't get the main word, I don't fully know what the sentence actually means. But I still get enough to know that I'm on the right track.

So I'm responding to this by trying to shut down my conscious mind, and just listen (without trying to translate). And although it's still managing to evade me, I have noticed I am definitely operating at a higher level.

Something has definitely happened.

Have you experiened something similar? Do you remember the first time you understood what someone was saying to you even though you didn't seem to hear the words they were using? Or is this something you're still waiting for? Please leave a comment - I'd love to hear from you.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore ... here I come in March

2010-02-23T08:20:00.000Z

In the second half of March I will be visiting Hong Kong, Taipei & Singapore on business.

I'm guessing that I'll only be in those cities for about 3 days each - but I'm hoping I'll have a little bit of spare time in the evenings, or weekends (depending where I am) to meet up with some of you.

So if you live there, and you'd like to meet up, please drop me a note at the following address (I'm sure you can work it out):

greg ((at)) Mandarin Segments ((dot)) com

I look forward to meeting some of you.
Greg

Heisig - wherefore art thou now?

2010-02-19T00:35:00.000Z

Nearly three months ago, I announced that I had finished working my way through Heisig's "Book 1" on learning to read & write the first 1500 characters Chinese characters. I just wanted to update you on what I've been doing since them in terms of reading/writing.

Whether you're interested because deep down inside you're a voyeur, or because you're curious what may be in store for you when you finish book 1, please keep reading ...

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

The observations are quite simple:

I have done almost no revision using the Heisig book (although I did try for the first week after completing the book). I have not used any Heisig flashcards either.
I did become increasingly aware, while doing Heisig, of the importance of knowing lots of compound words, and have since put lots of effort into that - instead of revising Heisig.
I do try to read some tweets in Chinese, the odd Chinese website, and some Chinese cartoon & children's books I bought a few months ago.
Of the 1500 hanzi that I learned, I would guess that I know 500 really well so that I can read them without having to work out what it means, 500 I have to work out using the Heisig image system, and 500 I have probably forgotten and will have to re-learn (although that will be pretty quick I'm sure).

So basically, there has been a "polarisation" of those 1500 characters. Some of the characters have become increasingly firmly embedded, and others have faded away.

Of course I'm disappointed to have forgotten anything at all, but sometimes that's the reality of living in the Real World (tm) - and not having enough time to do what you want. However, don't confuse forgetting some characters with having wasted my time.

This has not been a waste of time. In fact, my time with Heisig still feels like a massive success.

I am now very comfortable using instant chat with my Chinese friends (Skype, QQ, Sametime), communicating only in hanzi. There is very little more satisfying for me at the moment than closing down a Skype window, for example, staring at dozens of lines of pure Chinese characters. (Even now, a little self-satisfied shiver runs down my spine :-)

I'm sure I will spend time with Heisig Book 1 in future, actively revising. I just don't have time. Bit by bit, when I come across hanzi I don't recognise, I will look them up, remember the Heisig image, and they will become firmly embedded too.

And eventually, I'll take up Book 2. (Although at this rate, I might be ready for Book 2 before Book 2 is ready for me!)

A Mandarin Moment

2010-01-24T11:38:00.001Z

Hang on a sec', can I get your help quickly? Just hold this for a moment ... thanks, now take a quick look.

These are really common English phrases, and it's quite useful (nay, very useful) to be able to say it in Mandarin. Fortunately, in true WordPack style, there is a very familiar pattern that links these, and other similar phrases.

The pattern is: 一下

yí xià: Literally this means "one down", but the dictionary translations look more like: one time / once / in a while / all of a sudden / give it a go (when used after a verb).

Here are some of the more common phrases that you'll hear, and certainly ones that you're very likely to use. If you're a little beyond beginner, then you probably already know most of the opening hanzi, in which case the phrases will be really easy to remember.

看一下: kàn yíxià: take a quick look
等一下: děng yíxià: wait a moment
让一下: ràng yíxià: literally this is "yield a moment", but it's used in the context of, for example, "Excuse me, can I get past you?"
拿一下: ná yíxià: hold this for a second
挑一下: tiāo yíxià: usually it's like "let me take my time to choose" (literally: choose a moment)

Now that you've got these phrases sorted, take a moment ...

Volunteering in China - charitable projects

2010-01-22T00:27:00.000Z

Hi all

I have two trips planned to Asia in March & May (and another to Japan in July, but we'll skip that since this is a Mandarin blog :-) ... and I am looking for your input. Please.

One of the things I'd like to do while in China is volunteer on some kind of charitable project for a week or so. I've done some research, and found some ideas - but perhaps you know of others?

Although I'd like to pretend that my interests are purely altruistic, there is of course a (slightly) selfish side. This would expose me to a different type of China experience, and perhaps give me an opportunity to practice my Mandarin in a non foreigner-in-big-city kind of way!

These are some of the ideas I've come across so far, but would really appreciate it if you could leave comments with other ideas, websites or suggestions.

Volunteer teaching in Beijing

This is organised by Gap Year in Asia, and is my most likely option at the moment. You can start at any date, and assignments last from 1 week to 12 weeks. This includes a choice (or mix) of working at the following places: Orphanage, Charity for the Disabled, School for Poor Children, Project for the Children of Convicts, School for Disabled Children, Charity for Autistic Children. Activities would include teaching English, caring for children, working with disabled children.

Friends of Dulwich College, Beijing

The charity work done by this organisation covers a foster home, a life centre for disadvantaged children, care for children, and Harmony outreach. Their site talks about projects you can work on, but it also seems that you can volunteer on work which simply involves email address. Good for non-residents of China?

Bean in Shanghai

According to the BEAN website, "BEAN is a networking, volunteering, and social group for young professionals in Shanghai. It affords many awesome opportunities for busy, young professionals to network, socialize, and make a difference." Although I think what they do is a great idea, it seems to be more short-project based - ideal for people already living in Shanhai.

Compassion for Migrant Children

This group also takes on volunteers, but I get the sense they're looking for people who might be happy to volunteer on an ongoing basis (I guess if you live in China) - rather than me who is looking for something to last about a week.

The Library Project

Their website talks about ways you could volunteer - but again, this appears to be more of an ongoing commitment rather than just spending a week with them.

SOS Children's Villages

This is the China branch of their international network. Interestingly, they state on their website that they prefer not to use short-term volunteers - because they believe the children benefit more from long-term relationship with their teachers and helpers. For those who don't have time, you could always sponsor a child.

Chinese Children Orphan Sponsorship

If sponsoring a child is your preference, this is organised by Chinese Children Adoption International, where you could sponsor a children for as little as $40 a month.

Western Academy of Beijing

In the charity section of their website, they list the details of about a dozen charities. As far as I can tell, there don't appear to be any volunteer projects available - but plenty of opportunities to donate money to a cause that means something to you.

I was convinced than when I trawled through the Net there would be so many options to volunteer on projects - and yet, as you can see, I'm struggling to find many choices.

So if you know of projects that might be of interest, or you know of someone who might know of projects of interest, please leave a comment. I'd love to help.

Greg

New Year Resolution: learn to speak Mandarin Chinese

2010-01-19T00:54:00.002Z

OK, so here's the deal. What if you were offered $1 million dollars to learn to speak Chinese?

It's a simple challenge. As soon as you can speak Chinese at the level of the average school-leaver, you'd get your money. (This is hypothetical situation, please don't send me an invoice.)

Do you think that, before you went to bed tonight, you'd learn 10 more words? And maybe you'd revise yesterday's words too? Do you think, if getting a language-exchange partner would get you to your million dollars one year sooner, that you'd make the effort to find someone you could converse with?

Would you listen to more podcasts? Use flashcards more? Watch more Chinese-language movies?

Forgive me for being presumptious ... but of course you would!

What you do, and Why you do it

There are two aspects to achieving any goal: (1) the technique behind what you're learning, and (2) the motivation to keep on applying that technique.

The reality for most people, however, is they focus on the technique - and they ignore the requisite motivation. And then they fail. Bummer.

Head-bangers

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that you get all psyched up, banging your head against the wall, shouting, "Yes, dammit yes. I can do thisssssss!!"

But if you go back to the million dollars example, I think we all know that if there was enough resting on it, you'd find the time, you'd make the effort. And your excuses about how hard Chinese is, and how little time you have, would be forgotten as you work your brains out to get your reward.

But of course you don't need to have a million dollars at the finish line. Sadly, no-one has offered to pay me money once I'm fluent in Chinese - and yet here I am, 00:50 on a Monday night (uhm, Tuesday morning) blogging about learning Mandarin, thinking about what works and what doesn't work.

Make it happen

So spend a little time trying to work out why you're learning (or going to learn) Chinese.

But don't be lazy - don't wait for the inspiration. Try to create the inspiration. Get excited about travelling to China, or conversing with Chinese people in your local area.

And if you really think it's better to focus on learning, and to not worry about your motivations, then ask yourself .... who is going to become fluent first? Will it be the person who only has access to one podcast series, one textbook and one dictionary (but who has a million bucks resting on fluency)? Or will it be the person who had access to lots of podcasts, many textbooks, medical research papers into the optimal way to memorise lists - but no real interest in becoming fluent?

Motivation

So some of you are reading this post, rolling your eye-balls, and wondering if I've lost the plot. But others of you are (I hope) are going to take a little time to examine your own motivations.

If you're already learning Chinese, what got you motivated in the beginning? And what excites you now? Are there things you could do to re-ignite the flame?

And if you're new, take a moment to work out why you've set yourself the goal of learning Chinese. It really doesn't make a difference whether it's a dumb reason - if it fires you up, then use it.

Perhaps rate yourself on these questions, on a scale of 1-10 ...

Do you want to know another language?
Are you embarrassed about only knowing one language? (Or two, or ...)
Would you like to be able to impress the cute girl/guy in Accounting because you can speak their native tongue?
How about aiming to impress your friends by ordering in Chinese, at a Chinese restaurant?
Would you like to travel China, speaking to the locals in their own language?
Would you like to make more friends? (There is no shortage of awesome Chinese people wherever you look.)
Or would you like to move to China because of the opportunities that country offers, but you'd like to be different to all those people who go there and hang out in their little communities without learning the local language, even after several years?
Is this just another challenge, because you're the kind of person who thrives off challenge and personal growth?

But don't take my word for it ...

Once you've read this post, there are two things you could do.

Quickly learn some Chinese words. You might start off by reading one of my WordPacks, and find 3-5 words you don't know - and learn then. It won't take more than a couple of minutes.
Do something else.

If $1 million were resting on it, you'd do #1. But I'm guessing you're probably going to opt for #2.

What more evidence do you need that - ultimately - motivation is everything?

Tasting your way around the world

2010-01-15T06:56:00.000Z

I recently wrote an article for Mango Languages with the above title.

Please pop in and have a read, and make sure you leave a comment if you've had similar (or better) experiences.

To whet your appetite for the article, here's a picture of me eating a chicken head in Beijing :-x

Greg

A Christmas Challenge!

