Chinese Learning Process, Level Two: Processes

I ran out of words when it came to naming this level. By Processes, I mean the habits and routines that we form on top of our infrastructure or workbench. They can be pretty mindless, in the sense they are things to do, rather than things to think about.

In my software world, this layer represents the things that can be scripted, though we might not have done this yet. Perhaps we're waiting for the processes to settle down and become more predictable before we automate them. In any case, there's nothing much that is directly productive going on, but we are doing the necessary housekeeping that supports what comes next.

Following the language learning analogue, I synchronize my iPod with iTunes once a week for use in the car (car time, as Chris has recently pointed out, can be very valuable). I also agree with my study parner (more on that in a later blog entry) what scenarios we will try to replicate, what roles we will play.

What do you do? Do you collate your weeks new vocabulary? Do you set your VCR or equivalent to record certain shows? My processes are quite sparse I think. As I said in the last blog entry, I outsource a lot of gruntwork to Chinesepod: The range of materials I use regularly is relatively narrow, and so I can leave it to that service to manage things for me. If I were better organized I might try to arrange to speak with my Chinese colleague in a regular way rather than the haphazard manner it happens now, or tag my vocabulary in a way that made consulation more easy.

Chinese Learning Process, Level One: Infrastructure

Following on from a previous blog entry, I'm going to continue to kick my analogy with software engineering process while it's down. Let's start with the layer that I call Infrastructure. In software, the tools and libraries that populate this layer are such things as source code repositories, build scripts, dependency management tools and continuous integration engines, as well as less concrete things like internal standards on project directory structure and granularity.

WAIT! Don't go away. I'm done with the techobabble.

What these tools do is give a basic workbench on which something may be built. My Chinese language workbench is these days composed almost entirely of Chinesepod, augmented by reading other learners' blogs, and occasionally indulging in a little grammar on the side.

This lowest layer of the pyramid is the necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for being productive and creating something of quality. Pretty much all students will have constructed this layer for themselves. But if this is all you have as far as process is concerned, then you have a reduced chance of learning well and quickly. It's just the starting point and there are more wrong turns from here than right ones (even allowing for multiple 'right' directions). It's like having a car and a track, but no idea of the race line, no pit-stop strategy, no tyre choice, no team instructions (tip of the hat to this weekend's Shanghai F1 race). But I'll write more on the other layers in later blog entries.

What constitutes a good choice in Infrastructure? Something that you don't have to think too much about. Something that serves you, rather than something that you have to continually service. It should be an almost invisible workbench, that makes the tools visible to you when you need them, then fades into the background again. It should remove as much drudgery as possible, automate what can be automated, and above all, it must be stable and broad enough to support the layers that come next (hopefully this will become clearer from later blog entries).

I've outsourced my Infrastructural needs almost entirely to Chinesepod. In this build-or-buy decision, the alternative would have been to get my hands on a whole bunch of learning material, integrate it with a selection of teachers (assuming they were both available and compatible), store new vocabulary by hand (and generate flashcards and memory games from them), cross-reference the lessons with other lessons based on topic, vocabulary and level, and then constantly keep developing the workbench to make it more complete and more invisible.

My guess is that I wouldn't have any time left to actually learn much Chinese.

The Study Process

As perhaps previously mentioned, I'm a software engineer. In fact my main responsibility is as the architect of my company's software development processes. There are some parallels between constructing a successful software development process, and constructing a workable study process which I'd like to outline.

I've heard it said that the most important thing about processes is making sure that you at least have one. I don't agree. If you study, you have a process. It might not work very well, but it's there. So the first step is evaluating the one you have and deciding whether it meets your needs.

In our software process, I've divided the areas of interest into 4 layers of decreasing size, each building on the other, forming a kind of pyramid. On the bottom layer, there are the concrete tools and libraries that make up the physical aspect of process. Next there is a layer of processes - repeatable, almost mindless, activities that are done regularly. The next layer again is called practices. In software engineering, this is the layer that takes into account the skill, experience, and attitude of the individual practicioner. And lastly there is the Organization and Communication layer - the part that allows individuals to collaborate and share tools and techniques.

The parallels are as follows:
Infrastructure: What books do you use? What websites? Do you attend a class?
Process: Do you repeatedly listen to dialogs. Do you do tests in workbooks? Do you prepare for your classes?
Practices: How do you listen?
Communication: Do you work alone? If you have a study partner, how do you plan and work together?

