Hanyu Man

Measuring Progress

2009-07-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

An interactive test that could be used to periodically measure and track progress would be extremely valuable. I haven't found a good, comprehensive one yet.

Clavis Sinica offers a pretty good character recognition test. It generates an estimate of the number of characters the user knows. The test is located here.

The test seems to be well-designed. Characters are categorized by frequency of use. The "Beginner" level focuses on the 300 most frequently used characters. The higher levels progressively throw additional characters in to the mix. The estimated number of characters known is calculated from the percentage of characters correctly identified in each grouping. Since the Beginner level only samples from the 300 most frequently used characters, the highest possible score at this level is 300. The Low Intermediate level adds in the next 500 most frequently used characters, so the maximum score achievable at this level is 800. And, so on.

I took all four levels of the test and achieved the following scores:

I am not sure exactly how many characters I know, so I can't quantifiably gauge the test's effectiveness in that regard. But, the but the High Intermediate result of 656 seems plausible. Since I currently am studying in a "top down" manner (from Chinesepod lessons) instead of "bottom up", the order in which I am learning characters is only loosely correlated with their usage frequency. That is why I already know a fair number of characters in the 2nd 800 even though I still need to learn a large number in the first 800. I was 0-for-18 on characters beyond the first 1600, so there currently is no point in taking the Advanced level test. Doing so just reduces the sample size available for the more frequent characters.

I'll take the test again in a couple months and see where things stand then ...

Return to Chinesepod Podcasts and Transcripts

2009-06-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

I've been using Chinesepod transcripts and podcasts again over the last 6 months. My new emphasis has been on reading, writing, and building my vocabulary in an integrated manner. When I previously used Chinesepod, I had focused only on listening, speaking, and pinyin. I had completely avoided trying to learn the written script.

I am using Chinesepod material to move forward from where the Integrated Chinese Level I textbook left me. I had learned about 350 characters and 550 words through that effort.

I terminated my original subscription to Chinesepod a couple years ago, due to frustrations I experienced with their approach. I currently am re-visiting old Chinesepod lessons that I had downloaded and worked through previously. I have not yet re-subscribed to the service, although I plan to try that again soon.

Below is a timeline of the primary tools I've used so far in this Long March through the Chinese language. I've had to switch between systems over time, because I haven't yet found what a really good complete system for self-study of the Chinese language. There is lots of good content and many good tools available, but no really good system available yet, I don't believe.

I use the Chinesepod Newbie and Elementary level transcripts primarily as practice reading material. I don't generally listen to the podcasts associated with these lessons, since a majority of the content is in English. I am using the Intermediate lessons in a more integrated manner, though (i.e. reading, writing, listening, and speaking), because they are mostly in Chinese and full of rich content. Each Intermediate lesson typically introduces somewhere on the order of about 15 new characters and 20 new words into my vocabulary.

Deconstructing the Chinese Language

2009-05-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve found there are a number of different levels at which I need to study the Chinese language. A sentence, for example, can be broken down into the following hierarchy:

Sentence
Lexical chunks
Words
Characters
Character Components

The diagram below breaks down the simple sentence, “I like to eat lunch,” in this manner (click to view full size image):

Lexical chunks are word patterns that commonly show up in the language. Ken Carroll of Chinesepod is a strong advocate of the lexical approach to learning languages. In the simple example above, “I like to eat…,” is a lexical chunk. It shows up frequently in the language, paired with a variety of different objects. E.G.

I like to eat lunch
I like to eat vegetables
I like to eat fruit
...

Words can be formed from a single character or multiple characters. 午饭 - lunch, for example is formed from the two characters, 午–noon and 饭 - meal.

Characters are more basic elements than words. To successfully learn and remember characters, it generally is necessary to break them down into their components. In some cases I assign components their true etymological meaning, while in other cases I assign them a meaning that I find to be more conducive to building mnemonics. In the example above, “hand” is the actual meaning of 扌. But, “chair” is a made-up name I have assigned to the又component, simply because it looks like a director’s chair to me.

Using Mnemonics to Learn and Remember Multi-Character Words

2009-05-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

My recent posts have focused on using mnemonics to help learn and remember characters and the components used to construct them. Mnemonics can also play a role up one level, in learning multi-character words. A significant fraction of Chinese words are composed of two or more characters. In some cases, the meaning of a word is closely related to the characters used to construct it, and therefore easy to remember. In other cases, the relationship is not so clear.

I have found there are four general classes of words in this respect. From easiest to most difficult they are:

Literals
Doubles
Literal + Other
Non-Literals

These are my own, layman’s classifications of how these words appear to me as a language learner; they are not based on the actual etymology of the words.

Literals

Most relatively new words to the language seem to have a fairly clean, literal, and intuitive association with the characters used to construct them. The names for electrically powered devices, for example, typically are easy to break-down and remember according to their functional nature. Most begin with the character 电 (diàn) = electric, and the literal translation often is somewhat entertaining. Some of my favorites include:

电脑 (diànnǎo) = Electric + Brain = Computer
电梯 (diàntī) = Electric + Ladder = Elevator

The literal translation makes these words seem as if they are from a decades old science fiction book. These words were easy to learn, and I’m sure I will never forget them.

Some other words are less functionally “correct” in terms of literal translation, but still provide very strong visual images, and therefore also are easy to learn and remember (once their root characters have been salted into memory). A great example is popcorn:

爆米花 (bàomǐhuā) = Explode + Rice + Flower = Popcorn

“Exploding Rice Flower!” How perfect of an image is that?

Some more conceptual words also fall into this class. An example is:

开心 (kāixīn) = Open + Heart = Happy

Little effort is required to develop a mnemonic story for remembering this word.

Doubles

Some words are made up of two characters that have a similar meaning to the word they form. The most straightforward are those in which a character is doubled. For example:

看看 (kànkàn) = See + See = To examine

More frequently, a word may consist of two different characters that both have a similar meaning to the word they form:

告诉 (gàosù) = Tell + Inform = To tell, to inform
休息 (xiūxi) = Rest + Rest = Rest

These types of words are fairly easy to learn and remember once the underlying characters have been absorbed into memory.

Literal + Other

Some words have a similar meaning to one of their characters, but not the other. I would guess these combinations had a more literal, intuitive relationship at some point in the distant past, but have since evolved over time. An example is:

如果 (rúguǒ) = If + Fruit = If

I’m not sure how the fruit got in there.

Non-Literals

Most words have a less visibly literal relationship with the characters they are made from, probably due to evolution over time. They vary in how easy they are to develop mnemonics for. An example of an easy one is:

拿手 (náshǒu) = Hold + Hand = Expert

Of course an expert can help by offering to hold hands through the process.