2009-12-24T11:28:00.000Z

Firstly, I'd like to thank all the readers of Mandarin Segments for their support during the year. Blogging is fun, but really connecting with you all has been fantastic! I appreciate the time you take to read my posts, but I especially appreciate the time you take to leave comments, to disagree, and to engage me. 非常感谢!

And on the basis of your input, I'd like to pose a challenge to all of you ...

Although I spend a lot of time planning my articles, it's really the comments from readers that enhance the message that I'm trying to share, and that give other readers a wider perspective on the topic.

If you subscribe to Mandarin Segments through an RSS reader or through email, you might have the original post delivered to you, but you might not know about the comments that have subsequently been added. The same applies if you just link here from my Twitter account, without seeing any later input.

So I'd like to challenge you to go back an re-read some older posts, and catch up on the debate. Here are some suggestions as to what you might be interested to read (although feel free to read more widely than this) ...

Heisig - the experiment
Back in August I decided to learn to read and write Chinese. A few short months later I had learned 1500 characters from Heisig's "Remember the Simplified Hanzi, Book 1" (affiliated link) and I am now able to read basic texts quite well. Here are some of the key posts along the way:

Day 0: the start of the experiment
Day 6: stats on my early progress
Day 18: 500 characters: but what is hurting? and also: how much of a page can I read?
Day 46: 1000 characters - how is my learning?
Day 106: 1500 done!!

Some Controversial Posts

WordPacks - making it easier to learn Chinese

an introduction to WordPacks
eg. a Chinese paper trail
eg. Daily Dragons
a link to all WordPacks

And some fun ...

So check out the posts, read the comments, and please feel free to leave more comments. I'd love to hear from you!

In the meantime, I wish you all the best for the holiday season - and a fantastic new year.

Greg
London, England
24 December 2009

Daily Dragons

2009-12-19T23:50:00.003Z

Do you believe in dragons?

You might not know it, but you deal with dragons everyday. At least, you do if you speak Chinese.

This is another in my WordPack series, with this topic having been inspired by a post at the "Those crazy Chinese" blog. The goal of WordPacks is that, by linking these words together by a single theme, it makes it much easier to learn words. And if you're learning Chinese, let's face it, the more help you can get, the better.

The theme today is: dragons. (If you couldn't work that out from the title of the blog post then you really shouldn't be learning Chinese! :-)

The Simplified character for dragon is 龙 (and it is 龍 in traditional Chinese writing). Even if you're only learning Simplified, this is a good example of a character which you should also learn to recognise in Traditional - because it appears so often in the name of Chinese restaurants.

Daily Dragons

龙 : lóng:    dragon (also a common surname)
水龙头 : shuǐlóngtóu:    tap (water dragon head)
尼龙 : nílóng:    nylon (nun dragon!)
龙船 : lóngchuán:    Dragon boat
龙卷风 : lóngjuǎnfēng:    tornado, cyclone (dragon curl wind)
变色龙 : biànsèlóng:    chameleon (change colour dragon)

Dangerous Dragons

龙 : lóng:    dragon
恐龙 : kǒnglóng:    dinosaur (fear dragon)
霸王龙 : bàwánglóng:    Tyrannosaurus Rex (mighty king dragon)
翼龙 : yìlóng:    Pterodactyl (winged dragon)

Delicious Dragons

龙眼 : lóngyǎn:    dragon fruit (dragon eye)
龙虾 : lóngxiā:    lobster (dragon shrimp)
乌龙茶 : wūlóngchá:    Oolong tea (dark dragon tea)
小龙虾 : xiǎolóngxiā:    crayfish, langoustine (small dragon shrimp)

Dragons of Distinction

李小龙 :    Lǐ Xiǎolóng:    Bruce Lee's chinese names (Li small dragon)
成龙 :    Chéng Lóng:    (one of) Jackie Chan's chinese names (accomplish dragon)
九龙 :    Jiǔlóng:    Kowloon district of Hong Kong (nine dragons)

If you're a newbie, you should make sure that you can at least recognise 龙, and that you also remember the word: shuǐlóngtóu.   At elementary, at least know the above, plus all food references. At intermediate you probably know all of them.

Off you go ... go slay another dragon!

Do not scream!

2009-12-04T02:10:00.000Z

I only just noticed that a recent MandMx cartoon was sourced from a Mandarin Segments blogpost ...

Learn to Read & Write Chinese (done!)

2009-11-28T19:16:00.000Z

On 26 November I finished Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi, book 1". My last two dozen characters were done at 30,000 feet flying from London to Delhi.)

Just a few months ago, I had set myself the goal to learn to read & write Chinese, and I choose Heisig as the approach to follow. I did the first 94 characters in 5 days from their free PDF - so I started off feeling optimistic. However when the book arrived, it was thicker than I was expecting, which got me worried. This was going to take forever!

But it didn't take forever. Three and half months later, and it's done.

I've got plenty to share about where the journey has taken me (and where it has not taken me!), but I'm writing this post from Jaipur, India - so I'll take my time over a longer article when I get back.

First, some summary stats:

1500 characters in 106 days
this is about 14 characters a day
if I allow for the fact that during October I studied no new characters because of work pressure, I could argue it only took about 2.5 months, at about 20 characters a day
on average I spent 20-30 minutes a day learning to read & write Chinese, so I might guess that the total time investment was a mere 40 hours, including revision along the way
I'm guessing that my recall is about 80%+ (going from hanzi to keyword) and 70% (going from keyword to hanzi)
and even when I get a character wrong in my revision, when I look at the answer, it's almost never a total surprise - it was at the tip of my tongue.

Secondly, I know that this can't really said to be "done" - because there's plenty more revision to be done. After all, there's really no reason to be much below 100% recall. And of course, there still book 2. And beyond.

I'm also spending lots of time using flashcards to learn compound words - because without those "reading" is still only guessing at the meaning.

Thanks for all your support along the way, including comments and encouragement. There's a long way still to go, so hang around for the rest of the journey ...

They "ran" to the end of the word

2009-11-24T06:45:00.000Z

I have been so focused on learning to read & write Chinese, that I lost track of some of the fun stuff I was doing in Mandarin beforehand.

However, although I haven't provided any Wordpacks in Mandarin Segments for a while, I have actually been using them more and more often as I work my way through the first 1500 characters in Heisig's Book 1.

There has been one character that has been popping up quite often of late, which I think is really useful to know. Especially if you're learning Chinese :-)

The header image of today's Wordpack shows the hanzi for: rán. Dictionary definitions include: like this / thus / correct.

Aside: In Heisig's book it is defined as "sort of thing" - and the three primitives are 'flesh' (月), 'chihuahua' (犬) & 'cooking fire' (灬). The image I have created isn't exactly the same as his ... mine is centred around a hotdog - which can be thought of as the flesh of a small dog, on a cooking fire. It's not exactly what hotdog means - but it's the same 'sort of thing'.

And although the individual character's definition is very confusing (well, it is to me), you do see the word rán appearing in a number of common Chinese words, and so the goal of grouping them together into a Wordpack is to make it easier to memorise them and to recall them again in future.

当然    dāngrán:    Of course!
虽然    suīrán:    although
自然    zìrán:    natural / naturally
突然    tūrán:    sudden / unexpected
果然    guǒrán:    as expected
偶然    ǒurán:    incidentally / randomly

These are the ones I'm seeing most often. If you want to see a full list, check here for dozens more example where a word ends with rán.

If you're quite new to Mandarin, I would say that as a minimum you should learn dāngrán & suīrán.

Are there any others you think are common enough to be worth mentioning? Drop us a note to let us know, and even just to say hi.

Using Modern Art to Learn Chinese

2009-11-22T17:57:00.000Z

So I was sitting in the Tate Modern Art Gallery, staring at an abstract work by Henri Matisse. And the longer I stared at his "Yellow Curtain", the better my Chinese was getting. It's amazing - almost unbelievable, in fact.

Actually, it's totally unbelievable. It never happened that way. (And if you believe that it would work, you might be interested in a previous article called Learn to speak Mandarin fluently in 6 months.

But wait ...

Don't give up yet. In reality there is something about the way modern art is perceived by people that can improve how quickly you learn to read and write Chinese. In particular, I am referring to the Heisig method which allows you to use powerful visualisations that link the meaning of the word to the written components of the word which makes up the final character.

Some modern art is really abstract - in the picture above you can see a patch of yellow, and Matisse insists it's a yellow curtain. OK. I can live with that. And in fact, from now one, when I look at it ... I will think of a yellow curtain.

And other times you'll see just lines and blocks, which Leger has chosen to call "Railway Crossing". But this one is slightly different, because you might see little clues - like the sign with the arrow, and the concentric rings sign on the very left. For some people, especially people in France, this might be enough to trigger thoughts of a railway crossing.

And for people like me, I still don't get it. But I'll never forget the link again.

So if we take what we know about how artists can take an abstract image and allow it to create a special association; and if we use tricks like they do (for example, adding little Easter Eggs to the scene), we can greatly improve the way we memorise Chinese characters.

Seriously, but work with me on this ...

I've blogged lots about Heisig already, but there is enough of a base of people using this method that I'd like to share some other tricks I use to speed up my learning, and improve my retention.

You might want to fill in the gaps (if any) by starting off reading my first Heisig post, then my three month update, then all the articles in between.

In memorising nearly 1500 characters in under 4 months, my ability to visualise images or stories has improved. Some approaches have worked, other techniques have failed. And with so many characters, you get pretty fast feedback. After all, if you can't remember a word the next morning, something failed!

Clear & Distrinct

Nouns are easy to memorise - especially nouns whose primitives are nouns too. You put together a series of objects to create another object.

For example, 汤 (tāng) means 'soup'. It's made up of the primitives for 'water' and 'piglets'. Just picture a pot of boiling water where soup is being prepared, with screaming piglets trying to get out, and you have an image that you will not easily forget. Even if you want to! (Sorry.)

Abstract

But other words are much more difficult to visualise, and therefore I seem to forget them more easily. Over the last few months, I've found some tricks that seem to have worked really well.

Below you will find some examples of the imagery I have used. You don't need to use the same images, but you might find the approach I've developed for myself useful to you.

Examples

Peace (安)

"I wrote about this one in a previous Tips & Tricks article , but it's a good example for getting the ball rolling. 'Peace' is hard for me to imagine without putting flowers into the image - which would then interfere with images that use a 艹 radical. So I thought of "Peaceful Sleep" which is a mosquito repellant I used plenty as a child, which plugs into the wall. I tried not to break the first rule of keeping things simple, but so that it was still useful. So with 按 (finger ... peace) I picture a finger pressing on the Peaceful Sleep device. (I don't imagine it's hot to touch, or that it's being switched on - or anything else which might confuse the image)."

Great (伟)

The primitives which make up this word are 'person' and 'briar patch'. (As an aside, because you typically have 'people' in so many of your images, Heisig cleverly suggests that you imagine someone specific, someone who doesn't appear in previous images.)

