Learning to read Chinese (day 6)

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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.

HowTo ... look up a word really fast

When you need to look up a word quickly - what do you do?

(We're assuming for a moment that you're at your computer. If not, then add an extra step: Go to you computer.)


You could open your paper dictionary (which you keep next to your computer, of course), you could surf to a dictionary website (like MDBG.net or zhongwen.com - which would be even faster if you've bookmarked it), or you could phone a friend.


So here's how I do it ...

I might be at work, sending an email which contains the word "fortunately", and (at the back of my mind, because the front of my mind is for work only) I challenge myself. I can remember that the word in Mandarin is "xìng hǎo" (see the WordPack post on this) - but suddenly I can't remember how to write "xìng" in Chinese.

For a quick lookup, I use:

• {apple}{tab} (switch to Firefox)
• {apple} T (open a blank tab)
• type: m xing hao {enter}

And that's it! Just a few keystrokes which take less than 3 seconds. The listing appears like this, and it's easy to see in the results which hanzi I'm looking for. It's just like magic (but without the annoying background music).


HowTo ... do it

• (I use a Mac, but it's easy to make this work on Windows)
• Switch to Firefox (and if you're not already using it, tsk tsk)
• In your Bookmarks Menu right at the top, there is probably one called "Quick Searches" (create it if you don't have it)
• Create a new bookmark in that folder with the following characteristics: Name="MDBG", Location="http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddictbasic&wdrst=0&wdeac=1&wdqb=%s", Keyword="m"
• Don't type the inverted commas above, just the content.

HowTo ... use it

From now on, when you begin a URL with the letter m, Firefox will send everything that you type after that into the URL you have entered, in place of the %s that appears in the address. So here are some examples of how you might use this:

• m xing hao
• m shi3
• m shuō
  
• m milkshake
• m on good terms
  
• m 纯文字页
• m 开*
  

Variations

• You can use different keywords instead of m (like 'lookup', 'dictionary', etc.) - but a single letter is the fastest.
• Other browsers probably have a similar functionality to Firefox, so if you have the details on how to do it for them, please make a note in the comments below.
• You can use other Net dictionaries, although in order to do this, the word or phrase that is being looked up must appear in the URL. For example, it doesn't work with zhongwen.com. If you have the location-text for a different dictionary, please leave it in the comments below for others to use.

OK, so your work here is done. Now go look something up.

Running away from the Sea

One of the first memories I have of breaking words down into their component parts is doing it with "Shanghai" (上海).

The first step was easy, since the two characters were 上 (shàng, meaning 'on') and 海 (hǎi, meaning 'sea'). Shanghai ... "on the sea" ... fantastic. Even I could remember that!

It was very easy to remember '上' - but '海' remained elusive for me. So I got to wondering how that character might be made up. (And if you haven't already starting asking questions like this, don't worry ... you will!)

So with use of a decent dictionary (I used both MDBG.net and zhongwen.com here), we find that:

• 海 = 氵 + 每

hǎi (sea) is made up of shuǐ (the water radical, usually 水) and měi ('every')

• 每 = 艹 + 母

měi ('every') is made up of cǎo (the grass radical, usually 艹) and mǔ ('female' or 'mother')


So now it's quite easy to remember:

• 海 每 母
• hǎi měi mǔ
• sea every mother
• eg. Shanghai everyday parents

Linking words together like this is another example of what I've called Wordpacks (see here for an introduction, and click here to see all Wordpacks in Mandarin Segments so far). I find it makes it easier to memorise words, and certainly more interesting to learn.

And please don't just read this post, nod your head sagely and think that it would make it easier to learn, if you could just be bothered. Look at the three characters, note the similarity, note the build-up (or the the 'build-down'), make up a sentence ('a sea for every mother'???) - and learn it. Actually learn it.


And if you have similar hanzi build-ups that you use, drop us a note in the comments below.

Ways of applying Current (目前)

People say that Chinese is hard to learn, and as a native-English speaker, I agree.

One of the difficulties I find is that the sentence construction can be non-intuitive. Sure, it's still Subject-Verb-Object, but it's what happens in between that's difficult.


For example, take a look at this link from about.com, where it uses mù qián (目前) (which means 'currently') in two different styles:

Tā shì mùqián zuì shòuhuānyíng de nǚ míngxīng.
她是目前最受欢迎的女明星｡
She's currently the most popular star.

Nǐ mǎnyì mùqián de gōngzuò ma?
你满意目前的工作吗?
Are you currently satisfied with your job?


The English translations looks the same, but ...

In the first case, it's an adverb of time - in terms of when this action is taking place. Structurally: [subject] [verb] [time adverb] [object].

In the second case, the English translation also seems to be referring to time in the same way. However, in Mandarin it's used as an adjective - referring to the current state of the job, rather than the current time of being satisfied. Structurally: [subject] [verb] [time adjective] [object].


This post isn't going to completely change the way you learn Chinese, but hopefully it triggers a little more scrutiny in your processing of Chinese sentences as you continue to learn.


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