If you are an entrepreneur and one of your life focuses is a business idea, then here is another easy one:

生意 (shēngyi) = Life + Idea = Business

And, if you are a journalist, then when a big news event occurs, your rest probably vanishes:

消息 (xiāoxi) = Vanish + Rest = News

But, most words are more difficult than this. They require more effort to build a story for, and therefore generally are more difficult to remember. A couple arbitrary examples:

从来 (cónglái) = From + Come = Always
照顾 (zhàogu) = Shine + Look Back = To take care of

Another Character Mnemonics Book

2009-04-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

"Learning Chinese Characters", by Alison and Laurence Matthews applies mnemonics to learning and remembering Chinese characters. Similar to "Remembering Simplified Hanzi," it uses a bottom-up approach, starting at the component level and working up to build characters and words. The authors extend the use of mnemonics to address pronunciation, as well. I haven't tried doing this. A good preview of the book is available here.

I won't use the book because I have chosen not to adopt a bottom-up approach to studying characters. But, regardless of your plan of attack, the book provides a good reference for learning how to develop and apply mnemonics.

Learning and Remembering Chinese Characters

2009-01-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

The challenge of learning and remembering the large number of characters required to gain proficiency in the Chinese language (~3000) is enormous. Also enormous is the pedagogic topic of how best to go about tackling this challenge.

There are multiple aspects of characters that must be learned. Not just what the character looks like and means, but also how to pronounce it, the correct stroke order for drawing it, and what compounds (words) that it is used in.

Children in China generally build their written vocabulary through copious amounts of repetition – writing characters over and over and over. But, most laowai who pursue learning Chinese as a second language do not have the time luxury or patience required to follow this path.

Some characters are easy to remember, because they are simple, distinct, and pictorially associated with their meaning. Here is an example of a character that is very easy to remember:

飞 - fēi – to fly

It only requires a few strokes to draw, it looks like a hummingbird, and it means to fly. Perfect.

Unfortunately, only a small percentage of characters are pictographs. And, many characters which technically are classified as pictographs have evolved over the centuries to the degree that they no longer look like the meaning they represent. For example:

月 – yuē - moon

This character doesn’t look like a moon to me.

Mnemonics

A variety of different strategies are used for learning and remembering characters. A common theme that most methods share is the use of mnemonics. This typically involves breaking each character down into components, labeling each component, and building a story or a picture that binds those components together to represent the meaning of the character. How well this works varies from character to character. Here is a classic example of the mnemonic approach:

Character: 休 = to rest
Component 1: 亻= man
Component 2: 木 = tree
Mnemonic: to rest, a man leans against a tree

Both of the components that make up this specific character are very common, and show up in many other characters. In this case, they also happen to be radicals (more on this later), and the meanings I supplied for them are the standard definitions assigned by the Chinese language powers that be. It is not necessary to assign components a name which is derived from their etymological roots – you can name them whatever you would like. But, I’ve found that for most radicals, it's easiest to use their official assigned name. Examples of a couple that I have given alternative names to include:

又 – yòu – again. Alternative mnemonic name: chair
夂 – zhǐ – go. Alternative mnemonic name: armchair

I created these alternative names because they provide a more tangible visual representation of what the components look like (to me at least), and because they were easier to fit into mnemonic stories.

OK, so what exactly are radicals anyways? I don’t really know, and haven’t found a good explanation of them. Theoretically, they provide the meaning basis for each character. But, often times the radical is only peripherally related to the character’s overall meaning, if at all. They are useful to know primarily because many of them show up as components in a large number of different characters. There are 214 official radicals. A good list is available at Yellowbridge. This list is helpful because it includes the Unicode representation of each radical and its common variants. This makes it ideal for incorporation into electronic documents, for the purpose of isolating and manipulating individual components.

Overall Method: Bottom-up versus Top-down

Most people use mnemonics in some manner, but there are many different ways they can be incorporated into a broader strategy for learning and remembering characters.

A somewhat famous language linguist named James Heisig promotes a purely bottom-up approach that focuses on building upward from components. It also focuses primarily on character design and meaning and leaves pronunciation and contextual usage for the student to pursue on their own. Heisig first developed this strategy when studying Japanese many years ago and recently collaborated with Timothy Richardson to apply it to Chinese. An extended excerpt from their book, Remembering Simplified Hanzi, can be found near the bottom of the page here in pdf format. It’s worth taking a look at to see if this method might work for you.

A top-down approach, on the other hand, focuses on studying characters simply as another element of learning new words and phrases.

Both approaches have pluses and minuses. I find Heisig’s approach to be too abstract and detached for my liking. I’ve determined that I need to learn characters within a broader context to stay interested and focused, so I embarked upon the top-down approach. The downside of the top-down approach is that it takes awhile to figure out the best way to break characters into components and how to build mnemonics from those components. Heisig has already tackled much of this heavy lifting for you with his approach.

Through trial and error, I’ve ended up using a hybrid of both the top-down and the bottom-up strategies. I find that it is best to build-up clumps of super-components so that any character can be represented using no more than just a few components or super-components. In most cases, super-components are characters in and of themselves, but characters which have not yet shown up in any of my studies to-date. Which super-components are worth creating and remembering depends on how frequently they show up in different characters you come across. An example of a common super-component is:

合 – hé – combine

Originally, I mnemonically referred to this combination by the names for each of the three radicals that form it:

人 - man
一 - one
口 - mouth

Man, one, mouth. After I started running into this combination of components in a variety of different characters, I made an effort to memorize the meaning of the aggregate super-component (combine), and now I use that to build mnemonics for the characters that incorporate it.

I find YellowBridge’s etymological dictionary to be an indispensable tool for breaking characters down into their components and super-components. A Unicode representation of most components is available within the breakdown they provide. This makes it easy to identify and then electronically copy and paste components into a document or spreadsheet for the purpose of building a vocabulary list that includes components and mnemonics in addition to the character itself. MDBG also recently added a somewhat similar capability to their site.

Other Items

Stroke Order. Is it important to learn the correct stroke order? I’ve found that it is helpful, because it is easier to remember how to draw a character or component if you always do it in the same way. And conforming with the standard method gives you a reference source to go back to for this. Using proper stroke order also improves the ability of handwriting recognition software, such as Plecodict, to recognize what you write.

Reading versus Writing. Since the typing of characters is accomplished using pinyin, is it necessary to be able to write characters, or is visual recognition enough? In most cases recognition is enough, and most people are able to recall many more characters than they are able to write correctly, especially when seeing them in the context of written text. A key question is: does gaining the ability to write characters help with long-term visual recall? I don’t know the answer to this, but it seems like it should. When using flashcards, I drill myself as much or more on writing the characters as on recognizing them.

Who's Mastering Chinese in Australia?

2008-12-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fluent in Chinese, and has an ambition for Australia "to be the most Asian-literate nation in the Western world".

This article in a publication named “The Age” summarizes the results of an interesting study into the effectiveness of Chinese language instruction in Australia’s schools.

The report states that the study of Chinese in Australian high schools "is overwhelmingly a matter of Chinese teaching Chinese to Chinese":

Students studying Chinese as a second language are "overwhelmed" in assessments by "strong numbers" of students who have Chinese as a first language.
94% of students who learn Chinese at some stage during their education drop out before year 12.
Of those still studying the language at year 12, 94% are "first language" speakers — Chinese-born or of Chinese descent.
Students learning Chinese as a second language at year 12 are required to master about 500 Chinese script characters — the same number reached by five-year-olds in grade one in China.

Jason & Sherry - Chinese Speaking Aussies

Learning to Read and Write Chinese - Part I

2008-12-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

After completing Pimsleur, I decided that I needed to focus on expanding my vocabulary as the next step towards growing my Chinese language skills. And, I concluded that in order to do so, I needed to start becoming literate – to learn to read and write. How did I come to this conclusion? I found that the plethoric homophones in the Chinese language make it very difficult to imprint new words into one’s memory just from the sounds and the pinyin representation of those sounds by themselves. All the shi’s and xi’s and xiao’s and shu’s start to blur together over time.

The reasons I waited 2.5 years before starting to study the script are twofold: 1) learning the script seemed of secondary importance and value to learning the spoken language, and 2) I find the Chinese script to be unappealing, both in terms of aesthetics and function. To me, characters look like lots of random scribbles, and there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason between the design of characters and their meaning and pronunciation.

Most laowai who eventually develop proficiency in the language seem to have originally been attracted to the script. I wish that were my case, but it isn’t. The Chinese script seems like a pointless puzzle, like Rubic’s cube or Sudoku, and I have no interest in those kinds of games.

I had only dabbled a bit with the script prior to embarking upon this new initiative. Since the script is not phonetic in nature, it is not intuitively clear what the best way to learn it is.

So, how best to proceed?

I decided that first and foremost, I needed to tackle reading and writing in a contextual manner, integrated with my limited speaking capabilities. While revisiting the characters I had poked at previously, it instantly became clear that I only remembered ones associated with words that I was already very comfortable with using verbally (e.g. 好hăo - good). The rest seemed completely foreign to me. They had failed to stick in my memory.

So, maybe a textbook would be a good tool? It seemed likely that an introductory textbook would focus on words I was already familiar with, and on applying them in context, rather than just introducing discrete characters (as “What’s in a Chinese Character” does).

I remembered seeing mention of a popular college textbook named “Integrated Chinese” on the Chinesepod blog, so I decided to give the first semester of this series (Level I, Part I) a shot. As the title implies, the series is designed for learning all four aspects of the language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) simultaneously. I can’t imagine taking on such a challenge, but I’m sure there are benefits to this kind of approach.

The first book introduces about 350 characters and 550 words. I was familiar with most of the words, so was able to focus most of my attention on the written aspects of the language. The book also addresses many basic grammar points that had previously puzzled me, such as when to insert a “de” between adjectives and nouns, and when not to.

It took me a few months to work through all 11 chapters of the textbook. I used Plecodict as a vocabulary list and flashcard tool to aid the process. I learned early on that it was important to work with full words in addition to the individual characters. For example, I had difficulty remembering one of the most basic of characters, 生 (sheng1 – to be born) until I repeatedly saw it as a component in the compound, 先生 (xian1sheng1 – Mr.). The reason being the power of context, of course. I rarely come across the verb “to be born” in every day language, but “Mr.” is very common.

The outcome (so far)

Studying the written script has turned out to be very valuable – I wish I had started much earlier. I recommend starting to study the script within 6 months of initiating study of the spoken language, rather than waiting 2.5 years as I did.

Having a visual representation associated with each word makes it easier to identify the relationship between words, and to imprint them in memory. As an example, the written script makes it clear that 已经 (yi3jing1 – already) and 经常 (jing1chang2 – frequently) both share a common character, 经 (jing1 – pass through). This is helpful because both words are temporal in nature, so the shared character helps reinforce the relationship between the words. This relationship would not be readily identifiable from the pinyin alone, since “jing” is such a common sound in the language.

Although I still don’t care much for the written script, I feel that I am becoming more comfortable with the language as a whole from studying it. The language is starting to feel less opaque than pinyin leaves it. A tangible example of this surfaced while looking at a map of the country. The names of the provinces never meant much to me before. Sichuan, Shandong, Shanxi, etc. used to seem like arbitrary names. But, when written in the script, these names suddenly come to life: Sichuan is written as, 四川. This is 四 (si4 – four) plus 川 (chuan – river). Of course! Four Rivers! Likewise Shandong is written as 山东. 山 (shan1 - mountain) plus 东 (dong1 - east). Of course! East Mountain!

Upcoming Posts

Learning and Remembering Characters
Australians who speak Chinese
Lexical Chunks
American Celebrities who Speak Chinese

Will Chinese Become the Dominant Global Language?

2008-11-28T06:01:00.000-08:00

When I started considering this question a few years ago, it seemed like a complex question. The eventual outcome would be determined by a tangled stew of global sociological dynamics, trade and investment flows, migration patterns, economic growth rates, popular culture development and marketing, thought and opinion leadership, technology development, etc.

I since have come to believe the answer is fairly simple: No, because Chinese is too difficult to learn and master as a second language.

Certainly Chinese is an important language today, if for no other reason than because more than 1 billion people use it. And, it will remain important for many decades and probably centuries into the future.

But, will large numbers of non-native speakers someday use it as a neutral, common language in order to converse with each other? Will corporate executives from France and Germany shift to Chinese when they meet to discuss business? How about students from Ghana and Thailand studying together in Canada? Or, government ministers from India and Australia discussing trade issues?

I don’t believe so. And, those are the attributes that define a “global language”.

Typing Chinese Characters

2008-09-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve embarked upon learning to read and write the Chinese script, the question of, “How the heck do people type Chinese characters on a computer?” has become more than just a curious afterthought.

Do they have a 6000 key keyboard, one key per character?

Apparently not.

Most Chinese speakers (all?) use a software tool that allows them to type a pinyin syllable, and then select the actual character they wish to enter from a list of characters that match the pinyin.

Windows supports this through a tool called the Input Method Editor (IME). The easiest way I’ve come across to set it up is described here by a Shanghai blogger.