It's very difficult (... for me) to visualise a person walking through a briar patch, and at the same time create the image of 'great'. What does 'great' look like? So instead I have included in my image that this person finds a 'grate' between the briars - and is excited. I know this represents 'great' and not 'grate' - and I've never forgotten the word.

Additionally, it prevents me getting confused with the word for 'grand' ...

Grand (雄)

We piece together 'by your side', 'elbow' & 'turkey'. My image is of someone standing on a GRANDstand, watching a game for example. This person is holding a 'turkey' (I always visualise roast turkey, but a live one is fine :-), and suddenly someone 'elbows' them in their 'side', and they drop the turkey, watching it bounce down the stairs of the GRANDstand.

Again, in my mind, it's clear that the word is 'grand' and not 'grandstand'.

Appearance (样)

Creating an image that means 'appearance' isn't easy for me - maybe you have a great approach? The way I pieced together the two primitives (tree & sheep), is to see a sheep in front of a tree, improving it's 'appearance'. It is looking in a mirror, putting on lipstick, and straightening out it's wool. This works for me to associate with a word as "woolly" as 'appearance'.

Endure (忍)

This is another word which might be a little hard to visualise - even though the primitives (blade & heart) are easy to picture. In my case, I picture someone tied in a chair. They are being tortured, with a blade threatening to plunge into their heart. But they are 'enduring' - and not revealing their secret.

If you had a different image, please drop us a note - yours might be better than mine.

Deliberately (故)

I mentioned in my general article about improving your visualisation skills, that naughty themes can really help. Here's a less graphic example.

The primitives are 'ancient' & 'taskmaster' ('taskmistress', actually). The image I have created for 'taskmistress' is a woman in S&M leather gear - and this is an easy-to-remember image that is used consistently throughout, because it appears often.

So for this word, I can see a young attractive taskmistress, and a very old woman in the same clothing. (Naturally both of them are holding whips, but don't read between the lines - and don't assume you know anything about me and my tastes :-) When the visitor chooses the older of the two, it's not just because the lighting is bad. The difference between these two women is too obvious - he must be choosing the ancient one 'deliberately'.

Border (边)

Again, this is a word which doesn't have definite form, and so is difficult to visualise - even though the primitives ('power' & 'road') are clear. My image is that on the 'road' ahead, there are a group of 'powerful' looking soldiers on duty - they are guarding the 'border' to stop the wrong people getting through. Can you see how tight those uniforms are? Awful.

Glory (荣)

There is a 'tree' which is so big it has grown through the roof of the 'greenhouse' - and the guy has won a prize for this work. He is getting all the 'glory' - ribbons, applause, and Gloria Estefan (yes, I can see it is her) is singing a congratulations song to him. As with 'great' (above) this is an addition I created to make sure I know it's 'glory' and not, for example, 'achievement'.

Achievement (功)

By picturing a 'powerful' person holding a very heavy 'I-beam' above his head, I am witnessing his 'achievement'. It's personal for him - no glory from an audience, and Gloria Estefan is not there to sing for his glory either. Achievement.

Temporary (暂)

The primitives are 'hew' (chop) and 'sun' (I don't use 'days', as you would have read previously). Of course no-one can chop an axe into the sun, but if they did - it would only be 'temporary' because very quickly the flames would close over the cut again. I can see the cut closing - can you?

Gradually (渐)

Similarly for 'water' and 'hew', I see someone chopping very gently & 'gradually' on the rocks, but the scene is set in the Great Canyon - which was formed slowly by millions of years of 'gradual' water erosion. That image is enough for me to link chopping, water & gradual.

Relatively (较)

I picture people 'mingling' amongst 'cars' in the parking lot. But oddly, the cars are lined up in size order from smallest to biggest, and the people are similarly mingling in size order. This scene allows me to see the 'relative' size of the cars & people, which is sufficient to make me remember 'relatively'.

As an added extra, in case I forget the keyword, it's also clear to me that the people are my relatives - which further helps remember the word 'RELATIVEly'. Note that I am careful that I don't let this addition confuse me with the word 亲 (relatives).

Go 'abstract' to get 'concrete'

These are some examples of imagery I have created. I can't guarantee they will work for you, and in fact you might have better ideas than me. I hope so!

So let me know what you've done. In particular, I'd like to see what scenes you used on the words above - I'm always looking for more 'concrete' ways of doing this. I'm only a few dozen from finishing the first 1500 characters, and Book 2 brings in another 1500 - so please comment generously.

Also, is there anyone else who hides little Eater Eggs, carefully selected additions, in their images to make recall easier? Let us have some examples ...

Talking Chinese (and not talking about talking)

2009-11-13T00:45:00.000Z

Last night, I joined a group of people from the recently-formed London Mandarin Learners meetup group at their first meeting.

It was a really good evening, with about a dozen Mandarin students and four native Chinese speakers. The skill ranged from beginners who only knew the basics through to advanced people who had lived for a few years in China.

I was slightly nervous - not knowing how the evening would work out. But it was fantastic. I would say I spoke Mandarin over 80% of the time, covering topics such as:

what is the Chinese word for "gherkin"?
does "ying guo" mean England, or the whole of Great Britain?
why people learn faster when they want to learn, rather than when they have to
(and of course the usual stuff like what's your name, where are you from, what do you do, how much do you earn, and who is that masked man?)

In summary - we arrived, we drank & spoke, and then left.

Only in the movies ...
For those of you who have listened to more than a few Chinese podcasts will have heard a dialogue exactly like this many times ...
A: ni shi na li de ren? (where are you from?)
B: wo shi ri ben ren (I'm Japanese)

Well, last night it happened. That was exactly the one dialogue I participated in, when a Scottish 'Don' was speaking with Japanese 'Tea'. Classic.

Common Structures
I really don't want to take a fun evening and make it dry by over-analysing, but I know there will be others like me that wonder how they will cope, will their vocab be good enough, etc.

Observing the conversations during the evening, I note there are several sentence structures that came up really often. So if you're not already fully comfortable with these, I recommend you learn them, and use them, soon.

xiangji de xiang / suoyou de suo / gualian de gua / etc.

There were many occasions when someone used a word, and you wanted to check that you heard them correctly.
So I recall hearing someone using the word "xiang" and I wanted to check if it was the same "xiang" as in "xiangji" (i.e. camera)
So I asked "xiangji de xiang?" - and they confirmed.

ruguo X suoyi Y

if ... then ...
and because Chinese can get really simple, sometimes (usually?) it's good enough to say "X, Y" - and people will get what you're saying

X ranhou Y

X and thereafter Y

yingwei ... suoyi ...

because ... thus ...

And many variations thereof. Basically, with this kind of basic sentence knowledge, and a chunk of vocab, you can talk for hours. (And we did.)

Your turn
If you haven't been to one of these meetups, I can recommend it. Try find one in your city - you can start searching the above link for groups near you. And if there isn't one, try create one.

And for those who regularly meet up in groups like this, I'd love to hear from you about what "format" you find works for such meetings.

Delusions - when roadsigns become Chinese characters!

2009-11-10T00:14:00.000Z

Learning Chinese will re-wire your brain.

OK, this isn't a scientific study I'm referring to - it's only my own experience. But check whether you would pass or fail ...

I was walking through London's St Katherine Docks recently, and there was a little pedestrian bridge near Dicken's Inn. I saw this little sign at the one end ... which basically means that mothers should look after their kids. I guess.

But that's not what I read. Nope. What did you think when you saw the sign (pictured to the right)?

Yeah, me too. I immediately thought about the character for "good" in Mandarin - 好 (hǎo). This is made up of 女 (woman) and 子 (child).

So I was chuckling at myself, taking this picture ... and all the people walking past looked at me really strangely!

(Now would probably be the right time to read a previous post on How to end with 'hǎo'.)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

OK, let's now have some fun ... what other signs make you think of Chinese characters?

For example, this character would probably be "train". Below I see "fire" and "car". The Chinese word for train is: 火车 (huǒchē, i.e. fire car)

What could the following signs be? Leave your ideas as a comment below ...

Learning to Read Chinese (3 months!) [pant pant]

2009-11-09T00:34:00.000Z

差不多

Nearly there. Finished off today at 1278 characters - which is over 85% of book 1 completed!

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

I must admit, though, it's going slower than I would like. On paper it looks quite good - having learned 278 characters in just 9 days - which is over 30 a day for about a week. But it feels like I'm wading through treacle.

The stretch from 1000-1100 was relatively easy - the words felt concrete, lots of nouns, easy to create images. And while 1100-1278 wasn't that bad, now that I'm this far advanced I'm having to spend a solid chunk of time revising, and coming across more & more words which have similar keywords to previous characters I've learned. So it's taking quite a bit more effort, but I'm getting there.

And I'm still enjoying it!

As I've previously observed, although Heisig doesn't teach the pinyin, I already know quite a lot of words from podcasts & flashcards. And so, with little effort, I'm learning the pinyin along the way. By accident.

For example, I've [verbally] known the word "yǒu xiàn" for ages, but couldn't write it, and only sometimes could remember how to read it. When I discovered (Heisig #1151) that 限 means "limit" - all the pieces just fell into place. 有限 --> "has limit" --> finite. And I now also know the pinyin for 限.

This kind of thing has been happening plenty along the way.

So, I'm into my last stretch. Just more than 200 to go ... maybe I'll try get it done by the end of next weekend?

Please do me a favour ... start putting the champagne on ice. (You can do this 'virtually' by leaving me a comment below ... thanks :-)

(Not) learning to read Chinese - 'Black October'

2009-10-30T17:46:00.000Z

If you have been paying attention, you would have noticed no updates from me on how many characters I learned lately. And there is a reason for this ...

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

October has been crazy work-wise. This included separate business trips to both India & Singapore. Leading up the trips there was a lot of preparation to do, and then after the trips there was, uhm, a lot of follow-up work to do. So I spent pretty much no time learning new hanzi - and my official total is still at 1000.

October hasn't be a total waste though ... I've been revising the first 1000 characters through flashcards (although only about 5-10 minutes a day).

And I suppose there is a lesson here - that if something is 'available' and 'easy', then you'll do it. Anki flaschards are always loaded in the background, and if I need a quick break, or I dial into a dull conference call, then I can flash through a few quick cards.

But enough is enough! I'm missing the excitement of when I was learning 25+ new characters a day. I'm missing the urge to reach for my well-thumbed Heisig when I pop out for a quick lunch. And I want to get through the 1500 well before year-end.

So this weekend, I'm back on the wagon. I promise.

(And if you're still thinking about trying Heisig, you can download - yes, legally - the first 108 characters here, and by Monday morning you could be 108 characters closer to fluency. If you're up for the challenge, drop us a note below, and then leave another comment when you've got through those 108. Go for it!)

Pinyin proves that Heisig is right

2009-10-22T21:02:00.000+01:00

Before reading this post, just consider for a moment whether you're a supporter of the Heisig method of learning to read Chinese, or not. Then read on ...

There has been some criticism levied at the Heisig method - because it teaches you the character and the English keyword, but it doesn't teach you the pinyin pronunciation of the word.

