Book wish list

One thing that would be real nice is if the Beginning Chinese Reader books were available in simplified characters. I used them for a while with the traditional set. Each chapter teaches 10 new characters and a bunch of new words. The readings spaces out use of the characters to reinforce memory. While I liked the approach, though, I'm not very interested in the traditional characters and would prefer to spend my limited time on the simplified form. If the book could be rewritten simplified I would gladly buy it.

I don't expect this to happen, though. John DeFrancis is up in years and is working on an English-Chinese dictionary, which is admittedly more important. The other reason is that DeFrancis hates the character system. While I have some sympathy for his point of view, it is still necessary to learn the characters to be literate in Chinese. The intermediate and advanced versions of his Chinese readers are written in Pinyin. The fact that he would make the effort to publish books in Pinyin, which no one uses for regular reading, confirms that he wants to put into practice the views in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Oh well. I otherwise like the approach in the Beginning Reader, which is a bit like the Pimsleur method, but for reading.

Pimsleur followup

I finished the Pimsleur Quick and Simple Cantonese course today and have a few more thoughts. While the Quick and Simple classes appear to teach the same vocabulary, the narration is customized for the language, with an emphasis on the tones in Cantonese. This was good since Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin.

One thing I had trouble with was the ng sound in Cantonese. This shows up in words like ngo and seung (I don't know how to spell these). The ng sound comes across sounding a lot like an "m" to me. The course explained how ngo is pronounced, but with seung (meaning "would like") I thought it was seum until my teacher corrected me when she heard the CD. Unfortunately when I got to "cik nang" I couldn't tell for sure how to pronounce "nang". For all I know it is "ngan".

I had some driving to do today so I checked out the Egyptian Arabic Quick and Simple class. It started out with exactly the same dialogue, and decided I wasn't ready to go through the same course again, even in another language.

The Pimsleur Method

I've seen the Pimsleur language courses at the store for a while and have wondered what their method was. I wasn't quite up to spending money to see, but when I ran into the some of the courses at the Akron Library I thought I'd try one to see how it worked. I'm far enough along with Mandarin to make that course too easy, so I went for Cantonese instead. The course is useful, but only in limited situations.

The main feature of the Pimsleur method is that you learn a language by speaking. The course comes with no written material. All learning is done by listening, repeating, and answering questions. There is a narrator to walk you through the process, explain things, and pose questions. Initially you just repeat words and sentences, and then as you learn more you will recall sentences, and later on form them.

I have been listening to the course while driving, and this is where I think this method works best. I have a 25 minute commute which gives me time to listen to most of a 30-minute lesson. I'm not sure this approach is efficient for home learning, though. Having undivided attention would be good, but it seems like one could learn faster by reading lesson material and then using the audio material for reinforcement.

This type of learning is definitely better than the rote memorization tapes, though. Nothing gets more boring than getting drilled through the same words over and over. With the Pimsleur method you advance through material so you will get periodic review while you learn more.

Chinese is not monosyllabic

One of the things that interested me about Chinese was something I read in the 1965 World Book Encyclopedia:


Spoken Chinese is weak in speech sounds because the language is monosyllabic. That is, each word has only one syllable.

The article goes on to talk about the small number of distinct syllables and the use of tones to add more sounds. This of course puzzled me, because I couldn't figure out how one could have a functional language with 400+ sounds, multiplied up to 1600 or so with tones. I pictued the need ot pick one of the 1600 sounds for each new word that comes into existence. Of course, this turns out to be an incorrect description of the spoken language, although I didn't really understand that until I started learning the language.

So if the World Book's description is incorrect, what is the truth? Well, a lot of Chinese words do have only one syllable. This makes for a lot of homonyms. There are also a lot of multisyllable words. An example would be zha4meng3, or grasshopper. Neither zha4 or meng3 mean anything on their own. In between are compound words, such as du2lun2che1 or unicycle. Du2lun2che1 is litterally "single-wheel-vehicle". Unicycle is derived from Latin and litterally means one-wheel. So are English and Chinese really that different. Most English words have root components, they just tend to come from Latin or French and they may be more than one syllable long. A lot of what makes Chinese appear monosyllabic is lack of loan words to mask the compound nature of the words.

A final reason why Chinese is not monosyllabic is that a lot of characters cannot be used as standalone words. A surprising example is hai2, which has a root meaning of "child". You cannot say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2". You must say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2zi" or ""Wo3 you3 yi4 ge xiao3hai2".

Now, it would be wrong to say that Chinese is constructed just like English. While many words in both languages are built from root parts, Chinese has a more limited set of components to draw from and the building blocks are more obvious than in English. Even so, though, to call Chinese monosyllabic is an oversimplifcations.

Comments on Spoken Taiwanese

A while back I thought it might be useful to pick up some Fujianese. I looked hard for a book but had a hard time finding anything. I finally came across Spoken Taiwanese. Taiwanese is a variety of Fujianese so I figured the book would be helpful. This turned out to be wrong, at least when using the book by itself. First, it does not explain how to pronounce the romanized letters it uses. It also lacks a description of the tone marks, or for that matter the tones at all. Finally, it lacks any explanation of anything in the language. It is actually just a collection of vocabulary and sentences.

The book appears to be designed to accompany the book Spoken Amoy Hokkien, which appears to be a more serious language reference. I haven't seen this other book, and at $45 from Amazon am not quite ready to shell out the money for it or the $170 tapes. The introduction says that Spoken Amoy Hokkien was written in Malaya during wartime, and that it doesn't reflect current Taiwanese usage and that Spoken Taiwanese was meant to rectify that. That turns out to be all it does, so if you want to learn Taiwanese be ready to buy more books than Spoken Taiwanese.

A Practical Chinese Grammar

A Practical Chinese Grammar was written as a supplement to Practical Chinese Reader volume I and II. If you are using that series you want to get this grammar. The PCR provides brief technical grammatical descriptions with a few examples, but A Practical Chinese Grammar deals with the same topics in a much clear fashion. The grammatical descriptions are much more detailed and rely less on technical terminology. It also provides a lot more examples and explains them better. I didn't get this book until I got to chapter 34 of the Practical Chinese Reader, but I wish I had gotten it at the start.

Thoughts on "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard"

I just came across the article Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. I have to say this is the best thing I've read on the language in a long time. I have written before about what make Chinese easy and hard but David Moser really understands the hard part. He mainly focuses on the writing system, but does include a few other things like the tones. The big thing I got out of the article was an assurance that I'm not stupid because I'm not doing as well after 4 years of Chinese as I did with three years of Spanish. Moser had studied Chinese for six years when he wrote the article and still couldn't read the newspaper without stopping to look up words.

This article is included in the book Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday, so it makes sense that this article would spend a lot of time picking on the character system, since that is John DeFrancis' least favorite part of the Chinese language. He may carp about the character system more than is necessary, but he comes up with new insights so in the end the whole article is useful.

One thing to keep in mind is that this article contains the rants of a frustrated Chinese student. A more scholarly article might distinguish between the features of the language that are arguably designed badly such as the writing system and features that are just plain hard for non-Chinese, such as the lack of cognates and the difficulty of using the tones. While the lack of cognates definitely makes learning Chinese difficult for the native Indo-European speaker, it is not a problem for the native speaker of Chinese. This is an important point, because early on Moser says "Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, the Chinese people". