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.

Grammar focus

Recently, I've been beginning to notice the importance of focus in study. I think it's important to keep yourself focused on a certain point or structure for a period at a time in order to learn efficiently.

In the past, I've been in a hurry to learn, and when I think to myself, "I must study some Japanese tonight" or something like that my inclination is to take on the whole language, as if I'm going to be able to devour the whole thing in one sitting.

This may sound unrealistic, and of course it is, but I think this is my subconscious telling me I've started learning too late, or I'm not going to be living here forever, and I need to get a move on if I'm going to succeed.

Anyway, in recent months I've begun to notice the benefit of remaining focused on a certain point for a period of time—mainly thanks to the fact that I now have a good teacher who isn't allowing me to talk and talk making wildly inaccurate sentences as some of my past teachers have been willing to do (but perhaps this is a topic for another post).

So recently, we have been focussing on the てくださる、ていただく、てくれる、てもらう、constructions. I have been learning Japanese for nearly five years now, and of course I have come across this construction before. But I have never given it enough time or thought to truly master its usage. Now I realise what a big mistake that was. I've been spending a lot of time on this recently and now feel pretty confident using these combinations and it's like massive new areas of Japanese have been opened up to me, and I find it hard to believe I went for so long without really getting to know it well enough.

My approach in the past has always been to hope that this kind of structure would sink in eventually, I guess through a combination of time and exposure. Of course, this takes a) time, and b) you need a lot of exposure, two things that I have complained about lacking in the past. My reasons for thinking like this can probably be put down to laziness on my part, and having teachers who were not strict enough with me.

Anyway, I think it's important to really spend some time trying to get to know a structure or language point like this to get the benefits sooner rather than later.

I think one of the benefits of  focusing on one point over a period of time like this is that it becomes something that you begin to go over in your head when you don't have your books in front of you. This is great "free extra study" that you don't even have to put any energy into. It just starts to go round your head as you're doing the dishes or something like that.

So recently, I've been trying to put this into practice with my Chinese. With my teacher we are currently going over directional complements,  like 进去 - go in, 下来 - come down; and completion complements like 修好 - fix (good), and 买到 - bought. Already I can tell that this part of the language is going to be coming up a lot in Chinese, and I think my past approach would be to hope that it sinks in at some point. I think this is possible, but now my thinking is that to become proficient and familiar with these structures as soon as possible is the better way to go.

A horrible sentence should be a horrible sentence in any language

I get the impression that I’m doing something wrong. I think there’s a quicker way. Nothing to do with study technique, but more to do with the way I’m thinking about the foreign language.

I feel there’s a shortcut. A better way to remember. A better way to retain the information—to somehow connect word and meaning faster and more permanently.

Take a sentence like this:

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？

In Chinese this sentence is an exotic thing to me. I’m in awe of it in a way. The use of 把 to indicate the direct object is something I can’t comprehend yet. The Chinese characters are both complex and beautiful (one of the main reasons I am interested in the Chinese and Japanese languages) and the sentence is something that is pleasing to the ear.

In English, on the other hand:

Where did you put the keys?

Oh God! What a horrible sentence. Could it be more mundane and everyday? A sentence that can only irritate, or cause frustration. “Oh, crap, somebody wants the keys. Now I have to remember where I put the damn things—I can never remember where I put the damn keys!! I might have to look around for them for a while, they must be lost if he/she’s asking for them. Crap!”

The words ‘exotic’, ‘awe’, ‘complex’, ‘beauty’, ‘interest’, and ‘pleasing’, are clearly words not springing to mind when I hear this sentence in English. So perhaps this is where I am going wrong. This is where my brain is taking me away from the reality of the situation.

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？should also fill me with dread. This is also a sentence to be feared: a sentence to strike fear into the heart.

This must be the shortcut to connect the meaning with the language (something I’m sure all those linguists go on about). This is the shortcut I need to start taking more often.

Note to self: must stop appreciating the beauty and sound of foreign sentences and Chinese characters and start taking note of the unpleasant consequences they can cause.

Getting the gist from the start

After my Chinese lesson this morning, my teacher and I exchanged a couple of emails. I told her that I thought I had improved—thanks to her—and I was enjoying my lessons. She agreed that I had improved, which was pleasing, and wanted to know if she was speaking too fast for me, and whether I wanted her to slow down a bit from time to time. I've been thinking over my reply this afternoon.