So imagine the irony ...

This morning I was working through some Anki flashcards, and the word for 'pinyin' came up. The characters are: 拼音 - both of which I have learned through Heisig, where the corresponding keywords are 'piece together' & 'sound'.

I had not previously learned that 拼=pīn and 音=yīn, but it didn't take much effort to remember that pinyin is a collection of tones. In other words: 'piecing together sounds'. So, because I knew the word pinyin (pīnyīn, actually) and through Heisig I learned 拼 & 音, I didn't have to memorise the pinyin at the time - it just came naturally at a later stage.

I'm finding that more and more, as I'm learning more words, the two methods of studying are merging like this - very efficiently. Of course, this works because I'm studying Mandarin words in addition to the Hanzi. Learning Heisig-style by itself is not the solution.

As an aside, there is a great site about pinyin called Pinyin.info. The webmaster also keeps an enjoyable blog, so check it out.

With thanks to Timothy W Richardson ...

2009-10-11T18:55:00.000+01:00

The books "Remembering the [Simplified][Traditional] Hanzi" were co-written by James Heisig & Timothy W Richardson.

I know I've personally spent a lot of time in my blog referring to the "Heisig method", or saying things like "What Heisig teaches us is that ...".

And although it was Heisig who originally developed this concept in his series of books called "Remembering the Kanji", it was Richardson who - as part of his doctoral thesis - extended this idea to apply to the Chinese hanzi in the 1990s. Apparently the results were sufficiently encouraging that he approached Heisig, who agreed that they should collaberate to produce these books.

Finally, in 2009, the above two books were published. Without Richardson, I would still be struggling with my 13th and 14th individual hanzi - as opposed to learning (with high retention) over 1000 characters in about 6 weeks.

So I'd like to thank Richarson, who has received no credit in my blog so far, for the role he played in bringing these books to the public

谢谢

Strangers on a train

2009-10-09T23:54:00.000+01:00

What a crazy little world is this?!

I was catching the London underground this evening with two Chinese friends, heading out to dinner - we were speaking a mix of English & Chinese. Sarah & Jessica were telling a funny story about a time soon after they arrived in London, when they were gossiping in Chinese about someone on the train.

To their embarrassment, that person actually could speak Chinese!

And the funniest thing happened tonight. While they were telling the story to me, a Westerner turned to us and spoke in really good Chinese, "Can you speak a little louder, I can't hear everything you say."

Turns out he lives near me, and is married to a Chinese woman from Yunnan Province.

It really is a small world!

Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations

2009-10-07T15:04:00.000+01:00

What do peeling bananas and reading Chinese have in common? (and no, it's NOT a bad joke about slipping on banana skins)

How do you peel banana? Until a couple of months ago I did it like 99% of people - grab the top end, struggle for 20 seconds to snap & peel, struggle more, eventually bite it and get a horrible taste, and then finally peel it open. But now - after having a video emailed to me by a friend - I actually just pinch the other end: the banana tip splits easily,and I peel it open. Just 2 seconds, without any nasty taste.

(By now I would have lost some of you, as you rush off to the kitchen to find a banana to experiment on. For those of you who are still reading, you're going to enjoy this ...)

To make this more relevant to reading and writing Chinese, I need to ask you: how do you visualise Chinese characters while you're learning new ones? Have you been using a method of visualisation that takes too long, and leaves you with a horrible taste in your mouth? Well, the focus of this post is to teach you to pinch on the other end. No mess no fuss.

Warnings
(If I had a lawyer, she'd want me to write this stuff)

Just to be clear I am using the Heisig method to learn the Chinese character system, so this post is specifically filled with tips & tricks to enhance the visualisation you use when learning characters through the Heisig system. You can of course apply these elsewhere.

Also, what you're learning here is the learning to read and write Chinese. Once you're fluent, you won't need this anymore. Unless, for example, you see a character that you've forgotten, and you have to 'reconstruct' it in your mind.

These are my techniques, and you might have different preferences. That's OK - I'm just giving you ideas of what allowed me to get through 1000 characters in about 6 weeks. If you have different (or similar) ideas, please leave some comments to help all the people that I'm otherwise leading astray. Also, I use the Simplified character set, so if my numbering isn't the same as yours on the Traditional road, don't stress.

Depending your level of progress, I've made some comments at the end about next steps for you - but just get through the article in the meantime!

Finally, putting images into words might make things look messy. But it's not, so try not to get bogged down with the details. The more experience you have with Heisig, the easier this post will be to follow.

What is Heisig?

Many years ago, James Heisig wrote a series of books entitled "Remembering the Kanji", which developed an excellent method of learning to read and write Japanese. The method is very effective, and it developed a bit of a cult following. (As much as you can get cult followings if you teach people to read & write Japanese.) It took until 2009 before this same method was developed into a complete system for Chinese characters.

If you've been following this blog, you'll know that I'm a big fan of the system, and continue to work through it. Here are affiliated links to his books for the Simplified character set and the Traditional character set.

Basically, the writing system is developed by starting with the simplest of characters - each of which are allocated an 'image'. Usually the image matches the meaning of the word, but for abstract words, a 'better' image is used. For more advanced characters, these images are combined into stories.
When you see a character, you mentally assemble the component images, which gives you the story - and thus the meaning of the word.
Similarly, when you want to write a character, you think of the English word, the story pops into your mind, and you thereby assemble the images to produce the correct written character.
(It's quicker & easier than it may appear :-)

This is my original post when I began applying the Heisig method.
This is my most recent post, when I crossed 1000 characters.
And here is a link to all related posts I've written.

Tips & Tricks (this is the stuff you'll actually use, so start paying attention)

With all these clarification done, here are some of the things I've realised in learning over 1000 characters through the Heisig approach so far. Application of these should greatly speed up you learning time and improve your recall.

Now it's time to let your imagination run wild: 胡思乱想

* Keep it simple

Try not to get carried away with additional components in your visualisations.

Let's start with an example, #100 乱 (chaos) is "tongue ... hook". If you've been paying attention, it's in the Chinese Proverb above. To make this easy to remember you could imagine the following "someone grabbing & holding a person by the tongue, taking a fish-hook, embedding it, and seeing the person go wild as they break glasses and bump into people around the room, causing chaos". However, a simple alternative would be "someone causes chaos using their barbed tongue as it lashes out at people around them". (Heisig's recommendation is close to this.)

The problem with the first image is that in addition to the chaos, the tongue and the hook, you also have: hands, holding, people, glasses & breaking. So later, when you're trying to remember the character for 'chaos' - you might remember something about hands & glasses, and get confused about what the story is.

Another example is #114 尖 (tip) - where the image is something that goes from 小 small to 大 large. I have limited myself to the story 'a tip is something that starts small and gets big'. To be fair, though, after reading this character a few times, you don't need the story anymore - you automatically know it as 'tip'. The problem is if you try too hard to visualise the tip of a pen, or arrow, or pagoda - then you might find yourself thinking that 尖 means pen (or arrow or pagoda or ...). So keep it simple.

By having complex stories, you risk (a) forgetting parts of the story when trying to recall it, and (b) creating associations with items that aren't really part of the story. So use the minimum number of components you need to make it work.

As Einstein once said: "Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

* Pick just one meaning for primitives

More options means more confusion.

Heisig has a bad habit (in my opinion). For example, for #60 页 (page), he says "As a primitive, this character will often take the unrelated meaning of a head."

The problem I found is that it slowed me down when trying to read a character which contained the 页 primitive. For example, consider #61 顽 and #82 项. Because I was predominantly using the 'head' meaning (as in 顽 which is "beginning head") - but I couldn't work out, when reading 项, what the associated keyword was with "I-beam ... head". Until I realised they used the image of a 'page' in this case - at which point the story came flooding back. If I had always used 'head', then this confusion would not have arisen.

I accept that for the first couple of hundred words it's not a big deal. But as the words continue to mount up in their hundreds, it certainly can get confusing. Just the other day I couldn't recall the meaning of 历 - because I was trying to imagine a 'factory' which is the keyword of 厂, rather than a 'cliff' which is the primitive image. Sigh.

With #12 日, the possible meanings given in the book are: sun, day, tongue wagging in the mouth. Trust me - just pick one (I recommend 'sun') and stick with it. (And yes, I know there is a difference between 曰 and 日, but for visualisation purposes, it really doesn't matter.)

The benefit is that when I am reading, I don't look at 音 and think "standing ... tongue wagging" - and end up spending two minutes trying to remember that story. Then it turns out that not only did I use the 'sun' meaning (and not the 'wagging tongue'), I also used 'vase' (and not 'standing'). Arghhhhh!

Sure, I accept that sometimes the meaning isn't quite right. For example, it makes more sense to have a "wagging tongue" in the hanzi for 'sound', but let's face it - many of the visualisations are somewhat contrived, so at least choose contrivances that speed things up for you.

So 日 is always 'sun'. And 立 is always 'vase' (not standing up). 王 is always 'ball', etc. Always.

Pick just one image. Choose it by thinking (a) which will be easier to visualise, or (b) which is closer to the primitive's actual meaning, or (c) which one is used most in the words which follow in the next few pages.

I find this eliminates the uncertainty - which makes it quicker to memorise words, and much quicker to read words.

* Careful of primitves & keywords which are similar

This continues to bite me.

#513 蛇 has the keyword 'serpent'. #515 己 has the primitive image of a snake. Problem arises when I know that the keyword for 'begin' has a story of "walk ... snake" (I picture people about to begin a walk/race, and the start line is actually a snake) - but how on earth should I know whether it's snake that I'm visualising, or serpent? I don't care what the dictionary says, how does my mind work?

Make sure that you have a way of differentiating between snake & serpent that works for you. Perhaps a snake is white and a serpent is brown? Perhaps a snake is lying down, and a serpent has lifted its head to attack? BUT be careful that you don't add too much to the image, and thereby breach the "keep it simple" rule. If your 'snake' (nor 'serpent') is going to be white, for example, make sure you don't let it interfere with the character 白 for white.

In a previous post, I pointed out how confusing it gets to have various 'hands' in your images - here is my exact wording: "If you allow me to mix up word meanings ('W') and primitive images ('P') for a moment, then note the following: 手 (W:hand), 扌 (P:finger), 开 (P:two hands), 乃 (P:fist), 及 (P:outstretched hands) .... arghhhhh!!"

In this case, it's essential that you take the time to work out exactly what each of the above should look like, so you don't confuse them.

Similarly, I already mentioned above that the keyword for 'factory' has a primitive meaning of 'cliff' - and Heisig's stories use both. I find that confusing, and prefer to limit myself to just one meaning.

So make sure when your creating images, that you are clear on what you mean - it will make the process much simpler to take in, and will dramatically increase your recall.

* For similar characters, use similar stories

If your mind thinks that way, then you should think that way too.

Look at characters #506-8: 她 she (woman ... scorpion), 地 ground (soil ... scorpion), 池 pond (water ... scorpion). Unfortunately, the stories that Heisig recommends aren't consistent, so when I tried to recall what the word was by looking at the character, I was failing. So I reworked the images to have the same framework. Let me explain ...