How Long Does it Take to Learn Chinese?

2008-09-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

The US State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has developed estimates for how much effort is required by native English speakers to learn various languages. They list the typical study requirements for developing to a level of, “general professional proficiency”, based on FSI experience over the years.

2200 hours of classroom time is listed for Mandarin, versus 575-600 hours for languages like French and Spanish and 750 hours for German. By this metric, Mandarin is ~4x more difficult to learn than French or Spanish.

The FSI estimates assume the student puts in about an equivalent amount of time outside the classroom as well. So, this totals around 4400 hours for gaining proficiency in Mandarin.

I’ve been putting in about 4-5 hours per week on average, so I guess I’m looking at somewhere around 20 years in total to become proficient. It seems that I’m currently only 2.5 years into a multi-decade journey.

Pimsleur Postscript

2008-09-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

I finished the third and final level of Pimsleur a few months ago.

Was it worth the time and effort?

I believe it was. It seems to have laid a solid foundation for the next level of development. The method effectively imprints a small vocabulary and set of language patterns into one’s consciousness. The level of fluency coming out of it is still extremely low, but it creates something solid to build upon.

Pimsleur focuses on speaking, and specifically on translating spoken English to spoken Chinese. I’ve concluded that the next areas I need to focus on moving forward from Pimsleur are: growing my vocabulary, and improving my listening comprehension skills.

To grow my vocabulary, I decided that I need to start becoming literate. There is a point where audio and pinyin don’t seem to cut it any more. The homonyms run together and make it hard to remember new words. Too many ‘shang’, ‘shi’, ‘sheng’, ’xi’, ’xiu’ sounds in sequence.

How best to learn to read and write? Last year, Chinesepod introduced companion material for what they said is the most commonly used textbook in college Chinese language courses: Integrated Chinese published by Cheng & Tsui. Integrated Chinese takes I decidedly different approach than I have been using, in that it focuses on all four language components simultaneously – reading, writing, listening, & speaking. More on this later.

Need Different Brain Wiring?

2008-05-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Below are excerpts from an interesting column by Robert Lee Holtz in the May 2nd Wall Street Journal. It seems that learning Chinese as a child wires the brain differently than learning English does. The dynamics of learning written Chinese sound similar to those of a physical sport. A game of Zhongwen, anyone?

How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.
...
Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal.
...
To learn the ABCs of English, we essentially harness our listening skills to a phonetic code. To become literate in Chinese, however, we must make much heavier use of memory, motor control and visual-perception circuits located toward the front of the brain. Children can master the 6,000 or so Chinese characters used in Mandarin and Cantonese text only by laboriously copying them out over and over again, until each abstract form becomes second nature.
...
Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January's Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

"Once you have different writing systems in place," said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. "They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove."

Why is Chinese so Difficult to Learn?

2008-04-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

Chinese is extremely difficult to learn as a second language. From my experience, the challenge is created primarily by the following characteristics, all of which are interrelated with and compound each other:

1. The Written Character Script

The Chinese language does not have an alphabet. The written character script is very different than an alphabet. Most experts say that a person needs to know somewhere between 2500 and 4000 unique characters in order to become reasonably fluent in the language. Just think about memorizing this many unique characters designs, some of which are incredibly complex. As an example, this character requires 36 strokes to write: 齉

It is pronounced, “Nàng” and means, "to speak with a nasal twang."

Of course, some words are made up of more than one character. Two characters and 45 strokes will get you “parrot” (yīng wŭ), for example: 鹦鹉

On top of this, the character script is only partially phonetic. Knowing how to write a character does not mean that you know how to pronounce it. And, knowing how to pronounce a character does not mean you know how to write it. Yes, English spelling often is phonetically irrational. Why is there a “b” in “debt”, for example? But, in most cases it is reasonably predictable.

A misconception I held for a long time is that pinyin is an alphabet-based translation of the character script. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Pinyin is just a method for representing the phonetics of the spoken language. A one-to-one relationship does not exist between pinyin syllables and Chinese characters. “Jiào” is the pinyin representation of the common verb 叫, which means “to call”. But, it also represents the sound of the character 觉, which means, “a nap”. Because of pinyin’s limitation in this regard, you will not find books, magazines, or other texts written in pinyin. It is used just as an aide for teaching the spoken language, and as a tool for narrowing the selection of characters when entering text on a computer with a standard keyboard.

An interesting anecdote: Peter Hessler wrote in, “Oracle Bones” that Mao desired to scrap the character script during his time, and to replace it with an alphabet system based on the Roman alphabet. But, Stalin convinced him to reconsider for reasons of cultural pride. Therefore, Mao embarked upon a less ambitious initiative to simplify the complexity of characters instead. The result was the simplified character script that is used on the mainland today.

2. Tones

Native speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a hard time adapting to tones. We are used to tailoring our pitch and inflection to express situation-specific emotions or to provide emphasis, rather than for making clear whether we are talking about a horse (mă) or a mother (mā). Tones also are difficult for novices to distinguish from each other during normal speech, which further complicates the development of listening comprehension skills.

3. Plethoric Homonyms

Mandarin has many characters that sound similar to each other, per the “jiào” example above. In addition, most words are made up of only one or two characters and therefore consist of only one or two syllables. This has resulted in a massive proliferation of homonyms as the language has grown over time. This in turn makes communication more context dependent than with most other languages.

The large number of homonyms makes it difficult to develop strong listening comprehension skills without first having a large vocabulary. If you don’t know the meaning of all the words you hear in a sentence, it is difficult to guess what the sentence is generally about. And, since you don’t know for sure what the sentence is about, it’s difficult to guess what the mystery words within it mean. This creates a classic chicken and egg problem. You need to understand the words in order to figure out the context, but you also need to understand the context in order to figure out the words. Therefore, you are unable to do either.

This complication is further amplified by tones. If you aren’t certain which tone you heard (Did he say, “jiào” or was it “jiāo”?), then the degrees of freedom become even greater.

4. Weakly Typed Grammar

Explicit expressions of tense (present, past, future) and pronouns (I, we, you, them) are often omitted in the spoken language. When you marry the complexity of tones with the large number of homonyms, and then throw a weakly typed grammar on top of it all, this creates a language that is egregiously context sensitive. Is the person talking about a horse or a mother? Are they talking about what is going to happen to the horse/mother now, or in the future, or in the past? Are they describing what they did/are doing to the horse/mother, or what we did/are doing to it? It is extremely challenging for the novice to fill in all these interdependent holes.

