Free online Mandarin lessons

I've been working my way through the lessons on this website for my Chinese studies:

It seems that it was set up by Oxford University—not sure how long ago, but some of the video looks pretty old.

Anyway, I thought I'd point it out as I've been enjoying working through the lessons. They're just about the right level for me, and all the dialogues attempt to have some amusing point thrown in at the end. Even if the amusing point isn't funny in itself, just the intention can raise a smile.

Another interesting point is the acting. The women that appear in every video are pretty bad at acting—it's painful in places—but they're supported manfully by a middle-aged bloke who does a good job despite the crick-inducing woodenness going on around him.

But besides the cheesy humour, and bad performances, it's useful material with some good exercises thrown in for practice after you've watched the video. Take a look.

Peacecorp language learning manual

I found the Peacecorp manual for language learning* on the internet the other day. I downloaded it and gave it a read. The manual is filled with good language learning tips, and it is clear that it has been put together by people who have been through the process. It’s not too text heavy, and is pretty practical— there's very little in the way of linguistic theory which was a relief for me.

Developing a learning plan

The manual advises identifying areas of your life where you need to use your target language and developing a language learning plan for these topics. Basically, you should identify something like “sending parcels at the post office” or, like the example they use in the manual, “chatting with other teachers during your lunch break” and prepare for this situation by preping vocab, and developing a possible dialogue that you might have in that situation. You should go over this with a native speaker, the book advises, and practice the pronunciation, register, etc. before going into the situation itself and trying out what you have learnt.

This seems like a pretty sensible way to go about things, so I thought I’d give it a go. Recently, I decided to improve my apartment with a few plants, so I needed to go to a florists to but some flowers. I prepared some vocabulary and a dialogue, (I uploaded the dialogue to lang-8 and got some feedback through that site), then I visited the florists and it seemed to go pretty well. I got to use a few new words and managed to buy myself a nice Chinese Bellflower for my veranda.

Chinese Bellflower:the fruits of language learning

Anyway, I think this is a good tactic. What other areas should you prepare for when you are learning a foreign language? Here’s a list of 5 topics that I think should be top of any language learner’s list:

1. Getting a haircut
A personal one this. I’m not a big fan of getting my haircut, in any language, and I put off going to a proper barber for years in Japan because of this and wrote about it here. But worth the effort, and barbers / hairdressers are great for language practice!

2. Asking for directions
When you’re living abroad, you’re going to get lost sooner or later. (The first time I went to China it took me about 20 minutes. It only took me another 5 minutes or so to find out that your average shopkeeper in Beijing speaks no English whatsoever!) Essential!

3. Asking where stuff is in a supermarket.
This one is another personal one. I’ve a tendency not to ask for help until I’ve exhausted every possible aisle and nook and cranny of the supermarket. Would probably have saved myself a lot of time if I’d just worked out how to ask in the first place. Took me much longer than it should have.

4. Ordering in a restaurant
Pretty obvious and always a favourite of beginner textbooks. But we’ve all gotta eat. This one will get a lot of use. It’s very easy to pick up food ordering language when you live where your target language is spoken, but I think it’s a good idea to cover it anyway, just to make sure you’re getting it right and the waiter isn’t just nodding politely at your dodgy language skills.

5. Telling your favorite story / joke
I’m not a big fan of people who bring prepared stories to the dinner table to be honest, but I don’t think it can hurt to think about a couple of stories that you’ve told in the past and think about how you might go about telling those in a foreign language— you could look up the vocabulary at least I guess.


So to sum up, I think this manual is pretty interesting. The only problem for me is is that it's clearly written for people who have a lot more time to devote to their studies than me. It is time consuming to put these learning plans into action, and is not something I can see myself doing on a regular basis (unless I can get into the habit I suppose).

How about you? When or Where do you think you need to set up a learning plan for? Have you done this kind of thing before?

*I've lost the link for this unfortunately, but I can email the pdf to anyone who's interested in getting it. Just leave a comment below. Or send a direct message to my twitter account.

Ideas for journal entries

Been getting back into language studying after the past couple of weeks of craziness here in Tokyo. It was pretty hard to concentrate on other things while you have half your mind on the next aftershock, and the other half on the latest radiation readings in the area.