The parallel with my professional life is far from perfect: Building software is primarily a collaborative activity that nonetheless requires a large amount of solo concentration. Acquiring a new language on the other hand, is primarily is solo effort though potentially with a lot of interaction. There is no finish line in language learning - no delivery date.

But they are both efforts that require dedication, even a certain amount of obsession, to get good results.

For the next few blog entries I'll work my way up this pyramid and explain not just what I'm using now, but what I've used in the past. Because the most important part of any process is its ability to adapt.

Advice to Chinese Language Beginners

Even writing this title, I feel a little strange - even a bit of a cheat. Who am I to give advice to beginners when I'm barely out of the cradle myself. That said, this October I'll be two years into my study of the language, and there is at least one thing that I would do differently that I'd like to pass on.

In a nutshell: Get over it.

I think I spent as much as the first 12 months marveling at - but also being intimidated by - the twin strangenesses of tones and characters. They are surely the two biggest differentiators between a European language and Chinese. And while it does take a bit of time to get the sounds and ideas into your head, I think I spent far too much time pondering this - to the point of letting it get to me.

So my advice to anyone who is just encountering these novelties now for the first time. Do yourself a favour: Be amazed, have your mind boggled, lose your intellectual footing - for about 2 weeks. And then stop. Don't give this aspect of the language too much respect. Treat tones and hanzi like they were the most natural linguistic artifacts in the world. In that way, they will become exactly that faster than you might think.

Review of ChinesePod Practice Plan

I've finished a month of CP's Practice Plan, a step on the learning ladder that I've been anticipating for quite some time. In a way I'm quite relieved it's over, because it's quite intense and requires a daily commitment that feels almost work-like. On the other hand, that's exactly what I was hoping it would be like (a daily linguistic workout), and I think it'll take a few days for me to adjust to not starting each day with a 10-15 minute Chat with Vera.

What can you expect from Practice?

• An appraisal of your current level and requirements.
  
• A lesson plan spread out over a month (for monthly subscriptions) based on your level an requirements. The plan in my case had three new dialogs per week, and two days of review.
  
• Daily calls from your counselor that assume you have studied the planned lessons, where your counselor engages you in conversation using the constructions and vocabulary of the lesson.
  

What I didn't expect from Practice!

• A level of personalization that was all-encompassing: The questions that Vera asked me, the translations she asked me to make etc all took into account where I lived, my personal circumstances, and so on. This beats the pants off La Plume de ma Tante, is very much in keeping with ChinesePod's "On Your Terms" philosophy, and made the language come alive for me. It made clear not just Vera's level of expertise, but also her level of preparation.
  
• An immediate effect: I'm not suggesting that my Chinese has suddenly jumped a level. I started as a low Intermediate, and I'm still a low Intermediate. But I feel more confident in my ability to use Chinese, and I certainly have acquired more vocabulary. I put this latter point down to the fact that when you actually use a word, it's on the fast-track to long-term memory. The extra learning facet that Practice provides has been great.
  
• Listening comprehension: You would think that ChinesePod itself, centered as it is on daily dialog podcasts, is all the listening comprehension that one would ever need. But I learned at the end of my month's Practice that 听力 is what I need to work hardest on. Listening passively to recorded sentences works to a certain level - probably quite a high one. But the understanding needed to understand during the to-and-fro of conversation is, well, harder!

To summarize, I'm very very glad that I've used the excuse of my Summer isolation to keep my Chinese simmering. In fact it raised the temperature nicely - nothing to do with the Sardinian sun.

Tones and Genes

A brief one: I just read this article from New Scientist that uncovers a potential link between one's genetic endowment and one's ability to speak tone-based languages. I don't think it changes much for any Occidental learning Chinese, but it does contain an echo of an idea I read about a long time ago: the notion that languages evolve towards increasing simplicity over time.

It matters where you put your tongue.

Tongues. You can skewer them with metal barbs without feeling much pain (apparently), you can almost find words at the tip of them, you can set other people's wagging with relative ease, you can twist them for fun, or roll them if you've got the right genes. And if you know just the right place to put the tip of your own, you can make all the difference to somebody else. If that somebody else is Chinese. Because then you can make all the difference between pinyin pronunciation of zh and j, or sh and x or indeed ch and q.