5. Difficult Sounds

Tones are just one of the speaking challenges presented by the language. Many of the consonant and vowel sounds in the language are different than a straight English interpretation of pinyin would indicate. They require using different motions and parts of the mouth than we are familiar with from other languages.

For reference, here is a description of the “q” sound from the textbook, “Integrated Chinese”:

"q is an aspirated voiceless palatal affricate. It is produced in the same manner as j, but it is aspirated. Note that the Chinese q is similar to English ch except that is articulated with the tip of the tongue resting behind the lower incisors."

Got that? Two years into studying the language, I still am unable to correctly pronounce even basic q words like, “qù” (to go).

Chinese-English Dictionaries

2008-04-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

English-Chinese dictionaries are difficult to use, especially for those of us not yet schooled in the Chinese character script. They are more complex than traditional translation dictionaries because they traverse three different written languages, in a sense: English, pinyin, and the Chinese character script. The large number of homonyms in the Chinese language makes it difficult to find the pinyin spelling for words you hear, especially if the tones are in question. And, searching for specific written characters requires a solid understanding of how the character script is structured.

Nonetheless, dictionaries are a necessary tool when studying the language. Three different formats are readily available, and each has their own pluses and minuses:

Printed Books

I have the Oxford Beginner's Dictionary. Even a light dictionary like this spans 500 pages. I often use it to look up the English-to-pinyin translation for new words I want to use in conversation. It works reasonably well for this. I also sometimes use it to look up the pinyin spelling for Chinese words that I hear in Pimsleur lessons. I rarely have luck with this.

Internet websites

A large number of Chinese-English dictionary sites exist. I use http://www.mdbg.net/ and find that it works pretty well, especially for confirming the pinyin spelling of words I hear in Pimsleur.

Electronic Handhelds

Pleco Software offers a powerful dictionary/flashcard package named Plecodict that runs on Palm and Windows handhelds. I’ve found it especially useful for working with characters, because it provides the opportunity to look up characters by drawing them on the screen. In addition to functioning well as a dictionary, it also is an effective tool for practicing and testing your ability to draw characters.

It also is much smaller and lighter than a full-sized dictionary in printed book form.

If you have a handheld or can justify the investment in one, I highly recommend Plecodict.

Who Visits the Hanyu Man Blog?

2008-04-12T03:47:00.000-07:00

The locations of recent visitors to this site:

Top search terms:

"Is Chinese difficult to learn?"
"Chinesepod"
"Pimsleur"
"Chinese as a global language"

Dialects

2008-03-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

What is the Chinese language? There is no single common Chinese language. Seven different major dialect groups are spoken within China. Mandarin is the most widely used and is understood by about 70% of the population. It is a group of northern dialects associated with the Beijing area and is the country’s official spoken language.

The written language is more standardized than the spoken language, at least within mainland China. A single script referred to as “zhongwen” is understood by about 95% of the population. It is built around simplified character set that was developed during Mao’s era. In many other parts of the Chinese language world, (e.g. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) a more traditional, complex set of characters is still used.

From Chinesepod, below is a comparison of a few common expressions in three different dialects. Shanghainese is spoken in the Shanghai area, while Cantonese is common in Hong Kong and the southern part of the mainland.

I work with a number of people who speak Shanghainese. I hope to learn this dialect some day, so that we can converse confidentially behind the backs of the Beijingers.

Banned in China

2008-03-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

THIS BLOG IS BANNED IN CHINA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would like to think it is the result of my insightful and penetrating commentary. But, in reality, there has been nothing "politically sensitive" whatsoever posted on this sight.

The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) blocks access to all major external blog-hosting sites.

That is just the way they are.

Black Man In China

2008-03-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

A Cleveland artist named Ron Sims has created an entertaining video podcast series called, “Black Man N China”. He filmed 25 episodes over a two year period while teaching English in Fuzhou, China. I found the videos to be highly addictive and watched all 3+ hours worth of material, some of it multiple times.

The videos do not provide much help with learning the language, but they are very entertaining and provide interesting insights into the country.

An example of a typical episode is "Fuzhou Nights", located here.

Most of the rest of the episodes are available on youtube here. They also can be downloaded as .mp4’s directly from his site here.

Characters

2008-03-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

To-date, I’ve only dabbled with characters, so I don’t yet know what constitutes an effective way to learn them.

A book named, “What’s in a Chinese Character” by Tan Huay Peng provides a good introduction to the how and why of characters. Here is a page from it:

The characters are presented in a compositional manner. For example, 女- woman, and 子-child are presented first, followed by a character which is created by combining both these elements: 好–good.

This is different than the functional approach which seems to be common in children’s books. The functional approach clusters items that we associate with each other – such as cat and dog, for example - regardless of how similar or different their characters are.

Memorizing hundreds of characters seems like a daunting task, regardless of the method. I’ve read that somewhere on the order of 2500 are required to achieve a reasonable level of reading and writing fluency.

Video Podcasts

2008-03-03T12:35:00.000-08:00

Audio podcasts are a great medium for delivering language learning material. So, how about video podcasts?

It is my experience that video does not provide much value over audio when trying to learn the fundamentals of a new language.

The exception is for demonstrating the interactions associated with ad hoc, unscripted encounters. This becomes valuable after one has already mastered the structural basics and acquired a moderate-sized vocabulary.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find many examples of “person on the street” encounter material like this. The only ones I'm familiar with are experimental videos that the interns at Chinesepod created in a series titled, “Video Hotpot”. The two good episodes were: The Market and The Restaurant.

CCTV has broadcast hundreds of short, entertaining, travel-focused language videos in two series titled Happy China and Happy Journey (note the abstract URLs, a seemingly common phenomenon on Chinese websites). Each episode includes subtitles and transcripts, and they can be streamed or downloaded. The language level is pretty advanced; I hope to be able to comprehend these videos some day.

CCTV also broadcasts a short language series titled, Travel in Chinese created by a famous foreign national TV personality named Da Shan. I haven’t found these to be useful, as the content is not very well organized.

FSI Lesson Material

2008-02-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

The US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has made much of their language training material publicly available. It can be found on-line at: http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/

The course contains a large amount of material and seems to be of reasonable quality, although somewhat dated. I have only dabbled briefly with it, so can’t judge its effectiveness. The content is from the 1970’s, and includes this interesting passage (click box to increase size):

Of course, this custom is no longer applicable. I tried addressing a native-speaking acquaintance using the term “tóng zhì”, and was informed that outside of high level Communist Party business, this word's primary usage now is as slang for “homosexual”.

Remote Tutors

2008-02-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

I’m sure the most effective way to learn a new language would be to work full-time with a professional tutor. Of course, this is not practical for the vast majority of us.

