I'm the flippin' veggie...

What a difference a day (and one horizontal stroke) can make. Here's what my 'radish' turned out to be:

As Chris very perceptibly figured out, it was meng4, not luo2 that I saw in the cosmetics ad. The word Masayume apparently means something like Dreams that Come True. Which might be a great name for a Japanese cosmetic, but frankly it's a bit odd for one made in Duesseldorf.

And will my dream of being able to speak this language ever come true? I think I'd need a lot more than cosmetics...

Do I smell of principled radish?

Over the last couple of weeks I've seen a perfume for sale in Italian shops. It seems to have a Japanese name (can't quite remember - four syllables with 'ake' at the end), but it also boasts some hanzi as a prominent part of its title:

正萝

I wish I could offer a photo here, but I haven't had the chance to go and take a picture yet. I recognized zheng1 but I had to memorize the second character and look it up on zhongwen.com. Either my memory is shot, or the perfume smells of upright/principled radish, or the Japanese use hanzi in a very different way to the Chinese!

ChinesePod Practice Plan: Day One

In a word: excellent (or in three characters, 非常好）.

Vera is my tutor and she came really well prepared or else she's great at thinking on her feet. In either case, the effect was good. What impressed me most was how she wove together the elements of the lesson, and my only somewhat convoluted personal circumstances (Irishman living for the Summer months in Sardinia), to ask me questions that I was often able to answer, and always interesting in trying to answer.

I definitely learned a few things, but most of all, as with the Velcro theory of learning that Ken from CP has mentioned recently, now I have another hook. Today, Chinese was not just something that I read and heard, it was something I spoke. I've been missing my local language class in Ireland for quite some time, and these 10 minutes this morning were a great boost.

My goal above all is to lose as much nervousness and self-consciousness as possible when speaking Chinese. It's inevitable to feel this to some extent (hell I feel it when speaking English under some circumstances!) but too much of it interferes with the flow. That aspect, and some progress in getting over the current 'hump' in learning that I've been in for a while, will be the criteria I use to judge if the overall experience has been worth the effort and expense.

The next big push

I've been a bit quiet here lately. I've moved to Italy for the Summer and there has been a bit of business travel too so I've neglected my studies (and blog) for the past few weeks.

I'm finally back on track, and this very morning I spoke with Aggie from Chinesepod about my Practice Plan. I've signed up and begin tomorrow. I'm really keen to make this push me to the next level. My local (Ireland) Chinese teacher told my classmates and I that we were at a point on the journey uphill towards Chinese whereby one more big push would make all the difference. I hope she's right. I know I'm probably progressing, but most of the time I do feel like I'm trying to fill a leaky bucket.

With Aggie, the Skype connection wasn't great so we switched to a phone line after a while. I'll try again with Skype tomorrow with my Practice counselor. The plan is to use the first hour of my day (9-10 CET) preparing the day's lesson, and having the phone call. At 10am it's 9am Irish time and I can just get to work. In the evenings I usually have an hour or more to recap if necessary, and begin the preparation for the following day's lesson.

According to Aggie I'm an Intermediate, which kind of surprised me. Perhaps I am from a listening comprehension point of view, but certainly not as far as my spoken Chinese is concerned, or my hanzi reading either. So the practice sessions will be based on three Intermediate lessons a week, and two calls to revise, recap and bring all the threads together. I'll be concentrating on travel Chinese to prepare for my big trip - I can't believe it's only 6 months away.

I apologize in advance: Another 'joke'

You will understand, that all this in done in the interests of furthering the total sum of Chinese knowledge. If humour has to suffer in the process, well, so be it.

"医生，我的老公跛是因为他的右腿比左腿长。如果你是他，你会怎么做？"
"也跛。"

Thanks to liping, and apologies to everyone else.

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.

Who chooses the names?

There was a thread recently on Chinesepod about students' Chinese names - usually students get Chinese names from their teachers or friends, based on a phonetic transliteration of their own Western names. For example my own is bu lan deng (布兰登）. On that thread I asked a question which didn't find an answer: For famous Westerners (actors, politicians etc.), who chooses their Chinese names so that they are consistently used across newspapers and TV for example?

Given the subtle play on words and symbols that Chinese appears to offer, there's sure room for fun or failure.

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.

Oh go on then. A joke (in Chinese)

Class is out here, but my teacher is still in touch by email, and encouraging us to communicate in Chinese. Jokes - even old ones like this - make far more interesting homework than most things. So here was my first attempt (after being corrected by my teacher):

客户: 我有三个问题。 你是怎么收费的？
律师： $100 一个小时。你其它两个问题是什么？

Laugh? I nearly did.

Listening to Chinese: An observation

I hope this observation isn't so obvious as to be uninteresting:

There are two ways to listen to a Chinese sentence. Both have their value, but they are completely different experiences.