Anyhow, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things now, and I've been using Lang8 again a bit more recently. I seem to go through input and output phases, (I tend to output more in the way of writing rather than speaking at the moment, which I need to work on) and now I seem to have gone into output mode again by writing on my Lang8 blog.

The challenge with writing a daily journal is finding something to write about. I don't think my life is dull, but I don't seem to have the motivation to write about the ins and outs of daily life (again, I should probably work on this).

One tool I have been using to generate ideas however is the stumbleupon.com website. This website enables you to "stumble" almost randomly around the internet to find sites that other people have labeled as interesting. I say almost randomly, because the sites you do actually stumble through are regulated by your settings page where you can specify what your interests are, and thereby only stumble onto sites that are related to these interests. I find this site gives me some good ideas for journal entries on Lang8.

Writing this though I realise I should try to work on writing (and speaking) about more mundane day-to-day topics: as these are the kind of topics and language that I probably need to be more familiar with on a daily basis.

OK, that's my goal for this evening. One Lang8 entry about my day today. Hope it's not too dull!!

Using Google images

Yesterday I had a lesson in Chinese about ordering in a restaurant. I'll be honest, I'm a complete dunce when it comes to food. Even in English I have trouble describing dishes and tastes, so trying to do it in Chinese is an Everest sized task for me. Anyway, I left the class with a list of Chinese food stuffs on my sheet of paper and as I sat down to go over the vocabulary today I was struck by a great idea: Google images!

Check it out. Just punch the word into google and you get the perfect idea of what you're looking up.

From the top we have:

粽子 zong4zi: a rice ball in a leaf

春卷 chun1juan3: spring rolls

馒头 man2tou: steamed bun

羊肉串 yang2rou4chuan4: lamb kebabs

粥 zhou1: congee

在香港我吃了真好吃的粥！

Recall flashcards are no more

I decided to suspend the recall cards in my Anki flashcard deck. (recall cards are when the English sentence appears and you have to try and remember the Chinese.) I'm not sure how much good they're doing, and they are the most frustrating part of doing flashcards.

I said before that the help I'm getting from the audio files with my pronunciation is the best part of the flashcards for me. Trying to translate the English sentence into Chinese in my head is taxing, and could potentially be counter-productive seeing that translating in your head is one thing you should be avoiding when speaking/learning a foreign language.

The recall cards are still there, but for now I want be using them. This means I won't have those painful moments trying to rack my brain for the corresponding Chinese sentence to translate the English. It'll just be straight reading the Chinese sentences, whilst listening to and practicing the pronunciation. Hopefully, this will make using the flashcards a more efficient and enjoyable experience, and I should be able to get through a higher volume of sentences faster.

The flashcard debate

One of my more personalized flashcards

Are flashcards really the answer? Doubts are beginning to creep in to be honest. They're definitely helpful, and with the audio file added, they give me good practice listening and repeating after a native speaker, which is pretty valuable for Chinese because of the pronunciation difficulties.

But I've begun to think that as far as absorbing vocabulary and sentences goes, maybe using podcast material is more beneficial over the long-term. Podcasts give you more context, and are certainly more interesting than the flashcards, which are really just a series of unrelated, random sentences.

I follow a few other language bloggers on the internet, and I know that there are those that are against flashcards, and those that are for. I'd probably say that I'm in the 'for' camp for now, just from the point of view that they are a good tool for remembering certain phrases, and for remembering Chinese characters.

But they do have their drawbacks. One of the main ones—which is really the reason I have begun thinking about them a little more critically of late—is that you really do have to tailor them for yourself, and this can be time-consuming. I sometimes find myself spending more time, looking for, copying and pasting, and uploading sentences, than I do actually thinking about them in a meaningful, semantic way.

But like I said my current deck of cards has definitely helped me progress in some ways, especially with the pronunciation, so I'll keep them ticking over for now I guess, just to keep my options open.

Getting immersed

I haven't written a post for ages, and there's an excellent reason for that. All my time has been taken up studying and blogging in Chinese. It's great! I got caught up in the whole flashcards thing, and that has been keeping me busy, but now I've also got myself up and running on China's version of twitter. Come and check it out at:

http://t.sina.com.cn/easterngrean

All good for getting immersed. Also getting into some Chinese music through this search engine.

