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.
   

Sidebar: China's economy, China's ecology

I know that posting about another post is the cheapest of blogging activities. When that other post is your own, from a different blog, then I'm not sure if this compensates for the apparent laziness, or makes it worse due to egotism.

You be the judge.

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!

Chinese for the Classroom

For those who are studying in classrooms or with a tutor, here's some vocabulary that you might find useful (on my teacher's site). As is often the case, I've made flashcards out of this for those of you who, like me, suffer from bad memory.

As well as suffering from a bad memory, I suffer from a lack of opportunity to use chinese. This means that very often, during classes, I (and my classmates) are slow to speak. What I really like about this particular vocabulary is that it allows us to stay in Chinese for longer, without resorting to English at the first hurdle. While this might not seem very important, but the impact is tremendous. Staying "in charactor" as one of my classmates buts it, makes Chinese seem much less like a thing to be studied and more like a language to be spoken.

Sidebar: Braille for Chinese

Following on from the irrelevant but disturbingly attractive discussion on hearing aids and chinese tones, and the resulting avalanche of questions from Chris, I found myself trying to find out how blind Chinese people dealt with reading Braille.

You might think that this is just a simple matter of googling the words chinese and braille and selecting the first returned page. Well you'd be right. Feeling kind of smug now, aren't you.

Well then, can you figure out how the Chinese braille system works before following that link? You probably think that it's nothing more than a braille representation of pinyin, don't you? You do, huh? Well you'd be right again (dammit). So now that smug feeling is transforming into something altogether more sinister - you're feeling rather self-satisfied and superior by now. Wondering what the hell you're even doing hanging round a blog entry like this, eh?

Right then - clear off! Go on!

Bloody intellectuals.

Requesting Advice on Travel in China

I've posted on my Round The World Trip blog looking for any travel tips related to China. If anyone out there in the Chinese-language-learning community has any advice to offer, please do check out this post and leave a comment. Thanks!

Some more flashcards...

I've created a single flashcard file that I intend to expand a lot. I'm transferring the vocabulary (and eventually sentences) from the notes I've taken during the last term of lessons here in Cork. I won't blog every time I update it (that would be too noisy) but feel free to download it regularly to pick up any changes.

As ever, my flashcard files can be found here.

Cork Chinese Learners: This weeks flashcards

For my fellow Cork Chinese students in particular, but for anyone else who may be interested:

I've made flashcards from Liping's lesson number 9. They can be found here along with any other flashcards. This time I've realised that there was no need to enter the cards twice (doh!) and it's simply a matter of selecting the last of 4 'side modes', under the advanced menu, when starting a lesson.

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 ;-)

Sidebar: Mandarin Tones and Hearing Aids

I just came across this short article (and I wasn't even looking up anything to do with Mandarin!) which explains that folks with hearing aids might have difficulty understanding tonal languages.

Besides the interesting description of how one must use both sides of the brain in understanding tonal languages, it begs the question: Do native Chinese speakers fare worse with hearing aids than speakers of non-tonal languages? Are there some special specifications for hearing aids in China that make them more sensitive to musical sounds? Does this really matter?


No. Probably not.

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?

Flashcards Continued: Some more

Taking a leaf out of John's book, and based on the lessons from my local teacher here in Cork, I've put together some flashcards using the jMemorize tool. This is just a first attempt (and only covers 3 out of the 8 lessons that Xiong Liping has prepared for us). The categories are a bit misleading, as the names of the lessons don't always coincide with the word-building section from which they are derived.

Again taking my lead from John, for each word I made two cards - one the reverse of the other. I wish the tool would make this easier by including a copy-and-reverse option.

My cards show simplified Chinese characters with toned pinyin on one side, and English translations on the other. If you download them, please let me know if I screwed up somewhere!

Flashcards: Thanks for the Memories

At the age of 37 (to steal that famous line from Marianne Faithful's Ballad of Lucy Jordan) my memory is sadly in tatters. I think it has been for some time. So one of the biggest problems I'm having with Chinese at the moment is absorbing new vocabulary.

I've taken to playing chinesepod podcasts, and my own local teacher's mp3 files in the car over and over, based on the old proverb that if you through enough mud against the wall, some of it is bound to stick. But thanks to John's Flashcards I now have another facility to deal with my fizzled out synapses.

John - thanks for your work on this. So far I'm finding it a really useful resource - so much so that I'm considering writing some flashcards for my fellow students here in Cork, based on the content of our course so far.