I picture XYZ (where XYZ is either a woman, soil, or water) totally covered by lots of little scorpions. And these then move and scuttle away to reveal something underneath ... perhaps 'she' is revealed, or the 'ground' becomes visible, or I see they are on the surface of a 'pond'. Because I use consistent images, I find my recall really quick, because I don't have to 'test' several images until one of them triggers the keyword.

For example, BadImage1 = 'scorpions are covered in soil, which then move off to reveal the ground underneath them', and BadImage2 = 'scorpions cover the water and you see they are on a pond'. In the first case the scorpions are doing the covering, in the second they are being covered. If you're not consistent, you're not going to come to the right image quickly enough - which is a waste of time.

Perhaps another example will add to your understanding.

In #479-81 we have 资 'assets', 姿 'looks', 咨 'consult with'. But the recommended stories are again not consistent, and are a bit of a jumble. I struggled to remember them. So I reworked the stories into the form "next ... XYZ". I could then easily remember that "next ... shell" was a guy collecting shells as assets, going 'next next next'. Similarly, "next ... woman" was a guy who was seeking the perfect-looking woman going 'next next next' on the basis of her looks. Finally, "next mouth" is someone going from person to person (mouth to mouth), looking for opinions, going through people 'next next next'.

With this consistency, the images are clear and need almost no interpretation - the keyword is obvious in each case.

Similarly, 赔 has a "clam used as a muzzle", while the next character is a "muzzle on the earth". I'm not saying you can't manage to cope with these differences - thousands have already. I'm just saying you can be more efficient. So why not!

* Abstract words

Some words are just difficult to visualise.

Heisig is aware of this, so often a word's keyword is changed for the purpose of making visualisation easier. So 白 means 'white', but he suggests you picture a 'dove'. 己 means 'self', but he suggests you use a 'snake'.

But there are many other words which are difficult to remember - and it's worth trying to find a consistent way which works.

For example, 安 means 'peace', but that's hard for me to image without putting flowers into the image - which would then interfere with images that use a 艹 radical. So I thought of "Peaceful Sleep" which is a mosquito repellant I used plenty as a child, which plugs into the wall. I tried not to break the first rule of keeping things simple, but so that it was still useful. So with 按 (finger ... peace) I picture a finger pressing on the Peaceful Sleep device. (I don't imagine it's hot to touch, or that it's being switched on - or anything else which might confuse the image).

Another one I had difficulty with was 忄 ('state of mind') - and I dealt with this by trying to construct images which suggested what the person's 'state of mind' might be in that case. With the word for 'slow' (慢) it was easy: "state of mind ... mandala". The latter reminds me (in the I-wasn't-born-yet kinda way) of the drugged-up bright-lights 1960s, and I can imagine someone in a chill room, with time really slooooowed down. Get what I mean?

* Touching primitives

If they're touching, then know they're touching (or avoid them touching).

I mentioned in previous post about how the primitives are pieced together to make the character for 音. If you take those primitives literally, there is a line that goes missing. This works find when you're reading - you'll work it out. But when you're writing, you might get confused.

One example is: #677 会 which is "meeting ... rising cloud". This is made up of the triangle shape (including the horizonal base) plus 云. But you'll note that this results in a line-overlap, which is fine if you're reading, but if you following the instructions closely when writing you'll get an extra line. I've reconstructed 'meeting' as the 'umbrella' primitive and 'rising cloud'. Not only is the visualisation easier, but it works with no extra lines.

This doesn't happen often (so far), but it helped me to make sure my visualisations worked. And this might seem that it's overly complex, but I assure you ... it isn't. It's only because writing it out. If you were thinking this, it would only take a few seconds.

* Order your primitives

If you're smart with your story, it'll work much better.

What do you notice about the following pairs: 古/叶, 叮/可, 杏/呆, 未/末, 玉/主? Yup, they're almost the same, but not quite. For the early characters, it's not really a big deal - you should be able to remember the positioning of the primitives, and little confusion should result. But as you progress, and the characters become increasingly complex, you might correctly be able to remember the components, but be unable to piece them together in the right order.

For example, #661 派 is "water ... drag ... bandana", and #723 曼 is "sun ... net ... crotch", and 德 is "ten ... net ... one ... heart". My recommendation is that you create the story so that the order of how the pieces are put together is preserved. Over time this won't be necessary, but for fastest progress in the beginning, it really helps.

So in the example of 曼 (drawn out), I picture the sun shining - from above - through a small net onto the crotch, and the net is being 'drawn out' as wide as possible to cover as much area as possible. The story implies the correct order. Try to get in that habit.

Similarly, for 蛇 ('insect ... it'), try to use the words in that order, and not the other way around. Don't worry - this very quickly becomes a habit.

Here are some other quick examples:

爱: somehow picture the 'birdhouse' on the 'friend' (not next to, not under) --> you'll be glad you did
香: try ensure that the sun is under the wild rice in the image (perhaps a reflection)
售: picture the turkey falling from above, and popping out the mouth at the bottom of the vending machine
设: can you see the words written on the side of the missile? the side? good

* Static vs Dynamic

Know how your own mind works.

In 设, as mentioned above, I see 'words' on the side of the 'missile'. This is a static image - just a snapshot.

But sometimes it helps me to have movement in the image. Take #763 (journey) for example - "wild rice ... submit". I had difficult doing this as a still image, but instead my mind showed someone walking down the road (on his journey), offering wild rice to peasants along the way, who are so grateful that they fall to their knees and submit to him, head bowed. It's a video that last a fraction of a second in my mind, but it tells me what I need. The movement helps convey the sense of 'journey'.

So experiment with your own mind. Do images work best? Or video? Decide for yourself. And use it.

* Make it Sexual

You know you want to.

For school children, I would say "make the images clear, colourful, vibrant, rich ...". But I'm going to say it as I see it - sexual images are more memorable, whether you're a fan or an opponent of sex. You'll remember the image - and that's the goal.

Heisig gives a clue about this in his definition of #633 又 ('again'), which uses the primitive image of 'crotch'. He says, "... by assigning it the meaning of crotch, as in the crotch of an arm or a tree. Or whatever."

"Or whatever", indeed.

So when 戏 (frolic) is "crotch ... fiesta", make it easy on yourself and create something that is memorable.

And the story for #838 ("use" - a verb, 使) is "person ... 100 Chinese inches ... mouth". If you have an image that words for you, fine. But I have an image I won't forget, and I'm sticking with it.

* Font curses

It's not you, it's the font. Honest.

There are a number of characters which appear sufficiently different in some computer fonts - that it's difficult to recognise the character. If you stick to Heisig's book, you're fine. But when you use flashcard software, or internet-base dictionaries, or online text - you might get confused.

查 - the bottom line is sometimes separate, sometimes connected
拐 - sometimes it appears as 'dao' below the mouth, sometimes it like like 'li'
直 - sometimes the line at the bottom also runs up the side
条 - sometimes it's a tree at the bottom, sometimes it's poles
派 - the inner bits sometimes touch, and sometimes not
房 - sometimes it's a line across the top, sometimes a little 'drop'

Over time, it won't make a difference, you'll still recognise them. But you may as well know they're coming.

Bringing it all together

I thought I would give one closing example which brings together a number of these components, and I've chosen #497 激 (excite).

the primitives appear in this order: "water ... dove ... compass ... taskmaster"
yet Heisig's story begins with the taskmaster, which I think makes it more difficult to remember
I have very specific image for 'taskmaster' which I use in all related images
he talks about 'white' foam, but I always use the 'dove' image so I don't get slowed down
in the character, the 'dove' is on the 'compass', and in my imagination it is too
I picture the water washing the dove-on-a compass towards the taskmaster, so the order is right and thus easy to write
the closer it comes the more excited the taskmaster gets

Your image may work better for you, and if so then definitely stick to it. But I found this type of thinking (consistent images, useful ordering, etc.) has allowed me to remember images quicker & more easily, with better recall. This includes going from character to keyword, or keyword to character.

So now what?

You can do whatever you want, from ignoring this post, leaving rude comments below - or using it, integrating it into your studies, and improving it. But here are some suggestions ....

If you're just beginning, keep these things in mind as you set off on your studies. Maybe come back to it every now and then, and see if you're "on track", and leave some comments each time you spot an improvement. Heisig suggest stories for you in the beginning, and it's probably best not to deviate too far from that until you've got some momentum and some experience.
If you're a few hundred characters in, you should be able to immediately start putting these ideas into practice as you move forwards. There are still lots of characters to play with, and get right the first time!
I'm not suggesting that you go back and change your existing stories. If they're working for you, then stick with them. However, if there are certain characters, or groups of characters, which you keep forgetting, then see whether these techniques will help you 'tighten up your game", and get them right from now on.

And read some of my previous posts on the Heisig method. I've made observations of things that go well and things that go badly - you' definitely get some more clues from there. All such posts use the RTH-hesig keyword.

To make sure you get updates and new tips & tricks, don't forget to subscribe to Mandarin Segments, using RSS/XML, email, or other. You can also follow me on Twitter.

And of course, leave some comments to help me and other readers with your insight. Are there characters that you always get wrong? Are there other tricks I've forgotten to mention? Do you think I'm talking a load of shit? All views are welcome.

And now we've come full circle. If you're still still peeling bananas the old way, there is a much better alternative. And if you're still learning to read & write Chinese (or Japanese) for that matter, this is definitely a better way.

Learning Mandarin - Start Off Lazy, Build From There (guest post)

2009-10-04T14:07:00.000+01:00

I was very pleased to be invited to do a guest post for Charlie at the Discovering Mandarin blog. In it I talk about how I started learning Mandarin (really really slowly at first), and what I'm learning at the moment.

You can find the post here. And once you've read it, and left a comment, take a look at the rest of Charlie's blog. It has daily Chinese proverbs, Chinese recipes, news & culture posts, and more. Definitely worth becoming a follower.

Greg

Learning to Read (day 46) - 1000 characters!

2009-09-27T21:42:00.000+01:00

Today I reached 1000 characters. I think Heisig & Richardson are very sneaky in the way the wrote "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" - because Lesson 31 ends with just 999 characters. They made me start the next lesson just to make it to 1000. But I digress ...

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

I celebrated this on Twitter early today, even mentioning how I rewarded myself.

Some quick statistics:

it has taken me 46 days to reach 1000 hanzi
that's close enough to 1.5 months
22 characters a day (although some days were as little as 0)
I have been spending roughly 30 minutes a day do this, sometimes more sometimes less
my retention, according to flashcard testing, is around 90%
the first 500 took me 18 days, this second 500 took 28 days

When I got started, I had no idea how long it would take me. After a couple of weeks I determined that it would take me until the end of the year to get through Book 1 (1500 characters), but now it's looking like it's going to happen looooong before that.

Although I try to regularly revise, covering recent chapters as well as older material, I know that there are sections I'll definitely have to work more on. For example, I find characters which use the 忄radical difficult to create images for, so I need to spend more time with those.