Even in a self-study program, tutors still play a vital role. We need live practice with real people in order to test and refine our language skills. Native-speaking acquaintances are an important practice channel, but probably not sufficient in and of themselves. They are unlikely to be willing or able to provide the depth of feedback or repetitions required to hone new language skills.

Finding a good tutor and determining how best to work with them is a logistical challenge. For many of us, it is not practical to meet in person with a tutor. A remote tutor is the only viable option. So what is the best way to find a remote tutor and what is the best way to work with them?

My Experience

After working with Chinesepod for six months, I was frustrated with my inability to reliably recognize tones. It seemed that I was tone deaf. Sure, on the occasion when a particular lesson cycled through all four tones of a syllable in sequence, I could distinguish between the tones. But, otherwise, my recognition accuracy was very low. So, I searched for a tutor that could help me with this specific aspect of the language.

At the time, Chinesepod allowed tutors to post contact information on a “teacher connection” page they had set up. A massive list of names developed over time. Most of the tutors were very young, listed little or nothing about themselves, and demanded high hourly rates. My impression was they were just looking for a quick, easy Laowai buck. Fortunately, there was a filter capability on the site, and I searched using the criteria of:

Chinesepod certified (meaning the tutor had invested effort in receiving training on the Chinesepod system by Chinesepod personnel)
> 30 years old
Posted a resume
Charged a reasonable hourly rate

This narrowed the output down to one single tutor by the name of Amy Shen (Shen Xiaomei) who was located in Shanghai. I contacted her, and we agreed to move forward with a fixed number of sessions.

Initially, the logistics were difficult to work out. A common tool that people use for this type of remote communication is Skype (a VOIP service), but at the time broadband Internet access had not yet reached my home, and most wifi hotspots and corporate networks did not support Skype. Also at the time, Skypeout, which enables users to call outside the Skype network to a regular phone, was not yet available in China. In the end, using a pre-paid phone card and connecting via regular landlines ended up being the best solution. Pre-paid cards offer inexpensive rates and provide excellent sound quality, which is critical. The card source I used was PhoneCardOnsale.

Another logistical challenge was payment. Most people in China do not have credit cards, so therefore do not have ready access to money transfer services like Paypal. The solution we worked out in the end was for me to acquire a bank check and then snail-mail it to her half-way through the 16 one hour weekly sessions that we had agreed to.

We used Chinespod transcripts as the foundation for our work, and focused most heavily on tone recognition and pronunciation. This effort turned out to be very valuable. I’m certainly still not a tone virtuoso and never will be, but Xiaomei was an excellent teacher, and she helped me gain the level of ability that I needed.

Six months after completing our tone sessions, we began a new round of lessons, attempting to marry Pimsleur techniques with Chinesepod material. This has been very valuable. Unfortunately, we've had to put it on hold for the time being due to scheduling conflicts.

Where to find a remote tutor

You may be able to find a tutor locally. Universities are a good resource. I have never tried this avenue, but a university near where I live offers up native speaking students as tutors for a fairly reasonable rate ($15/hour).

Chinesepod eliminated their teacher connection site, and instead now offers up a service option called “The Practice Plan”. It includes 10 minute calls with a tutor five days per week. With a price of $200/month including the other premium content, this comes out to an hourly rate of around $50/hour just for the tutor. This is pretty steep. The likely upside is that their tutors should be well steeped in the Chinesepod material and processes.

Another site that offers structured Chinese lessons with live tutors is the Confucius Institute, run by the Chinese government. Warning: their site is very confusing to navigate. I’m not sure how much they currently charge for this service, as I was not able to easily find this information on a recent visit to the site.

There are a number of independent websites that offer to connect teachers and students with each other. I haven’t tried any of these. One such site is: Chinese-Teachers.com.

Another concept that some sites support is connecting “language partners” with each other. Rather than building a one-way teacher-student relationship, the idea is for native speakers of different languages to connect and help each other, typically via Skype. An example is a site named Mixxer.

Somewhat of a hybrid model is Livemocha, which offers formal course content and teachers, but which also connects native speakers of different languages to give feedback to each other.

Pimsleur

2008-01-20T17:56:00.000-08:00

I dropped Chinesepod and started working with Pimsleur lesson material about seven months ago. I since have completed two of the three levels they offer for Mandarin. I am happy with the system, and have found it to be effective and efficient.

How it Works

Pimsleur is a pure audio approach to language learning. The lessons do not include any text or transcripts. The creator of the approach was a linguist named Paul Pimsleur. A description of the method can be found here.

The key differences between Pimsleur and other, more modular lesson systems such as Chinesepod are:

Each new lesson systematically builds upon and re-enforces material learned in previous lessons.

The method involves very little passive listening. It is built around “challenge-response” sequences. The student is forced to think and actively respond for the full duration of each lesson.

The method is heavy on repetition, but in a stepped and purposeful manner. The frequency of repetition decreases incrementally over time. When a new word or construct is first introduced, it is brought into the dialogue repeatedly at short intervals. The interval between repetitions gradually grows over time. But, it never stops completely. Pimsleur referred to this as “Graduated Interval Recall”, and its purpose is to progressively cement words and concepts into the student’s long-term memory.

The downsides of the system are that it requires hard work, and the amount of repetition can sometimes become tedious. But, I’m not sure there are any effective language learning systems that don’t involve hard work and repetition. I haven’t found any yet.

How Much Time it Takes

The three levels of material require more time to work through than I had initially expected. Each lesson is 30 minutes in duration, and each of the three levels consists of 30 lessons. This adds up to a total of 45 hours of material. Should be doable in about a week, eh? In actuality, I’ve found that I typically need three runs through each lesson to achieve the 80% accuracy level that is recommended before moving forward. Since I spend a total of about 3 hours per week studying the language, this translates to two lessons per week, and therefore 30 weeks to complete the 60 lessons contained in the first two levels. Although I started working Pimsleur seven months ago, I have only just recently started on Level III.

Where to Get It

Another potential downside of the Pimsleur approach is its high cost. Simon and Schuster’s list price is in the range of $300 per level. Fortunately, a number of lower cost channels exist for acquiring the material. I’d recommend checking your local library first, as many libraries carry Pimsleur material for some of the more popular languages. Another good option is http://www.recordedbooks.com/. Follow the “Direct to Consumer” link from their home page and then search for “pimsleur”.

I bought the first level from Amazon for ~$220 before I became aware of Recorded Books. I rented the 2nd two levels from Recorded Books. They have broken each level into two parts (A and B), with each part costing $16.00 to rent, for a total of $32 per level.

Many stores and sites also offer a “Short Course” in addition to the three levels in the “Complete Course”. I recommend skipping the Short Course, as it covers just a small subset of the material that is included the complete course.