And even started watching a bit of TV and listening to the radio here.

There are no excuses anymore!

Tweet

My method for making flashcards

Things seem to be moving quickly of late with regard to study method. I've almost ditched the idea of completing the Smart FM goals (yes, it does seem pointless to set a goal only to ditch it) but I think I've come up with a better method.

I need to really nail those basic sentences and get the pronunciation down pat for the Chinese. So I've started data mining sentences to put into my Anki flashcard deck.

Basically, if I find a word I think is important, say "important" for example, I'll search for sentences that contain the word "important", mostly from tatoeba and nciku. The sentences need to be fairly straightforward, and not contain other new vocabulary that I'll need to learn on top of "important". This way, when I go over the card, I can concentrate on the sentence, the word, and the pronunciation. If the sentence contains recently studied words or grammar that's even better.

I then collate these sentences and put them into anki. Over the course of a day I might add 10-30 new sentences which cover anywhere from 3 -10 new words or phrases.

The final stage of this process is putting the sentences up on Rhino Spike to get a native speaker to make a recording. I haven't really worked out the best way to do this yet, but I've got a few in the Anki deck already, and these sentences in particular really stick when it comes to having to review them.

The only possible sticking point with this method I can see so far is the number of Chinese speakers who use Rhino Spike. It's not a great number at the moment, and the sentences generally take a few weeks to get recorded. Hence my previous post attempting to recruit through a Chinese social networking language sites who's name I won't mention for now.

Anyway, all is good at the moment. Feel positive about this. Just need to knuckle down and start getting through the flashcards.

Journal writing deleted on italki

I wrote a journal entry on italki about the audio recording site Rhino Spike.

Admittedly, although I claimed to be sharing the benefits of the site with italki users, my reasons for writing it were self-serving.

I uploaded a load of Chinese Mandarin sentences on Rhino Spike that I wanted recording to put with my Anki flash cards, to help with my mandarin pronunciation.

These haven't been recorded yet, so I figured I'd try and get a few more Mandarin speakers using the site by writing a little piece about it in Mandarin and posting it on italki.

Anyway, I just received a message from another user telling me that she just saw my entry moments before it was deleted (by the administrators we presume).

Why would they do this?

They don't want competition from other language sites?

These two sites are hardly in direct competition. And I'd have thought if italki really wanted to help their users, they'd at least encourage this sort of information sharing.

Seems like overkill on their part to me. They see another website being talked about and they immedietely delete the entry?

Is this what the internet is about?

Or is Rhino Spike a blacklisted site in mainland China?

I can't really see why.

Anyway, here's my entry for those poor souls at italki!

一个实用的网站

我觉得这个网的概念非常好。

大家知道这个网站马？

http://rhinospike.com

你的想听的外语文章能录被讲母语的人录下来。

我想录的上载句子很多。

你有空就看看一下这个网站

Taking stock

I have come to a few conclusions about myself and my method of study over the past couple of days. Not sure what has brought this on. Guess it was just time for these things to occur to me.  Here are a few of the highlights:

I am a bit of a daydreamer.

I don’t concentrate hard enough when I study.

I am not concentrating on important things that are important for communication.

I am studying language that is too difficult, language that I will not be able to use because I do not have the foundations to get to a point in a conversation to use this language.

I need to practice basic sentences, and focus on sentences that are useful in communication.

I need to work with Anki more to practice lots and lots of basic sentences, to get myself confident with these, so I have the foundations to move further on.

I need to focus on Chinese or Japanese.

I want to focus on Chinese because I think I have more interest in China and more motivation to learn the language.

I need to study hard, and by this I mean focus hard, and get myself thinking about the language and challenging myself to produce the language more.


Ditching Japanese seems like a big step, and will be hard seeing that I live in Japan (for now). But I think as far as individual study goes, I want to focus exclusively on Chinese. I have the drive to do this, and when I study Japanese it feels like I am wasting time that I could be using to study Chinese. So I’m going to get rid of, or at least hide, all the Japanese language books I have in my apartment and focus on Chinese.

Chinese character goal

I have set myself the goal of completing all the Smart FM Chinese character goals by the end of February—6 months from now.

This goal will be difficult, but I have made it difficult in the belief that this will get me to study faster and harder than if the goal was easier.

