A Christmas Challenge!

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!!

• Tips & Tricks for Heisig visualisations
• Using Modern Art to learn Chinese

Some Controversial Posts

• Learn to speak Mandarin fluently in 6 months
  
• Pinyin proves Heisig is right
  

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 ...

• Why a meal is worth more to me than my grandmother...
• Pleasure while Practising
• Strangers on a train
• Delusions - when roadsigns become Chinese characters
• Do not scream!

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

Tones -vs- Facials

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.

Review: MandarinSpot (annotation)

Summary: If you're looking for a website to annotate Chinese text, I recommend (and yes, I use) MandarinSpot.


Whether you're learning to read Chinese, or are already mostly fluent, you're going to be looking at Chinese text. (Yup, I worked that part out all by myself.)

And every time you come across a word that you don't know, you copy & paste it into a web dictionary, and then move on. But that's a painful process - especially if you're a beginner and you're pretty much looking up every word.

To speed that up, you can use annotation websites. Basically, you load the Chinese text through the annotation site. However, when you now hover your mouse over a word or a phrase, a little popup tells you how to pronounce it in pinyin, and what it means.

MandarinSpot allows you to enter web addresses, or to paste Chinese text - either of which get annotated.

1. Websites

You can see MandarinSpot in action on the BBC Chinese-language site from the following screen capture, and note the transliteration & translation wrt the phrase I'm hovering over:



There are many different annotation tools out there, but my reasons for using MandarinSpot include:

• it preserves the appearance of the website (some annotation sites seem to reformat the page a bit, or not cope well with images)
• it preserves the function of websites (a couple of other sites I tried made a mess when I clicked links on annotated pages)
• it doesn't just translate individual characters, but gives you the entire word or phrase where relevant (again, see screen capture above)
• it gives you five options for annotation, including Hanyu Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin & Wade-Giles)

And at one point I had problems where it was giving me cached versions of one particular page, so I emailed MandarinSpot - and Alex replied, did some tinkering, and it worked. So they feel more 'personal' to me.

2. Pure Text

If you simply have text, then paste into into the text box on the MandarinSpot page, and you get something along the lines of the following (text taken from the BBC sports page). Note how the transliteration is provided alongside the Chinese text, with the popup window also giving you translations:


Reasons for using MandarinSpot in this context include:

• Again, you have five options for your method of transliteration
• There is a print option - see the screen cap below - which does two great things: (a) it formats the output for printing, and (b) it gives an option to have the vocab from the text neatly presented at the end of the text (if you're an advanced reader, you can choose just to have words listed which are HSK Level x and above)
  

Finally, other things worth noting are:

• MandarinSpot also has a dictionary
• It's all powered by CC-CEDICT
• They provide javascript-based bookmark links, so that you can make using the site's tools even easier for yourself
• There is a mobile version of the site, for people accessing it through a Blackberry, iPhone, or similar

Happy, uhm, annotating ...