I could continue past 1000 - even if I'm focusing on revision - but I need to keep myself in check. But I think it's about keeping a balance. When I stopped to revise at 500, I really missed that sense of progress. I missed the excitement of new words - and I lost a bit of momentum. But I do want to solidify these 1000 before I climb into the last bunch. And this time, I mean it.

As you saw above, the first 500 took 18 days, while the second 500 took 28 days. No idea how long the last 500 of this book will take, but I'm pretty sure it will be more than 28 days. I know I keep talking about having to go back and revise, but without these increasingly frequent pauses, I found myself forgetting almost entire lessons at one stage.

Keep an eye out for my next article where I take the same texts as last time (The Little Prince & BBC news) and highlight how many characters I now know. Then compare this with how 'yellow' the pages looked when I only knew 500 characters.

(By the way, I'm not trying to light a fire under your bum, or anything like that, but if you think about it ... even if you haven't started the book, you could finish all 1500 characters by the end of the year, starting now.)

干杯 !!

Learn to speak Mandarin fluently in 6 months

2009-09-19T11:54:00.000+01:00

I've got good news and bad news for you.

The good news is you are about to discover something really interesting about yourself and your attitude to learning Mandarin.

The bad news is that people simply cannot learn Mandarin in 6 months.

I'm guessing that when you clicked on the article, probably based on the title of this posting, you had one of three things in mind.

Three Types of Reader

1. Already fluent in Chinese (or at least on the way there)

You probably surfed over here to give me a piece of your mind! You were going to tell me that it's impossible, that I was misleading people, and that you were going to be unsubscribing from my blog.

Don't worry, I agree with you. I already commented on someone else's blog to this effect, and they were only promising native-level speaking in a year. On 10 minutes a day!

2. Still learning, probably still struggling

You're making progress, but not as fast as you'd like. You probably came here to learn something - just in case you were missing a trick. You know it's hard to learn Chinese, but if maybe there was something you could do to speed things ...

3. Not yet started (or only just begun)

Perhaps you're still a bit naive about how much effort it will take to learn Chinese. That's not a bad thing - I think we all have misconceptions about the challenges your journey will offer. You came here because you're keen to learn Chinese, and a 6 month time investment is about what you're prepared to put in.

The Truth about learning Chinese

The reality is you can't learn to be fluent in Chinese as quickly as six months. You can make good progress though, and have basic conversations, but you won't be fluent. And of course there's reading & writing, which is another challenge altogether!

(I'm ignoring the statistical anomalies of a person who moves to China, and spends 6 months, morning until night, learning Chinese. If you are that person, then this post isn't for you :-)

There were two things that got me thinking about this:

I was listening to music using the Spotify app, and randomly typed 'mandarin' into the search bar. One of the items which came up was a track which claimed to feed you subliminal messages which would allow you learn Chinese. Honestly.
Also, there has been lots said about the Heisig method of learning to read & write Chinese. This is an impressive method, and I've learned (with 90%+ recall) about 850 characters in the last 40 days. Heisig's book certainly offers a short-cut, but lots of work is still involved ... it's no miracle

I think people should know what they're facing when they set out to learn Chinese. It's not easy - but it's one of the most rewarding things I've done.

Ultimately, it's about learning a skill that you will use forever. So does it really make a difference if it takes 6 months, or 6 years? You will be progressing all the time - it's not even clear to me what I mean by "take x years" ... after all, how will I know when I get there? And will I really be much worse 3 months before I get to there.

Efficiency in your efforts

Of course, you can waste time while you're on the way to fluency. I've done a bit of a brain dump of things that are "smart" - but would love to get your comments below on what you have found.

Don't waste time. Listen to podcasts while travelling to & from work or school. And while getting dressed in the morning.
Don't waste space. Maybe you could label your furniture around your house in Chinese. Even if you don't try, it's going to go into your brain.
Wordpacks. I've made some suggestions how I learn vocab which gives you more bang for your buck. You can see all related posts here.
If you're learning to read or write Chinese, the Heisig approach listed above is a great time-saver. Here was my latest post on the topic when I wrote this.
Change direction. If you're tired of listening to podcasts, then learn to read some more characters. If your head is full from that, read a blog or two about learning Chinese.
Listen to Mandarin music - traditional or pop. I am currently listening to Wong Faye.

OK, so it's going to take more than 6 months. But it would be a pity to wake up in 6 months time, re-read this post, and realise that you're no closer to fluency than you are right now.

So do something. How far can you get in the next 6 months?

I'd love to hear from you - leave a comment below. Please.

Reading (day 32) - bad week & bad mistakes

2009-09-13T18:23:00.000+01:00

This morning I reached 702 hanzi. The last week hasn't been good for my progress, but as I revise - I'm starting to get a sense of ways of speeding up the visualisation/memorisation/recall process. I'll talk about that in my next post.

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

A bad week

I had to go to Zurich for business for 4 days - and I knew I was going to be working long hours, so I didn't take Heisig with me. I thought I would mentally revise characters when I had the chance, but somehow my mind was always occupied with other stuff.

What made this worse was that last weekend I learned quite a lot of new characters, and I didn't get time to revise. This meant, 4 days without revising dozens of new hanzi, my recall was shocking. It felt like I had a re-learn a lot of stuff when I got back.

Some characters have quite clear imagery, and learning it once is enough. Forever. But I guess I had done a chapter which was sufficiently abstract that revision was really important.

Don't underestimate the value of regular revision!

Mixing stuff up

The more I learn, the more there is to confuse me. In case you find these detail points helpful to you as go work through the Heisig system, I'd like to suggest that you read through them, and "mentally innoculate" yourself so you don't fall into the same traps.

I think these points are important enough to bother documenting, if that tells you anything about whether I think they're important enough for you to read. :-)

If you look at 谁, you will see it has two primitives: 讠 and (the other part I can't work out how to type). The second part has the image of a "turkey" ascribed to it, to make visualisations easier. My mistake was to think that's how you write turkey - which is actually 火鸡 (fire chicken!). The problem was I confused the actual word with the image associated with a primitive.
But I'm not too concerned - practice can solve that.
The hanzi for 'sound' (音) is made up of primitives which have the images of 'vase' and 'sun' - and the bottom line of vase does not overlap with the top line of sun. On the other hand, 'side' (旁) is made up of vase, crown & compass. In this case, however, the bottom line of vase is the top line of crown. This is no problem when I'm reading the characters, but when I try to write them, I don't always get the correct overlap/non-overlap thing.
No problem, if I practice more, it won't be a problem.
I got confused between 匀 and 习 for a while, until I mentally made a point of revising their respective images & compositions.
If I practise lots, then this will become automatic.
安 (peaceful) is easy to remember as a character (it's fairly common) - but it's difficult to incorporate the concept of "peaceful" into an images sometimes.
But as long as I continue to practise these visualisations, I'll get better.
The word for punishment (刑) is made up of 'holding hands' and 'sabre'. I was trying to remember the image associated with 'two hands holding a sabre' but was drawing blanks. It was only when I remembered that my image was of two hands being cut by a sabre that the word 'punishment' popped into my mind.
So I guess, if I practise reading these hanzi often, this issue will not arise. Or not as often, anyway.
If you allow be to mix up word meanings ('W') and primitive images ('P') for a moment, then note the following: 手 (W:hand), 扌 (P:finger), 开 (P:two hands), 乃 (P:fist), 及 (P:outstretched hands) .... arghhhhh!! I think it would have helped if Heisig had pointed out that these similarities were coming, so that I could have been more careful when setting up the images in the first place.
But by ongoing practice of being careful of how I construct these images, and lots of repetition, this won't bother me at all.

And please don't use my shortfalls as an excuse to criticise Heisig - stuff like this is bound to happen whatever method you use. I just have to pay more attention. And practise. Lots.

My goals of writing these notes in this much detail are twofold: (1) to put my thoughts in clear terms so I can learn from my mistakes, and (2) to help others using the Heisig approach so they can be more efficient at this than me.

As always, it's your comments to these posts that add the value - my notes are just a starting point. So let me know your thoughts. For those using Heisig, what kind of mistakes do you make?

500 - 'Little step' or 'Giant leap'?

2009-09-05T14:29:00.000+01:00

If you're following my reading experiment, you're probably wondering how useful it is to know just 500 characters. And if you weren't already wondering that, then take a guess - is it a lot or a little?

They say (yes, yes - whoever "they" is) that you need 1500-2000 hanzi to be able to read a newspaper, and that children leave school knowing 3000-4000. So in that light, 500 doesn't sound like much, does it?

And yet, reading my new "Adventures of Tin Tin" in Chinese, I'm aware that I can actually follow quite a lot - so I thought I'd do a visual experiment to see how much 500 really was.

Because fiction & non-fiction are so different, I separately printed out one page from the book 小王子 (The Little Prince), and a page from the BBC's Chinese website. Then I highlighted all the characters which I had learned in the first 500 from Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi - and this is the result. (You will have to click on the image to get the full size version ...)

Even without looking at the larger image, you can see that a large proportion of the page has been highlighted. This shows you that even at only 500, you're able to understand a large proportion of the characters.

(And don't get too detailed, pleeeeease. I might have highlighted words that were after the first 500, or missed out words that should have been highlighted. Overall, the highlighting is very close to reality.)

Note however that Heisig introduces characters by building up patterns - and doesn't necessarily include the most common characters first. (That's OK - if you only want to learn the most common 200, for example, then Heisig isn't for you.)

So I then used my green highlighter to include words that, if you're learning with an open mind, you can't not learn these characters. This includes ‘I’ (我), ‘you’ (你), ‘not’ (不), ‘person’ (人), etc. As you can see from the image below, this adds quite a chunk to the proportion of the text you can read.

So if you haven't worked out the conclusion for yourself, at 500 characters (which only took me about 3 weeks to learn) - you can follow a massive proportion of the characters on the page.

But don't be mislead! This is not to say that you can understand at least half the article - because you won't be able to. Chinese uses lots of compound words - so that even if you know the two characters which make up the word, you still won't get the word.

For example, on the second line of the Xiao Wang Zi text, you will see the word 地方 (dì fang). You will know from Heisig that 地=ground and 方=direction - "ground direction"? What? Actually, 'dì fang' means 'place' - but you wouldn't know that if you had only learned individual hanzi from Heisig.

Actions for you ...

Subscribe to the Mandarin Segments blog here
Here's an affiliated link to the Heisig book on Amazon:Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters
If you found this post useful, please Tweet this article (you can use the button on the top-right), or reference it in your blog.
Leave me a comment - let me know if your experiences are the same. Or different.

Greg

Pleasure while Practising

2009-09-02T00:33:00.000+01:00

If you're learning Chinese, are you scared to get out there and practise?

Today I did just that - but no fear, just pleasure. I took the day off work today (legitimately - I didn't take a sickie!) and "tricked" myself into having a great time around London, and this is what I did ...