There are times when I'm listening to my teacher speak that it feels like I'm just being bombarded with a succesion of strange sounding Chinese noises which seem completely devoid of meaning. This can certainly feel a little daunting, and even depressing—'how the hell I'm I ever going to get a grasp of this language', kind of feeling. But other times I find myself being able to understand most of what she is saying, and I'm able to distinguish just the individual words that I don't understand.

The conclusion I've come to is is that it is very important to be 100% tuned in as soon as she starts speaking and make sure that I'm listening carefully to the first few words of what is said. I find that if I don't do this, the sentence just becomes a blur, because I find myself fishing in the dark for meaning later on in the sentence.

Chinese has a lot of similar sounding characters—often only distinguishable by the different tones being used—for example: 急 jí second tone，既 jì fourth tone, and 几 jǐ third tone. When these sounds are part of a longer, familiar set of words (or phrase) distinguishing which one is which is is not much of a problem. If you remove the context of the sentence however, and start trying to distinguish between these sounds on their own, at least at the beginner level, it becomes a monumental task, and a few words that you already know can sound incomprehensible.

An example sentence might be:

钱都花了，要去银行
qiándōuhuāle, yàoqùyínháng
All the money's gone, I have to go to the bank.

This is a fairly simple  sentence, and shouldn't pose any problems, but I find that if I miss the first couple of words, I get lost and I'm grasping at the later sounds to try and work out what is going on.

My train of thought might go something like this:

Ooo, Chinese, wait... hualeyaoqu... hm, leyaoquyin...not... Oh.... she's finished. What was that? Crap, now she's waiting for a response. err.... 请你再说一遍。(Please say it again.)

On the other hand, if I'm prepped, ready and waiting, it might go something like this:

qiandou... ah.. all the money... huale, has been spent... oh... missed a bit... yinhang, ah, bank. OK, so, she's spent all her money and needs to go to the bank. Hmm, 哪儿是一家银行。(There's a bank.)

Of course, given time, once you become more advanced, I'm sure this becomes less of a problem, and it becomes easier and easier to pick up the gist halfway through a sentence—like you do in your fist language, I guess. But for now it means that I have to be on my best listening behaviour all the time, to make sure I'm not just sat there listening to a barrage of Chinese noises.

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！

Jiaozi on the zhuozi

I started a new language exchange recently with a Chinese girl who works in Tokyo. I'm very glad I did it. There's no substitute to practicing with a native speaker, especially when it comes to Chinese it seems.

You have to hit those tones spot on, or you won't be understood at all, it's like fine tuning a frickin harp! One missed vowel sound and the comprehension level just completely disappears.

I've been doing a lot of practice listening and repeating to try and get my pronunciation down, but I think I need to be more conscientious of the tones when I learn a new word, and perhaps practice my vowel sounds a bit more too. I couldn't get her to understand 桌子 (zhuozi: table) all night, but that's because I had it written down as zhouzi (o before u) and I kept pronouncing it wrong, I also fouled up and said 饺子 (jiaozi: dumpling) by mistake once aswell.

She kept repeating it for me, and I would copy her 5 or 6 times, move on, and then make the same mistake 5 or 6 minutes later. In the end I decided to make a mnemonic connecting the pronunciation to "Jaws" the movie in my head—it's not a perfect match, but it'll do for now.

It was only later that I realized I had written the damn word down wrong and this was probably the reason for my repeated failure to get the pronunciation right.

Anyway, when your in the thick of these conversations it makes you wish you'd spent a bit more time on the tones and pronunciation of the words when you first learnt them, so I'll be trying to do that a bit more in future.

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.

Flashcards and pronunciation

It seems hard to believe that I've only been doing these flashcards for about a month and a half. It feels like a lot longer.

This may be because I have been doing flashcards of one sort or another for a lot longer, it's just that I've only been using this method for about a month and a half.

It's great though. I can feel the improvement in my pronunciation when I speak. Having the audio file attached is a great help in this respect. Being able to listen and repeat after every card is a great advantage.

I've just got back from a few days holiday in Hong Kong, and despite it being a Cantonese speaking area, I was able to put my Mandarin into practice on a couple of occasions. I found that the people I spoke to were able to understand my pronunciation, which is what most learners of Chinese say is the most frustrating thing, so I took a lot of encouragement from that. The biggest problem for me was not knowing enough vocabulary.

Hopefully, six months or so more of the flashcards and this won't be so much of a problem.

Can't wait!

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.

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.