The problem is, that even if we are capable of daily high-speed lingual gymnastics, even if English speakers can say this, that those and these with a facility that would make a German speaker zrow up (allowing for notable exceptions like Bertie Ahern - our Taoiseach again for a record turd time), if you stopped somebody in the street and asked them "exactly what are you touching with your tongue when you pronounce a word that begins with w?" chances are they won't have a clue. Why? Because the last time you had to consciously think about it, you were at an age where you also had to consciously think about controlling the muscles at the opposite end of your alimentary canal.

It's been a while now (like since the start) that I wasn't quite sure what the difference in pronunciation between chi and qi was. Or shang and xiang for example. But the answer is easy and difficult at the same time. The pronunciation guide from Chinesepod makes it easy: for your x, j and q, put the tip of your tongue behind your lower teeth (or where they would normally be if you hadn't taken up rugby as a lad). For sh, zh and ch, reach for the roof of your mouth, maybe even curling your tongue back a little if you can manage it. Easy really. Easy to write about and easy enough to read (even if you had to wade through 3 paragraphs of nonsense to get here). Easier done than said, though.

To put this advice into practice, you are going to need to get back in touch with your tongue, and start to reacquaint yourself with its general whereabouts. This may even require a little bit of direct manipulation, which isn't what folks on the street or even family members are used to seeing you do (are they?) But once you hear the real difference between shang and xiang from your own mouth... Well - you'll be speechless.

What's so difficult about understanding Chinese?

I'll tell you what. It's not tones and it's not the hanzi (the two elements that I originally felt most differentiated Chinese from Western languages). It's the homophones. Here's a quote from a book called A Brief History of the Chinese Dynasties, by Bamber Gascoigne, where he writes about the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci's* investigations of the Mandarin dialect during the late 14th and early 15th century:

The Mandarin dialect of Beijing used only 412 different monosyllables, with the result - in one quoted example - that a small dictionary, giving a total of no more than 4000 everyday words, was found to contain sixty-nine pronounced yi. The confusion is slightly modified by the famous four tones of spoken Chinese...But these are not distributed with mathematical fairness, and of those sixty-nine words no less than thirty-eight used the falling tone. Spoken in the fourth tone, yi could mean bosom, different, contemplate, wing, city, translate, a hundred thousand, hang or any of thirty other equally varied possibilities. In practice the Chinese, when speaking, avoid ambiguity by a system of duplication, tacking on another word of the same meaning just as we might distinguish between hang-suspend and hang-execute, or as schoolchildren do between funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar.

Here's the situation I often find myself in: When you're learning a language and trying to parse a spoken sentence, your ears latch on to the familiar. If the familiar part is one syllable/hanzi, but it turns out to be the 'wrong' one, your brain has gone so far down the wrong parsing tree that the rest of the sentence is a washout. You're trying to interpret what you subsequently hear based on an incorrect context.

For example, if you hear the familiar zai4 somewhere at the start, and think that it's 在, then you are going to be listening for a place, time or perhaps a verb coming next. If however it turned out that the zai4 you heard was actually part of zai4 xie2 - 载携 (to carry/to bear) - then you've already lost the thread of the conversation and it's going to be very hard to pick it up later. It would have been easier if the verb to carry had had a completely different sound. It almost seems that in order to learn a word, you have to learn all the other homophones in order to, as they say in all the best B&W detective movies, eliminate them from your inquiries.

I know that's not actually the case: nobody learns a language one lexical item at a time, and I'm not going to start a new trend! So what can we do to avoid this problem? My best guess would be to adopt the following rule of thumb: Never learn a singular syllable on its own. Always learn them in groups of two or more. The hope would be that these combinations would be what the ear will recognize as familiar.



* BTW: Ricci was the man who gave Kong Fuzi his Latin name of Confucius.

** Edit: Corrected homonym to homophone (28/03/2007)

Face, Competition and Chinese Wives

A great night of Chinese learning last night. A few things happened and a few things occurred to me, all of which I'd like to share.

In a lot of ways, my techniques for learning Chinese seem designed to appeal to my less appealing qualities (I must have a very low subconscious opinion of myself):

1. I don't like losing face. As explained previously, that's probably one reason that I blog. So if I keep telling the world that I'm learning Chinese, then I'd really better do it!
   
2. I'm competitive - there's no getting away from it. I discovered it relatively late in life when I first got into a go-kart, and I've seen it many's the time since. But this can be a really good thing. One of my classmates is particularly good, and his constantly improving standards are really putting it up to me. In a moderate, healthily competitive context, he is really helping me bring my game up.
   