I found a foreign language bookstore near Oxford Street, and spent ages browsing the Chinese book section. Bought a Chinese version of the cartoon book "The Adventures of Tintin" (in Chinese it's called '丁丁' - dīng dīng).
Strolled towards Chinatown, pausing to read various signs as I got closer, practising as many hanzi as I could - and pleased that even knowing only 500 characters I could get lots of them.
We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, making sure that I had a Mandarin-speaking waitress - who was more than happy to chat at my level and my speed.
Also in Chinatown, we went for a 20 minute massage, where I got to speak Mandarin. Sara the masseur was flattered that a foreigner would self-study Chinese, and was more than happy to follow my speed, and teach me new words along the way. (£16 for a massage and Chinese lesson - 还不错)
Decided to finish the day with a Pearl Bubble Milk Tea (珍珠奶茶 - zhēn zhū nǎi chá). Tried about five places before I found one which sold it, so I got to practise my Chinese several times over - much to the amusement of the staff on duty at the door of each restaurant).

Overall, it was a great day - speaking Chinese with lots of people along the way. Add to that a great Chinese meal, a massage and a Pearl Bubble Tea - a very pleasurable practice indeed!

Have you done anything similar? Are you planning to? Leave a comment below to share ...

Reading (day 18) - 500 characters!

2009-08-30T22:44:00.001+01:00

OK, its time to celebrate! I have just crossed 500 hanzi in my "Learning to Read Chinese" experiment - in less than 3 weeks.

Here are some of my thoughts on the Heisig method of learning to read & write Chinese:

If you'd ask me when I began, I didn't think I would get through 500 with 90%+ recall in just 3 weeks. But I have.
I'm not delusional - I'm pretty sure the next 500 will take longer. Especially because of the fact that as you learn more, you need more time to revise.
I'm enjoying this a helluva lot more than I thought I would. Although I was looking forward to this experiment, I thought it would feel a bit like school - but I am actually eager to get some quiet time to learn more.
The more you do this, the better you get at creating and remembering images.
I know there is nothing magical about 500. But I'm goal-orientated, and since Book 1 has 1500 characters, 500, 1000 and 1500 were always going to be important milestones.

And you know, at only 500 hundred, I'm neverthless seeing so much more meaning in Chinese texts. I can read sentences using words I've learned. And often, even when I don't know the word, I know enough characters that I can work out the general meaning.

And here's a really important point ... Heisig's goal is not to teach the pinyin pronunciation of words. But that's OK - I've got podcasts & flashcards to do that. All I'm trying to do here is to read words and know what they mean.

On a more technical level, here are some observations based on the characters I've learned since the last update:

In Lesson 17 I was getting confused between footprint, footprints, and footstep. I didn't realise at first that the images were going to be slightly different, so I used them inter-changeably. Fortunately, only a few stories down, I realised I had to be more clear, and was able to go back and clarify the images.
I'm learning English words too! I never knew the word "ford" was a verb wrt crossing rivers, but found that out with 涉 (#381).
Again I found myself getting a little confused between the word's meaning, and what its image is when used as a primitive. (Heisig does this because some words are difficult to use when creating images.)
For example, although 竟 (#487) means "unexpectedly", but this is difficult to use in images - so at such times you should use the visual of a "mirror". (This isn't as silly as it sounds - just look at the actual word for mirror: 镜).
I had a really sad moment ... 乞 means "beg", and I used a clear image of a prostrate begger with a hook instead of a hand (look at the image and see why). But the very next character is 吃 (to eat) - and the image naturally took the "beg" scenario and extended it to this crippled starving guy wanting to put food in his mouth. Such a depressing image! (I hope I don't create an eating-disorder for myself as a result :-)
Characters #479-81 are 资, 姿 & 咨 - which are made up of 次 ('next') at the top and another primitive at the bottom. Heisig's suggested stories were not consistent in the sense that sometimes the top part came first in the story, sometimes second. I simplified this as "next shell", "next woman", "next mouth" - and had images which generated the words 'assets', 'looks' & 'consult'. (If you're not actually creating Heisig images yourself, this last point might not make a lot of sense.)

Revision is becoming increasingly important, so here are some thoughts:

I find it makes a big difference if I review my most recent lesson after about 12 hours (i.e. the next morning or the next evening).
The first time I revise a lesson, I work through the hanzi and - by recalling the story - remember the meaning. The second time I revise (a day later) I make a point of looking at the English word and - by turning the image into a story - create the hanzi. Both are important.
As I progress, I make a point of mentally re-creating the stories for primitives that are being used now, although they were taught much earlier. This keeps up my recall.
I am aware that sometimes, especially when a character is built on the previous character, I know what word is coming next even before I see it. So I've been trying to revise in later sessions by bouncing around from chapter to chapter, page to page - to avoid this familiarity. But it's reached the point where I've got to start using flashcards. Anki ... here I come.
Over the next few days I'm simply going to review these 504 characters. It will give me a chance to confirm my recall, and make sure my foundations are strong because the connections are becoming more advanced.

This habit of decomposting hanzi into their components is becoming automatic - and powerful:

For example, this morning I saw (for the first time) this character: 做.
I knew that 故 (#342) means 'deliberate' (you don't want to know the image I use for this one!), and that 亻 means person.
A 'person being deliberate'? I guessed it might mean either 'do' or 'make' or something like that - and it turned out the definition is indeed 'make'.
So I was able to follow the sentence using a word I'd never seen before - and now I'll never again forget how to read/write the word for 'make'.
(Have I mentioned before that I'm liking the Heisig approach?)

So if you're sitting on the fence about whether you should use this approach, I have a strong yes recommendation.

Here's an affiliated link to the books page at Amazon:
Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

So here's to the next 500! And I would appreciate your thoughts too - whether you're a fan or opponent of Heisig, and especially if you have observations or suggestions to share, please leave a comment ...

Mom bothers the horse by scolding - what ???

2009-08-28T08:08:00.002+01:00

When I started learning Mandarin, playing with tones was like playing with a new toy. I found it fascinating that so much could rest on the 'sound' of the word, and not just the spelling.

I would explain it to people who, without realising what they were getting into, asked me why learning Chinese was so difficult. So I would explain. And I realised really early on that I needed examples to show how powerful tones were.

Like so many people, I started off using the "mā má mǎ mà ma" , although I've dabbled a little in "zhū zhú zhǔ zhù" too.

I'd like to recommend that you pick a set - and learn it. You'll use it often - I use it again last night over dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in a couple of years. And since you only have to learn one word (just four different tones), it fits nicely into the WordPack concept - which is all about efficiency in the words you choose to learn.

With 'ma', you might use:

妈 mā mother
麻 má bother
马 mǎ horse
骂 mà scold
吗 ma (question tag)

If it helps, try a sentence like: "Mom is bothered by the horse's scolding - yes?" Not an entirely sensible sentence, but it at least catches all the five tones (including neutral) and in the right order.

(And I note that most sites seem to use má (麻) in the 'hemp' context, but since this is the same má as in "má fan" (麻烦, which is quite a common word), I prefer the "bother" definition.)

And for those of you who aim for the most distant limits of human endurance, there is always "ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma?" (Does Mother scold horses or do horses scold Mother"?)

I'll leave it up to you to fill in the missing tones.

So what wordset do you normally use when trying to explain to people how the tones work? Leave a comment and let us know.

Learning to read Chinese (day 11) - great progress

2009-08-23T11:02:00.007+01:00

This is an update on my experiment to learn to read Chinese. You can also read my original post on this topic, or check out all other posts on my experiment. After a bit of research I settled on Heisig's "Remembering the Simplified Hanzi" method - which is progressing really well.

As of last night, 11 days into the experiment, I have finished lesson 14 - taking me to a total of 336 characters. My recall is around 90% - although I'm going to do a full review session later today, so I'll get a better idea of whether I'm lying to myself.

On average I'm doing about 20 minutes a day, learning about 15 new characters every day.

Some of my technical observations from the last week are:

Normally the best time for me is last thing before I go to sleep - because recall the next morning seems strongest.
I found lesson 11 a bit 'abstract' so I was trying to be as visual as I could. Unfortunately, this was just before bed-time, and I spent the night dreaming about Chinese! In my dreams I was trying to memorise, trying to recall - and getting stressed. I woke up very tired!
I'm finding the Heisig-method visualisations very powerful in differentiating between some hanzi which look very similar - like 犬 and 尤
I'm learning not to deviate from the method! For example, this is the character for cry: 哭. I didn't bother constructing a "story" for this because I could see this looked like someone crying. Simple. Unfortunately, when I tried to recall it during a revision session, I was trying to remember the story that links the 'primitives' of the word - not remembering that I'd bypassed that part. OK, always use the story from now on!
I already knew the character 高 (tall) - so I was a bit lazy in constructing the story. A couple of days later I realised I could not write it - even though I would easily be able to read it. Again, I'm learning that I shouldn't deviate from the formula.
I twittered this a few days ago: "Going to try clarify in my mind difference between 'same', 'uniform' and 'equal' - so I don't confuse 同匀 & 均 with my Heisig visualisations"

But what about my actually ability to read? Well, I'm surprised at how much just 300+ characters can make a difference. For example:

I jogged past my local Chinese restaurant the other day, which I simply know as "Royal China". I had previously (a year ago?) tried to memorised the Chinese name (皇朝) - but I had zero recall. This time I immediately recognised the characters, the story, the meaning. Flawless.
I went to MandMx where they have great cartoons in English & Chinese, and looked through the collection of food cartoons. From not being able to read much of anything a few weeks ago, to generally being able to follow the meaning (obviously there were holes in my comprehension) is a huge success. Feels great.
Was looking through some old notes written in pinyin - and suddenly they looked so plain! Where were the Chinese characters ... tsk tsk. I guess this means there is no going back.

So at this point I'm still really pleased at my progress. I know that the more I learn, the more time I'll have to spend revising. But at least I'm not having to write characters 100 times - that never worked for me.

Don't forget to subscribe to Mandarin Segments, to keep an eye on my progress. And I look forward to some comments & suggestions from you.

Now on Twitter ...

2009-08-21T10:47:00.003+01:00

I'm now on Twitter - you can follow me here.

This will include to get notified when there are new posts, and to follow my learn-to-read-Chinese experiment with more regular updates.

Learning to read Chinese (day 6)

2009-08-18T07:59:00.003+01:00

Just a quick update on how my learn-to-read-Chinese experiment is progressing, using Heisig's original methodology. You can read my opening post for this with day 0.

In the previous 5 days I've learned another 142 characters, taking me to 236 in total (including the 94 I learned while still choosing which system to use). Last night I went through chapters 6-10 (characters 95 to 235) to test my recall, and I got 97% accuracy. That was very pleasing.

That might be enough detail for you - and if so, you're welcome to read one of the other posts on Mandarin Segments. But if you'd like more details, please continue ...