Interesting Books About China

2007-12-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

Below are some of the better books about China that I’ve run across, ranked in order of recommendation:

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler spent two years in the late 1990’s as an instructor at a college on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. This book describes his experiences there. What makes the book exceptional is Hessler’s ability to bring the location and the individuals to life for the reader. I gained a different, and I think better, perspective on China and Chinese individuals from reading this book.

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, by Rachel DeWoskin

This book is about the author’s experiences in Beijing during the early 1990’s, where she became a star in a soap opera with the same name as the book title. It simply is a great story, and like Hessler, DeWoskin is able to bring the location and the people to life in her writing.

One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China, by James McGregor

James McGregor was the Wall Street Journal China bureau chief for many years. This ostensibly is a business book, but it provides insights well beyond the bounds of business. Just as the two books above bring individual locations and personalities to life, McGregor is able to bring alive the inner workings of the government bureaucracy and business culture. He is able to break down the general western perception of “China, Inc.” as a single, giant, homogenous entity. Instead, it is what all large bureaucracies are: a collection of many different individual tribes and fiefdoms, often in conflict with each other.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, by Peter Hessler

This is a follow-up to River Town. The author kept in touch with a number of his former students, many whom migrated to the coasts after graduating from school. So, this book further enhances the character and lifestyle insights provided by the first book. His background discussion of the originations of the written language (the oracle bones) and the scientists who study them seemed a little tedious to me, but was tolerable.

China Road, by Rob Gifford

Rob Gifford worked as the National Public Radio correspondent from China for six years. This book is about a journey he took across China on Route 312 from Shanghai to the far western border. Gifford describes interactions with a broad diversity of people he meets along the way, so the book offers breadth, but not much depth. I probably would have appreciated this book more if it was the first book I had read about the country, rather than the most recent. And, the author’s obsession with the question of whether or not China is or will become a “super power” is somewhat tiresome. By itself, this is not an important question, other than as a small component of the much broader topic of where overall the country is going and what it will become. After all, the Soviet Union was a "super power"… ?

The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck

This book is about the early 20th century and doesn’t provide much insight into modern China, but it is a classic, and is very unique in nature.

Getting Started

2007-09-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

What is the best way to begin studying Chinese?

Start with either a short introductory class if you can find one locally, or else with recorded audio lessons (e.g. Pimsleur, Chinesepod). The most important hurdle to overcome initially is gaining familiarity with the sounds of the language and how they are expressed in pinyin. Learning proper grammar and focusing on building your vocabulary should be left until later, and the reading and writing of characters until much later.

I tried starting with a book, and this was a mistake. The problem with initially relying on a book is that it is difficult to effectively remember words if you don’t know how to pronounce them. Heavy audio input is needed to gain this understanding. Although pinyin is somewhat similar to English, it has a number of distinct differences. And, Chinese also contains sounds that do not exist in English.

Regarding tones – it is good to casually attempt to recognize and speak the tones early on, but don’t let them bog you down. The other basics of the language present more than enough challenge to take on initially.

John Pasden offers a good summary of the stages of learning Chinese, excerpted here:

"Ching-chong-ching" Stage (No Study)*. It just sounds like noises.

"OK, it's a Language" Stage (Beginner). In this stage the learner recognizes a number of common phrases and vocabulary words, and can usually make himself understood in the most basic communication scenarios. His pronunciation, however, is still quite horrible. Tones are a complete mess, and he has not yet started to get a handle on the Chinese 'r' or 'y', or on the distinctions between Mandarin's 'x/sh', 'q/ch', and 'j/zh' pairs.

"I'm speaking Chinese!" Stage (Intermediate). In this stage, not only has the pronunciation of pinyin's consonants (r, y, q, j, etc.) been acquired, but tones have been brought under control as well.

"I'm just speaking Chinese" Stage (Advanced).

"Pretty Much Chinese" Stage (Native-like).

*Note: it probably is wise to avoid publicly referring to the Chinese language using the Stage 1 description. Rosie O’Donnell (TV celebrity) recently created a major ruckus by imitating the language in this manner.

Practicing with Native Speakers

2007-08-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

A key to the success of any self-study language program is finding opportunities to practice conversing with native speakers. Some students visit Chinese grocery stores or restaurants for this purpose. I have the good fortune of working with a company that employs many Chinese nationals.

Two challenges for the new learner in successfully initiating conversations with native Chinese speakers are: 1) the highly context sensitive nature of the language, and 2) the difficulty of correctly pronouncing its sounds.

Therefore, if you randomly throw phrases you have learned at a native speaker, you probably will receive back nothing more than puzzled looks. The person may or may not perceive that you are trying to speak Chinese rather than English. If they correctly determine that you are trying to speak Chinese, they may not immediately understand your statements if they are not contextually appropriate to the situation.

This can be frustrating and demoralizing. There is a solution, though, for saving face. That is to attack the recipient of your efforts. Accuse him of being a farmer. Explain that his lack of sophistication is the reason that he doesn’t understand your elegant speech.

Farmer Zhang Yuetao - Puzzled by my Sophisticated Dialect

This tack can serve double duty. If he says something simple to you in Chinese which you fail to at first comprehend, you can also blame this on the crude nature of his unsophisticated accent. It is not your fault, it is his fault.

Now, go find someone that you can throw some words at!

Acquiring a Chinese Name

2007-08-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

I have acquired a few different Chinese names. The one I use most often was given to me by Sherry Hu, a friend from business school, and is a comical play on my English name:

Căoméi Shān = Strawberry + Hill

Some people adopt transliterations of their English name. They derive their Chinese name from characters that sound similar to their English name. E.G. "Ken" becomes "Kai En" (sounds like "cayenne"). Seems kind of boring.

Sherry Hu also provided me with a more serious name for use in professional settings:

Băi Lì Shān = Cedar + Standing Straight + Hill

I probably need to be careful with the tones in this, though, because the dictionary says that "Bái Lì" (2nd tone instead of 3rd) means, "dysentery characterized by white diarrhea".

Sherry Hu - Laowai Name Seer

Another option for finding a Chinese name is to use the naming tool at mandarintools.com. It asks for your English name, gender, and "desired essence" (e.g. wealth and fortune, beauty and appearance, mind and intelligence, etc.). When I tried this tool, it popped out the following name for me:

Bi Rui Shu

I don't know how to judge whether or not this is a suitable fit. The name I'm most comfortable with is the first one mentioned above - Căoméi Shān. My only concern is that most Chinese people laugh when they first hear it. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Chinesepod

2007-08-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Chinesepod is a very intriguing, podcast-based language learning site.