1. Listening to a sentence without knowing what the sentence means.
   In this case, if the vocab and/or speed of delivery is challenging (and it usually is for me), the best I can hope for is to pick out a few words here and there, deducing if not the meaning, at least the gist. It's an intellectual, almost investigative activity.
   
2. Listening to the sentence after finding out what sentence means.
   There is a completely different head on my shoulders now. I'm matching the sounds with the Chinese words that I know they correspond to, and really hearing the meaning in much the same way as I do in my mother tongue. The intellect has been short-circuited (actually that's not hard in my case).
   

One point about 2 is that it's extremely ephemeral. It's like trying to see 3D images by looking out of focus at those printed images (you know the ones, right?) - you can manage it for a fleeting instant, but then the moment is gone. Or like that point in meditation when you start to become aware that you're extremely aware - but inevitably blow the whole feeling away by analysing it.

Another point about 2 is that it's not at all the same as just letting the sentence wash over you. There is a kind of attention there (in fact if you switch off and just let the sounds wash over you, the moment is gone) but it is not an intellectual type of concentration.

One last thing to say, by way of describing this kind of not-quite-concentrating state, is that to me it feels like I am listening to each phrase of the sentence superimposed on its meaning (in English perhaps, though maybe it's mentalese). This has the effect of bringing the phrases to life and injecting them with real meaning.

I suppose the importance of doing 1 (i.e. not rushing off to read the meaning of a sentence before listening to it) is to learn how to bring these two ways of listening together - to transform one into the other on the fly.

Of course what's particularly stupid is that when I arrive at this realization, what do I do? Do I spend more time in the zone? No! I rush off to blog about it. What a git. I don't deserve to learn this language.

Carnegie Hall: Chinesepod subscription report

Very VERY old joke:

Lady (to man on street): Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?
Man: Practice lady, practice.

I'm about half way through my first month of premium Chinesepod subscription. I took this extra expense on for two reasons: 1) I wanted to check out what it had to offer before deciding whether the Practice level (higher cost again) might be worthwhile and 2) my face-to-face lessons here in Cork are over for the next few months and I really don't want to lose any gains I might have made so far this year.

In these two weeks I have noticed that I am actually studying a lot more. Because the information and activity is organized in one place (on the web site), and probably because I am paying for it anyway, I find myself gravitating towards the web site for the best part of an hour each evening, and learning new stuff each time. This works much better than just perusing through my notes. I'm getting obsessed - a necessary obsession. A result of this extra activity is that when I try to form sentences in my head, they tend to come a little more easily now. Some of them may even be correct! Thanks to the expansions I can see many more examples of well-constructed Chinese sentences (I am increasingly impressed by the flexibility and applicability of one of the first constructs I ever learned: the humble shi4...de (是。。。的) is even more elegant and rich than I had ever imagined (比我想象的还好 - see!!）

You can't beat a little hard work and invested time. What Chinesepod has done is given me a nice place to work.

What I would like to see on Chinesepod next would be more exercises (e.g. "write the following in Chinese") and more leverage from the vocab (e.g. a Google gadget to show me one of my own vocab items refreshed every hour for example) . The possibilities are endless.

Trying Chinesepod's Premium Subscription

After a little more than a year using chinesepod's basic subscription level, I decided to upgrade to the next level (premium) to coincide with Chinesepod's own upgrade to Version 3.

I am in the fortunate position of not knowing what CP was like in version 2 for premium subscribers - many are feeling aggrieved with the hitches that an upgrade inevitably brings (I'm a software engineer - I'm immune to bugs :-) ).

I had vagues notions of what was available - things called expansions, and exercises, and goodness knows what else. I had held off for so long because I felt that I had enough with the podcasts and pdfs, alongside my local teacher here. But our classes are on a break right now, and I know that I'll be away for the Summer and won't have the chance to attend lessons, so I decided to take a closer look at CP and upgrade for a month.

Five days in, and I'm really pleased with the decision. I have a lot of things to manage in my life, between work, family, masters and planning a big trip, so one thing that CP Premium definitely does for me is to help me manage my learning. I can schedule what lessons I want to do. As I study them, I can save off the vocabulary that I'd like to acquire (and later play with flashcards and memory games based on my vocabulary). I can set up a feed that sends me the lesson podcasts (and the dialog only versions - very important point that) for what I should be studying that day (I've cleared down all the other podcasts I had saved and now I'm building up a collection organically from scratch).

The big revelation for me was the expansion section. All there is to it is a bunch of other sentences that use the salient structures and vocabulary from the podcast. But the effect is terrific. I have a dreadful memory, but the extra step of going through the expansion sentences makes things sink in much deeper. Not just in terms of memory, but also meaning. And the exercises are great. Having a goal during the process is something I have blogged about recently, and I find that completing the exercises correctly is nice little short-term goal to spur me through to the end.