That same classmate has a terrific memory (even if he insists that he feels he onset of Parkinson's). He too finds the jMemorize tool useful, but he suggested what I consider a better way to construct jMemorize lessons than the one I've been using up until now. Instead of composing a jMemorize lesson of lots of different words related by topic, I'll try putting one together with one or two key words or patterns, reused in various sentences.

On a completely different note, our teacher's husband joined us for the last 30 minutes of the class. This was a real eye-opener for me. Firstly, it made it very clear to me just how well our teacher speaks English - she left her hubby in a cloud of linguistic dust. But at the same time, she spoke far less English than her husband did. She spoke clearer Chinese, and only spoke English as a last resort or to give more context. The other thing I noticed was just how much power (though perhaps that's the wrong word) the lady of the house wields. She made gentle but regular fun of things her husband said, and when he was getting under her feet, he was dispatched to make the tea!

Our classes are always entertaining and full of humour, but this time the experience was more lively than ever.

Dealing with Intermediate Dialogs

My move to Chinesepod's Intermediate level coincides with the discussion between Steve Kaufmann and Ken Carroll about the best way to learn a new language. As is almost always the case, these apparent disagreements eventually resolve to "your mileage may vary". In other words, what works for me might not work for you. I don't doubt that this is true to some extent, and a reasonable way to calm potentially heated discussion. But for all our differences, I think we humans are very much the same when it comes to language.

I have read that Steve doesn't believe in Chomsky's universal grammar. I don't know if his skepticism extends to disbelief in a human biological language faculty - language centres in the human brain. (Personally, I am completely convinced by the argument that says that such a capacity must exist in order to explain our children's astounding language learning capabilities.) To those who do accept that our ability to learn and use language is part of a universally human genetic endowment, the obvious corollary is that there is probably a set of principles that apply universally to language learning, that should work for anyone, from any culture, at any time. (I don't know what those principles are, but I'd sure as hell like to find out!!!!) In any case, this would seem to suggest that Ken and Steve can't both be right.

So, from the general, to the specific:
Here's what I think, and what I plan to do, as far as the Intermediate lessons are concerned:

1. Listen over and over again for the first few days. I do this in the car, in the supermarket, wherever I can bring the iPod.
   
2. Only when I can't gnaw any more meat off the bone do I turn to the pdfs provided by chinesepod, and the transcripts provided by Yves (what a guy!) Incidentally, if it weren't for John's English interventions during the Intermediate lessons, I would have to switch over much much earlier to the transcripts. I've just started in this level, and the speed and vocabulary is very challenging. However I wonder if after another year I will find the English intervention more a distraction than a help?
   
3. I read the transcripts fully over and over, using hanzibar as a dictionary. I skip over elements that are likely to lead to linguistic indigestion.
   
4. Then I go back to the lesson and listen over and over again, hopefully distinguishing, understanding and absorbing more that I did the first time round.

(I wasn't going for a digestion metaphor here, but now that it's done, it does seem appropriate).

This is very different to what I do with the Elementary lessons, where I spend much more time on the hanzi, and where I actually try to speak the dialog (I keep that activity for the car, as it's not such a great idea in the supermarket). I feel comfortable enough with the Elementary to start to get a bit academic or even adventurous with it.

And from the specific, back to the general:
A conclusion, in so much as I can offer one, is that the points of contention between Ken and Steve (importance of speech and the use of the learner's language) coincide quite precisely with the differences between techniques that I would personally apply for different levels. I'm not going make any suggestions as to why this is - I'm just pointing out this fact.

So maybe they are both right! Feck!

What!? Not again!

I thought I was safe with ni hao. I was wrong. I thought I was safe with using first names. I was wrong. I thought I was safe with xin1nian2kuai4le (新年快乐） but again, my Chinese colleague tells me I'm wrong.

Maybe this is a regional thing (he's from Da4lian2 大连). But according to the man I address in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as xiao3wang2 (小王) - he's neither that young nor am I that old - 新年快乐 is used on the 1st of January only. One should say guo4nian2hao3 (过年好), and should say it after the day of the Chinese New Year has passed (or at least not before it).

What's going on here!

On a different note, xiaowang also calls me the "second most proficient Chinese speaker in the company". Guess how many Chinese people work in my company...

Sidebar: Schoolyard Creole

This evening, my daughter was showing me the latest clapping game that she plays with her schoolfriends during break. There's two really interesting things about these games and how they are played here right now.