At the moment I’m on level 2. Level 1 took me approximately 20 hours. Considering level 1 was pretty easy for me anyway because I’m familiar with a lot of the basic Kanji, let’s say that it takes 24 hours to complete one level. In that case, a robot would be able to complete the course in 10 days. Unfortunately, I’m not a robot, so 6 months is my goal. That means I have to complete one and a bit goals per month—let’s say 30 hours a month. That’s about an hour a day. When I have to work, that's unlikely, but if I can keep in the game, I can play catch up when I have some spare time.

I'm going to measure my progress by saying 50% of each level should be completed by the 15th of the month—50% of level 2 by 15th September, level 3 15th October and so on, and the whole goal should be completed by the end of the month (so far, so good). Then it's just a case of fitting those other 2 or 3 goals in somewhere along the way.

Should I manage this, then in theory, I should know enough Chinese to read a newspaper by March next year. I guess the grammar might be a little weak here, but if the goals work as they should, then character recognition and pronunciation shouldn't be a problem. Seems hard to believe.

Watch this space.

Musical Instruments or Foreign Languages: which are harder?

Is mastering a foreign language as good an achievement as mastering a musical instrument?

I was skimming through this site the other day when I saw a Chinese Mandarin script that had been recorded by someone from Scotland, who listed their accent as Glaswegian. The thought of someone speaking Mandarin with a Glaswegian accent was pretty enticing, so I clicked on the recording, and, low and behold, the Mandarin was perfect. It really was like listening to a native speaker. I was well impressed!!

Well, this got me thinking as to how I would love to be able to speak Mandarin like this, and what a sense of achievement this would give me.

I began to think, would being able to speak Mandarin this well, be equivalent to say, mastering the violin, say to a level where you could play in a proper orchestra? And if so, why are there no people who are exulted for their second language talents, as world class artists like say Joshua Bell or Yo-Yo Ma are?

The only comparison I could think of is perhaps someone like 大山 Dashan, or Mark Henry Roswell, to give him his real name. But then 大山 really is famous for his performing skills I think, it just so happens that he is performing in a foreign language, and performing a type of cultural comedy, 相声 Xiangsheng, that is completely foreign to his native culture.

So I guess my question is this: Is learning a musical instrument to an extremely high standard more difficult than learning a foreign language fluently? Is there something that makes an art form like playing the violin different to training your vocal muscles in such a way that there are able to speak a foreign language?

One argument might be that mastering a foreign language really is just a means to an end, and not actually worth anything in itself—seeing that there are, depending on which language you are learning, already many millions of people who can already do what it takes a language learner years to achieve, just because they were born and raised in that area.

My feeling is that learning a second language is very much like learning a musical instrument, and the satisfaction gained from mastering either is just as great. The truly great pianists, cellists, and guitarists however, are at an advantage over the language learner in that they have mastered something that few people manage to do. Mastering a foreign language is equally, if not more difficult—you have to rely on, and use others to a certain extent to make progress, and bend to the culture and society of the language you are learning—but the number of people who actually master the skill are then dwarfed by the number of people who can do it anyway, without spending so much as a minute consciously thinking about it. It’s like spending years and years trying to behave and move like a cat, only to find out that there are already millions of cats!!

Perhaps.

Maybe I should take up the violin… again.

Actually, I should point out that the Mandarin recording uploaded by the Scotsman, was, it turns out, not actually recorded by a Scotsman at all, but by a native speaker. On further investigation it transpired that some technical difficulties forced the recording to be uploaded by someone other than the person who recorded it. Still, I’d like to think that there are some Glaswegians out there who can speak Mandarin like a native.

LingQ

Been using a site called LingQ over the weekend. There are lots of listening resources on this site, with scripts that you can check off the vocab you know, and highlight for review the words you don't. It's fun to listen to some real-life conversations on the podcasts, and you get a much better feel for the language with the longer transcripts than with say the one-sentence examples you get with the SRS (Spaced Repitition Software) like Smart FM.

So, I've kind of put the SRS on the back-burner for now. Actually, I'm just waiting for the moment LingQ tell me I have to start paying for their service, then I'll probably be back on the SRS.