In terms of how I spent my time:

day 0: chapters 6 & 7 (about 40 characters)
day 1: chapter 8.1 (only 15 characters)
day 2: chapter 8.2 (about 15 characters)
day 3: chapter 8.3 (about 15 characters)
day 4: chapters 9 & 10 (60 characters)
day 5: revision - as mentioned above

In summary, this means:

15 minutes a day of learning (except for day 4 where it was an hour)
5 minutes a day revising the previous day's work (usually getting 14 out of 15 correct)
overall, this is about one character a minute - although I can see that if I don't take enough time to create a vivid image in my head, then it's more difficult to remember.

Here are some of my observations from the last week:

I sometimes got confused between the word's definition and the 'image' I apply when using at as a primitive, like 寸 (#166) which actually means 'Chinese inch' but where you use the concept of 'glue' when it's part of other characters - for example, a village is 村 - which uses the image of trees (木) glued (寸) together
sometimes the definition just doesn't make sense, like #142 (原) which is defined as "flatlands" (what the hell???), when the dictionary says "original"
because of the way the characters are 'constructed' in the Heisig method, for the first ever I'm finding it easy to differentiate between 句 (#67) and 可 (#92)
I don't write the characters 100 times over to remember them - just once or twice in the air, because the way the system is constructed it's really logical - not just brute force
sometimes characters contain the same primitive and have similar meanings - like 砂 (gravel), 沙 (sand) & 尘 (dust) - which I found a little confusing, but I'm pretty sure it was easier than if I was just rote-learning

In terms of the 4 mistakes/can't-remember characters that emerged in my review:

I just couldn't remember what 够 meant (#117) - my image just wasn't clear enough
I thought 厉 (#123) meant 'obey', but it actually means 'stern' - my image for this character wasn't clear enough for an abstract character like this
for 漠 (#233) I thought it meant 'mirage' but it actually meant 'desert' - I got confused between the components of the image and the meaning of the character

For the 6 'deviant' occasions where I got a similar meaning (but not quite right):

乱 (#100) means 'chaos' not 'mess' - but I've forgiven myself
求 (#140) means 'request' not 'invite' - and again I'm trying not to beat myself up over this one
when reading, especially with most words being two-character sets, these small deviations shouldn't interfere too much with my understanding
(but I'll try harder next time, I promise)

It's now 00:30 and I'd better get some sleep. First, though, I'd like to make a dent in chapter 11. Good night.

PS. If anyone understands what "flatlands" means, or why it was used instead of a meaningful dictionary definition, please let me know in the comments below. Guesses are also welcome.

Tones -vs- Facials

2009-08-17T14:14:00.002+01:00

I came across this article, entitled Facial Expressions Show Language Barriers, Too, which makes for very interesting reading.

Credit: iStockphoto/Joan Vicent Cantó Roig

One of the conclusions is that East Asian people appear to be less skilled in interpreting whole-face expressions. This made me feel a little better, because Westerners struggle with tones, so here's something where we appear to have the upper-hand.

Also interesting is how they explain the difference between the emoticons used in the West compared with the East.

Learning to read Chinese (day 2)

2009-08-15T00:56:00.003+01:00

I've been thinking a little more about Chris' comment on my previous post, and I thought that an example might help explain why I'm still excited about this.

Today, using the Anki flashcard system, the word for razor came up: 刮胡刀 (guā hú dāo).

Normally the odds of remember that word would have been low. Very low. I guess in future I would have looked out for a three character word which ends in 刀 (dāo=sword) and thought of 'razor'.

But immediately I noticed that the middle hanzi (胡) was one I'd already learned a couple of weeks ago (RTH #17) - which means "reckless".

The book had taught me that the first primitive looks like gravestone - and means 'ancient' (create your own image here), and that the second means 'moon' (ditto). In my mind, "ancient moon" makes me think of the ancient werewolf curse - thus "reckless" (I'm sure you can picture a werewolf going all wild & reckless, right?).

So now I have a three-hanzi word where the middle is 'reckless' and the last is 'blade'.

I haven't learned the first hanzi (刮) yet, but I looked a little closer ...

I can see it's made of primitives for 'tongue' (RTH #40 - which I already learned), and 'sword' (RTH #83). Since the dictionary tells me the overall word means 'scrape' - it's easy to remember a sword being used to scrape the tongue. Ouch!

So, although it looks like a complicated process, it took less than a minute to associate those three hanzi with 'razor' - and I doubt I'll forget them.

And if you know some of the 'primitives' I've used in this comment, there is probably a very good chance you're not going to forget either ...

... scraping the reckless growth with a sword ...

Razor. (Simple, yes?)

I hope that helps you understand my thoughts. (It certainly helped me solidify them by writing this out!) I can easily recall characters, and remember characters, and now even remember more multi-character words.

I'm looking forward to day 100!

(apologies for the garbled post)

2009-08-12T22:04:00.002+01:00

Sorry to all those subscribers who received an (unattractive) draft version of this post when I pressed [enter] instead of [backspace]. Sigh.

You can see a neat & complete version of the article here:

Learning to read Chinese (day zero of a personal experiment)

Greg

Learning to read Chinese (day zero of a personal experiment)

2009-08-12T21:42:00.005+01:00

I'm going to do an experiment, and I'm going to document it here.

Until now my focus on learning Chinese has been conversational Mandarin. Since my last trip to China in May, I realised that my next challenge was going to be learning to read Chinese. Properly. Sure, I had picked up, say, 100 characters by then without even trying, but I wanted to be able to read signs, newspapers, etc.

So I've spent a bit of time reading up on various methods of learning to read, and eventually I've chosen one to focus on. In future I will log my efforts and my results.

Context

I don't live in China, so I don't need to be able to read Chinese. This is a personal goal - and I know that life is likely to get in the way, often. If it comes to limited time availability to learn, I'm going to choose conversational Mandarin over reading.

I work really long hours, so I have limited time to learn Chinese. If I progress slower than you think I ought to be progressing, don't let that stress you. If you spend more time than me, and that's your goal, then you'll progress faster than me.

Is this really day zero?

Yes. Well no, not really. These are the reasons why not:

I already knew about 100 hanzi before I began
in experimenting with different systems, I learned 94 new hanzi - just to check that I liked the approach

These are the reasons why it is day zero:

I will not judge myself by whether I simply know what the word means (for example, 中 is easy), but by whether I know the "story" associated with that character, so that the past doesn't matter
the approximately 100 characters I knew before I began this experiment are not the first 100 in my book, so it's not really a 'chunk' of advantage

"Remembering the Hanzi"

After trying a few methods (I'll write about this in a later post) I decided to learn to read using the approach taught in the book called "Remembering the Hanzi" ("Remembering the Simplified Hanzi 1", actually).

You can see the books' homepage here, and you can download for free the first 61 pages of the (simplified) book here. In summary, though, the key points are as follows:

it was originally a system for learning Japanese Kanji developed 30 years ago, but was only adapted for Chinese hanzi in 2007
book 1 covers 1500 hanzi, with another 1500 covered in book 2
the system does not teach the pinyin of the hanzi (and so you won't know how to pronounce it), it rather teaches a method of association for seeing characters and immediately identifying the meaning
it starts off creating a 'story' or 'visual image' for basic characters, and then builds these 'pieces' (what the book calls 'primitives') into more complex characters
when you see a character, your mind splits it into the 'primitives' which make it up, which in turn creates mental images, allowing you to remember the meaning of the character based on the image that pops up
it is easier than it sounds, and much more effective than it sounds.

I recommend that you read the PDF link above - where you'll learn the history of the method, explanations of how it works, and even a very detailed example.

Here are affiliated links to the two books on Amazon:

Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

The next few posts ...

I'll let you digest the content of this post - while I pour myself a glass from a great bottle of South African red wine I opened earlier.

In the next few posts I will talk about the first 5 days where I learned 94 hanzi (with near-perfect recall a week later, with no revision during that follow-up week), I'll mention the other methods I considered before embarking on this, and I'll talk about the little epiphanies I've had since beginning this experiment.

And you?

You can take anything you want from this series of posts - just make sure you're subscribed to Mandarin Segments (go to the top-right corner of this page) to watch my struggle.

If you've tried this approach, drop me a comment and let me know how it's gone for you. If you previously decided not to use this method, let me know why.

And if you have some words of encouragement, don't be shy either.

It takes two (or more) to tango

2009-08-04T21:13:00.004+01:00

One of the great things about learning Chinese is that you get to speak with Chinese people - who are usually very flattered that you're learning their language. On many occasions I've said 'nǐ hǎo' (hello - 你好) to someone, and they've replied (in English): "Oh my God ... your Chinese ... it's excellent."

It's nice to be appreciated.

Then you learn a few more phrases - and you can even manage a short conversation about 'hello' and 'where is the toilet?'. And (other than stumbling a little with your tones) they can understand you - and you run towards the little door at the back of the restaurant where they point you.

It's nice to be understood.

But you'd like to speak Chinese better than that. Right? You'd like to be able to have actual conversations with people. And although you can make yourself understood with the basics, when they talk back to you, you're immediately lost.

You blame it (internally) on the speed of their talking, and your lack of skill with tones. But that's not it. It's your vocabulary - you just don't know enough words.

You know how to say 'nǐ hǎo' (你好), but you have no idea when they say 'zěn me yàng' (怎么样) - which (although it literally means 'how is it going?') is close enough to 'hello' in general conversation. It quickly reaches the point where it's no longer good enough to know just one word for things - you have to learn more, especially if those variants are in common usage.

It's very nice to understand.

So build some synonym-based WordPacks for yourself ...

How many ways do you have for saying toilet (or bathroom, or lavatory, or ...)?
How many ways can you agree with someone (yes, or correct, or good, or ...)?
How many words do you know which mean restaurant? Or hotel? Or a meal?

In the beginning, it doesn't make a difference. But - as I realise all too often - if you want to get past that, you need more than one word for everything.

After all, it does take two to tango.

Goodbye. (zài jiàn) 再见
See you next time. (xià cì jiàn) 下次见
Until we meet again. (zài huì) 再会
Take care. (màn zǒu) 慢走

A Chinese paper trail

2009-07-25T15:11:00.004+01:00

The Chinese invented paper, so it's only fair that we should use it. And say it.

In Mandarin, the basic hanzi for paper is 纸 (zhǐ). And using the WordPack concept, there are a whole bunch of types of paper (specifically words ending in 纸) that you ought to know.

If you're a beginner, learn the first three. Everyone else ought to know all of them.

newspaper: 报纸 (bào zhǐ)
facial tissue: 薄纸 (báo zhǐ) or 纸巾 (zhǐ jīn)
toilet paper: 手纸 (shǒu zhǐ)

paper napkin: 餐巾纸 (cān jīn zhǐ)
wallpaper: 壁纸 (bì zhǐ)
wrapping paper: 包装纸 (bāo zhuāng zhǐ)
recycled paper: 还魂纸 (huán hún zhǐ)
cardboard / stiff paper: 硬纸 (yìng zhǐ)

If it makes it easier for you to memorise some of these words, note that three of them begin with 'bao' (1st, 2nd and 4th tones).

And if there are other 'zhǐ' words that you use relatively often, drop us a note in the comments below.