Firstly, they are making a comeback. My sisters played them thirty years ago or more (it really is a girl thing) but they had disappeared over the intervening generation. What's brought them back? Immigration. Many kids have moved to Ireland from so many different countries - especially Poland - and they have brought back this really sweet schoolyard game with them.

Secondly, the game that my daughter showed me was in effect a kind of creole version of the game. Well this isn't linguistically correct of me - no new language was being created here - but the game now has a Polish language component to it (Nina (7) is very proud that she can pronounce the Polish 'perfectly' - according to her Polish friend Milena).

Given the very high numbers of Polish families in certain Irish towns (my one included) I wonder whether in a few years there'll be some new words in the local teenage lexicon whose roots will be clearly visible as Polish. I can't tell you how exciting a prospect this is, and how unimaginable it would have been just a decade ago.

Making the leap to Intermediate

Something is definitely happening. There have been a number of recent indications. I've been trying to learn this language for almost a year and a half. When I took stock of things after the first year, I came to the conclusion that all I had managed to do was remove the initial strangeness of the tones, the characters and the strange grammatical structures (whadya mean, shi4 doesn't mean 'to be'?!). The sounds and the concepts were a little less foreign to me, even if I still couldn't understand or say much.

Perhaps I've become a bit more diligent, or maybe I've paid enough dues now, but it feels like I've moved up in the bus. When I hear a sentence on Chinesepod, or read my teacher's notes for a new lesson, the number of percentage of new words compared to ones already seen, is smaller. Often the old faces appear in new company, but still make some degree of sense or have some recognizable logic to them.

Yesterday, during our weekly lesson, I found myself listening to and understanding longer and longer sentences. Even the structure are coming a little easier.

Don't get me wrong - I'm still a crap Mandarin speaker. But I'm a crap Mandarin speaker who's started listening to (and kinda getting) the Intermediate Chinesepod lessons!

A slight change in direction

I started learning Chinese for the challenge and to try to keep the synapses crackling. But very soon afterwards, the idea of travelling around the world began to form in my wife's mind and my own (in that order - as with most good 'family' ideas).

Now it would appear, in a delicious irony, that I've got to learn another language before leaving Ireland: Irish! In order to home-school the kids while we're on the road, I'm going to have to get my Gaeilge back in order (it's been 20 years since I last studied it, and 26 since I last enjoyed that study). Ken from ChinesePod (if you're reading): How's your Irish?! I realise the market is about three orders of magnitude smaller, but any chance of you coming back here and setting up IrishPod ;-)

Sticking my neck out

Following my own excellent principle (ahem) that you can never learn a language unless you are prepared to make a complete arse out of yourself, and also taking on board Chris's excellent advice about going to Chinese medicine shops to try out speaking Mandarin, I found myself in front of Dr. China in Mahon Point, Cork.

Well actually I just found myself there by chance. But also by chance I have a persistent arthritic pain in the knuckle of my right hand. But the direct approach is not for me. Oh no. Instead of marching in there, rapping (arthritically) on the counter top and announcing my Mandarin intentions, I perused the leaflets on arthritis (and other ailments) that were strategically placed around the outside of Dr. China. And there I lay in wait, counting on the same entrepreneurial zeal that so cleverly placed the leaflets, to react to someone nibbling at the bait. In under 10 seconds a member of staff appeared from what seemed like a very busy shop to ask if she could help me with anything.

So far so good. Well we chatted about the availability of the doctor and the shops opening hours while I plucked up the courage to speak some Chinese, for all the world like a 16-year-old boy asking for throat lozenges in a pharmacy when he really wants condoms.

"One last question" I said, "ni3 shou1 zhong1wen2 ma?". She replied automatically in the affirmative, and in Chinese. It was only when I offered "wo3 zai4 xue2 zhong1wen2" that she seemed to realize that I was actually attempting communication. Now that, as far as the Chinese content of the conversation is concerned, is that. I switched to English to explain that I was learning here in Cork and that I was just trying it out (if not indeed trying it on). That's the problem about learning how to swim in pools - there's always a nearby edge to grab hold of.

Despite the embarrassingly basic level, it felt really good to have stuck my neck out and not get it chopped off. I fared much better than the time, for example, that I was watching a film in Italian with my Italian girlfriend (now wife) and my parents-in-law to be. On hearing the word "sega" over and over again, I asked aloud what "sega" meant.

"Wank" apparently.

Anyone else out there got any similar confessions?