I can't learn Chinese in my car. I realise now that I need some quiet study time. Chinesepod premium has become my desktop, my library, and my classroom. I'm looking forward to trying out the next level - Practice (where I get some telephonic time with a native speaker and tutor) - during the summer. Jeremy Uriz is already blogging about this.

PS: I know there are bugs, and some of them are very irritating. I have confidence in these guys to sort it all out quickly.

Listening till it hurts

I've been given some thought to the advice that I've been given by Chris and Liulianxiaoyu - just keep listening. I'm convinced by the argument that listening comprehension is the most important route to getting to the heart of a language. The question, however, is how should I listen (Brian: Go Away! Crowd: How shall we go away Master?).

I've found a lot of value in listening to the same Chinesepod Intermediate podcasts over and over, but I'm sure I could be doing better. I think I need to make it more goal oriented. I don't expect to understand everything, but it's too easy for me to gloss over large parts of the dialog and stick to the easier bits. (Perhaps there are exercises like this already as part of premium Chinesepod subscription - time for me to upgrade perhaps. )

Or maybe I should set myself the goal of finding one new word or phrase that I recognize each time I listen. Or read the transcript earlier, and choose phrases to recognize. Decisions, decisions.

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)

Learning Chinese Using Google Doc Collaboration

Just a little technology aside, about something that we are doing in my class - perhaps if you are also having face-to-face lessons you might find the same dynamic useful.

In the classroom everyone takes their own notes. There are a number of problems with this:

1. The inevitable mistakes we make are never corrected (and practice makes permanent, not perfect).
2. The work of taking notes is divided, duplicated but never shared. We all pick up on the things that we find interesting, but while these are intersecting sets, there are always things that one person will have taken note of that will have gone over another's head.

Enter Google Docs. I've already pointed out that I'm a nerd, but Google Docs is very usable by anyone who can use a computer. You can create and edit documents in the same way that you might do so for a Word document, but of course it's saved on Google's servers, not your own machine. The magic begins when you start to share the document with others. You can either make your document readable by others, or indeed editable by others.

My class's use of Google Docs has evolved to the point that we take notes directly onto our laptops - and directly into a Google document if we have connectivity. Typically we take pinyin notes and add the hanzi afterwards, before adding our classmates and teacher as editors.

The result is what one might expect from the Wisdom of Crowds - the documents get checked by teacher (and corrected where necessary) and the contents are shared amongst classmates so each can pick up what the other has missed.

As a result, the Google Doc notes become another online resource for the class to use.

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.

Does your deug bat?

Fantastic stuff: The latest Chinesepod Elementary lesson is based on a famous Peter Sellers sketch.

Learn Chinesepod on Your Terms at ChinesePod.com

Humour is everything. It's as fundamentally human as language itself. The Sellers sketch made me want to learn this lesson from start to finish. I don't just mean memorize it (heaven forfend ;-) ) - I mean understand every part of it so that when I tell this to my chinese colleague, and my teacher, I can do so to maximum effect.

More of this please, Chinesepod!

Or I'll sic my hen3 xiong1 de gou3 (很凶的狗) on you ;-)

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...

Blogging your way to the back of the class

Over on Tower Of Confusion, Edwin points out that blogging time can creep into you learning time, effectively slowing down the learning process. I have to admit that I can see this happening with me, so as soon as I read his blog entry, I immediately began to...blog about it.

Feck.

But the urge to communicate is amongst the reasons that many folks have reported as being the reason they are learning Mandarin, over on the Chinesepod blog. So it stands to reason that language learners should also be bloggers. There are a number of other reasons that I can offer as to why we should blog about our attempts to learn. Some of these even make sense.

1. Fear. The Roman military leaders used to toss their standards into the ranks of the enemy amassed in front of them, by way of, emmm, encouraging the common soldiery to fight harder in order to retrieve it. (Apparently going back home to Rome without your standard was not considered good form). Similarly, if you continue to tell the world that you're learning a language, it's a hell of a lot harder to give it up, than if you were studying under your duvet with a torch.
   
2. Feedback. If you talk Chinese to yourself in an empty and solitary location (like the shower, the car, or the space between Dubya's ears) then there is no opportunity for correction, or indeed fear of contradiction. That's a good thing of course, and you can replicate this by deleting all negative comments from your blog. Try doing that in the normal course of conversation.
   
3. Ferrets. This is one of the reasons that doesn't make any sense at all, but has the duel virtue of starting with 'F' and being a third point (you always need a third point). See this interesting Wikipedia article about Feeding The Sick Ferret (which to be frank I always thought was slang for something completely different). It will at least take you away from this page.