Pay a visit

Again, the power of using Lang-8 has come to my aid. I was scratching my head for the word to say that I had visited somewhere, like when I was in Africa I visited a lot of Safari Parks, or something like that. I know 訪問する is for visiting, but kind of more like if an Ambassador visits a church. I was thinking of 訪ねる（たずねる）but I think this is more often used if you visit your Gran, so I ended up putting plain old 行った:went, when in doubt I guess, just plump for the safest option. Anyway the corrections I got threw up 訪れる（おとずれる）, which I've never heard before, but obviously has the same kanji as たずねる。Looking at my dictionary now actually, looks like these two are pretty interchangeable. Here's the dictionary def: 「訪れる」は、「訪ねる」とほぼ同じ意味だが、「彼を訪れる」という言い方はせず、「彼の家を訪れる」の形になる。他に、「春が訪れる」「平和が訪れる」のように、ある時期・季節・状態が「やってくる」の意味にも用いる

Building a method

Starting to get into a routine after some time away from studying. Taking the useful sentences that I come across in the Smart FM quizzes and putting them into Anki. This should help build my vocabulary, get myself familiar with the sentence patterns, and help with my pronunciation, if I read them out loud as I go through them. This is just for the Chinese at the moment. Kind of feels like I'm starting with a clean slate with the Chinese after wasting so much time learning useless stuff with the Japanese (studying words I will never use in conversation, and not going over what, if anything, I had learnt).

Need more time

Lately, I've had little free time for studying, and it begins to feel like I might have forgotten everything. Of course it's not true, but I think momentum and continuity are very important in language learning. At times where I have had time to study over a period of days, confidence grows and I can notice the improvement. I guess, it's obvious to say, but I really need more time to study.

On a seperate note, I've noticed that I tend to retain flashcard vocabulary better if it's part of a sentence, rather than just presented on its own, so I'm trying to improve my flashcard vocab decks. I think I might have said this before, but context is important, and helps with memorization.

First Chinese Lang-8 entry

Yesterday marked my first Chinese entry on the Lang-8 website. Until now I have used the site exclusively for Japanese, but I decided to test the water with my Chinese with a simple entry about a visit to the park on a nice sunny day. It was short, and simple... and still needed correcting. Am I depressed about this? Not at all. I'm happy that I feel confident enough to make an entry in Chinese and I feel I know what I need to do to improve—due to my experience learning Japanese. Learning both languages certainly seems like a tall order, and I'm not convinced myself that it's a sensible idea, but I still have plenty of motivation and I guess that's what is important. My theory goes that once you know how to learn a language yourself, (that being what works for you: a good method, and the path you need to take) then picking up other languages becomes easier—it certainly seems to be the case so far for me anyway. Here's the post, and the correction in red:

东京的公园
Tokyo Park

今天去东京的公园了。
今天去了东京的公园。
Today I went to a park in Tokyo.

天气很好。
The weather was good.

我喜欢坐在公园。
我喜欢坐在公园里。
I like to sit in the park.

Words and sentences

The majority of flashcards I use on the computer are single vocabulary words, but recently I've begun to add more sentences to my decks to supplement the vocabulary. This has helped a lot, and I'm finding that my retention rate of newer vocabulary is higher when it has an accompanying sentence. I think the context that this lends to the word helps to fix in place. Anyway, using Anki and the online dictionary, Tangorin, is a good combination for doing this. Exporting saved vocabulary from Tangorin to the Anki decks is a piece of cake - just set up an account with Tangorin and use the vocabulary lists.

Word for today

だらだら One of the many onomatopoeic words in the Japanese language. This one can mean to run on/down - as in tears sweat down your face, or, more usefully for me I think, to drag on. Today there was a meeting at work that dragged on and on. I wrote about it on the Lang-8 website and I learnt this word from a contributor.
問題がなかったのにみんなが話し続けてしまいました。
becomes: 問題がないのにみんな（だらだらと）話し続けてしまいました。

Daily routine

At the moment I have about four or five different memorization / flashcard tasks that I set myself to complete every day. These things don't take much thinking about, or motivation to do. They're kind of like the chores that I have to complete of an evening - like the washing up, only more frustrating/rewarding/annoying/interesting etc. Beyond that, at the moment I have these two books that I said to myself I'm going to get through. These take up more time, and are therefore taking a little bit more motivation before they get picked up.