I subscribed to and utilized Chinesepod religiously for 14 months. A few months ago I started to become disillusioned with it and stopped using it. I probably will return at some point in the future after I’ve been able to fill in some of the gaps left by its method.

Chinesepod provides fresh podcast lessons on a daily basis – for free. Companion transcripts and on-line practice tools can be accessed with a paid subscription. The service is very seductive because the podcasts are highly entertaining and engaging. They are short in duration (10-15 minutes) and are segmented according to four different user levels (Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced).

Chinesepod provides an excellent toolset for students first starting to study the language. It offers a large mass of entertaining content to help users gain familiarity with the sounds and structure of the language. This is extremely valuable. I believe that Chinesepod also probably is excellent for advanced learners who have developed a well-grounded foundation in the language, and just need additional content and vocabulary to build their fluency level. I say this based primarily on the comments of other users, since I have not yet reached that skill level.

Where Chinesepod is deficient is in its lack of layering and reinforcement. Each podcast is designed as a standalone lesson. The idea is for users to select a topic they are interested in (e.g. travel), and then search for sets of lessons that address this topic. This approach is very flexible and modular. On the surface it seems powerful, because the student can focus on subjects they are most interested in, skipping the rest. The issue, in my view, is that it inhibits lessons from building upon each other. There can never be an explicit referral back to or expansion of content learned in previous lessons, because there is no standardized lesson sequence. This has negative ramifications for long-term retention as well as for gaining a comprehensive understanding of common language constructs.

I did not develop an awareness of these deficiencies until after I had been working the content for over year. I subscribed to the “Premium” service which includes on-line tools for drilling vocabulary and constructs learned in the podcasts. I took it on faith that this would effectively build my retention. I eventually figured out a way to quantitatively test this belief, and found my retention to be much lower than I had expected.

I listened to the stripped-down dialogue scripts from all 197 lessons that I had previously studied, and found my comprehension level to be as follows:

Dialogues that I fully understood: 16%
Dialogues that I understood the general subject of, but not all the words: 28%
Dialogues that I understood some words from, but not the overall subject: 56%
Dialogues for which I understood absolutely nothing: 0%

The results were disappointing. But, I also must say that I would not still be studying the language today if not for Chinesepod. And, I am hopeful that the operators of the service will continue to improve it.

How Difficult is it to Learn Chinese?

2007-08-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

The standard answer provided by people selling language teaching tools is: "Chinese is easy to learn!".

For some very small percentage of the population - whom I would refer to as "language savants" - this probably is true.

But, for the overwhelming majority of us, it is patently false. The language is diabolically difficult to learn.

The basic sounds are hard to understand and pronounce. The tones are difficult to recognize and to speak properly. The large number of homonyms and the light use of pronouns makes it difficult for a novice to express themselves clearly unless the background context for the discussion is already apparent. The sentence structure is often different than English.

That's just the spoken part of the language. Toss the character writing system on top of this, and you can count on throwing away the next 10 years of your life studying the language.

About the only good news is that you don't need to conjugate verbs (I am, I was, You are, You were). So, if you really, really, really hate conjugating verbs, then maybe learning Chinese won't seem so difficult.

For more detailed information on why Chinese is so difficult to learn, see my more recent post here.

For more information on how long it takes to learn Chinese, see my more recent post here.

10 minutes per day? For how many decades?

The Physical Classroom

2007-08-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

Most of my focus to-date has been on gaining verbal skills, and my primary tool for this has been recored audio lessons. This makes it possible to study just about anywhere. The primary physical classrooms I use are:

Vehicle. Listening and speaking practice while driving.
Home. Good for elements of study that require being on-line.
The woods. I refuse to use an MP3 player while running in the woods, but sometimes I will memorize dialogues and then periodically repeat them during the course of a run. If you ever are in the woods and you hear someone run by speaking bad Chinese, it probably is me.
The workplace. A good place to find native speakers to throw words at. More on this later.

Classrooms #1 & #2

Classroom #3

Why Study Chinese?

2007-08-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

Gaining proficiency in foreign languages is a good thing to do. This is the case whether it be to the level of full fluency, or else just to the Ni Hao - Guten Tag - Hola – Bonjour level.

How about Chinese specifically? Is it a language you should invest time and effort in studying?

Organizations which promote study of the Chinese language often target business or career benefits to aid their cause. They typically state supporting rational such as:

Chinese is the global language of the future
China has the largest consumer market in the world
China has the fastest growing major economy in the world
Global manufacturing and supply chains are moving to China
Everyone else is learning Chinese
2008 Olympics

The message usually is built on fear-based under-tones: you better learn Chinese, or you will get left behind.

From a business and career standpoint, the real answer to this question is unique for each individual, and revolves primarily around opportunity cost. Yes, it certainly would be good to know the Chinese language (and other languages), but what other activities must you forsake in order to free the amount of time necessary to gain proficiency in this language? Is the trade-off worthwhile?

For a very small percentage of the population, the answer is yes. But, for most people, the answer definitely is no.

So, is Chinese the global language of the future? Probably not, for a number of linguistic and societal reasons. More on this later.

Will knowing the language benefit your business or career? Probably less than gaining other business or technical skills would.

If you run a business which is engaged with markets in China, then you have ready access to millions of bi-lingual Chinese professionals and companies that you can hire to help you navigate the waters. By the same token, if you work for a company with multi-national operations, then it probably focuses most of its efforts on hiring and developing local nationals rather than sending hoards of ex-pats to overseas.

Of course, there are exceptions to these scenarios, but for an overwhelming majority of us, there is no rational reason to study the Chinese language beyond the Ni Hao level.

The only reason to embark on such an effort is if: You have developed a completely irrational desire to face down this absurd challenge, for some completely inexplicable and incomprehensible reason.

This is usually more politely referred to as being for reasons of “personal growth”. And most surveys I’ve seen of people who have seriously studied the language for an extended period list “personal growth” as their dominant reason for doing so.

In the Beginning

2007-08-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

I officially embarked upon my effort to learn the Chinese language about 17 months ago. Specifically, on March 14, 2006.

Prior to that time I had dipped my toe in the water a few times – picked up a book here, watched a videotape there – but had not yet found a platform that could entice me to dive in headfirst.

In early 2006 I finally found that platform: Chinesepod. As the name implies, Chinesepod is a learning system built around podcasts. It is very engaging and fun to use.

I have since concluded that Chinesepod contains fundamental design flaws that limit its effectiveness (more on that later), and for this reason I no longer am using it. But, I also can say that my positive experiences with Chinesepod are the primary reason that I am still studying Chinese today.