Another quick update

Another quick update after my last post where I mentioned that I was concentrating on the grammar exericises on the Oxford site. Well, I've just finished those this week—it took me about 3 months altogether. It helps to get into a rhythm with these things, I found my rhythm was broken by trips away and stuff, which probably doubled the time it took.

Well, "still going" I guess is the message. Progress has not been earth shattering by any means, but I did take a trip to Beijing earlier this month where I found I was at least able to communicate basic things with Chinese people, and didn't have too much trouble with having my pronunciation understood, which was good.

Going to keep up with the grammar style exercises, this time probably with the Conversational 301 text book I have for the time being.

Pronunciation reminder

Had a reminder this week about my pronunciation problems. I wrote about this ages ago, and how inportant it was, and then promptly completely forgot about it for a year or so.

It seems that when it comes to Japanese I can kid myself that the pronunciation is so simple (at least compared to Chinese) that I don't need to think about it. Not so!

I've also mentioned before that when you really try to speak as if you are a native speaker, almost mimicking the native speakers I guess, success seems to become easier to come by.  Tonight I was concentrating on doing this in my Chinese language exchange, and I could see my Chinese partner's positive reactions to what I was saying.

10 minutes later however my concentration had slipped, and I was back pronuncing words with a British drawl. My language partner's face had dropped, I could see the pain in her eyes.

Goddamnit! It's bloody hard work learning these foreign tongues. There's so much more to it than learning new words and grammar. You really have to live and breathe the language. You have to mold your mouth around the thing again and again to achieve a modicum of success.

This may sound a little defeatist, but the challenge is not motivation for me. Just technique and opportunity. I need to work on both.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Preparing for the future - speaking Japanese

Speaking to my friend last night, she told me that I sound like a foreigner when I speak Japanese. Bad news! I haven't paid much attention to pronunciation when speaking Japanese because when I started out, learning the pronunciation of the Japanese syllabary was pretty straightforward, so I think there was a tendency to imagine that I had it mastered it and ignore this aspect of communication.

Japanese pronunciation is much flatter than English. My pronunciation has a rising and falling intonation to it, so it doesn't feel natural to me to speak in a flat tone - it's something I have to concentrate on when I do it.

I was trying to think about speaking like a robot to make my pronunciation more Japanese, but you can take this too far - you don't want to talk through your nose and end up sounding like a Dalek, however tempting this may be.

Anyway, I was reminded of the Flight of the Conchords, and their song, The Humans are Dead. It's pretty funny.

Spring has arrived, so I'm inside

Decided to also take a systematic approach to a Chinese grammar book that I own, 中国語会話。The great thing about this book for me is that it's aimed at Japanese people, but the Chinese is at a fairly basic level; therefore, I get to review some Japanese as I study the Chinese grammar. My decision to go through this book came about after my Chinese lesson on Friday. The pronunciation, as everyone says, is very difficult, and it's clear to me that it's going to take a lot of practice to get anywhere near comfortable with it. To that end, I've decided to bring my study indoors. I've always liked to study in a local coffee shop or library, but to make progress with the Chinese pronunciation it really is necessary to get your toungue around it, so for the sake of my own fragile confidence and the well-being of other coffee shop-goers I think I'll be working on this one from home.

Fortunately, spring has finally arrived in Tokyo, and my apartment lends itself well to warm weather (i.e. in the winter it is a small prison cell; in the spring / summer I can open the large windows and enjoy the fresh air).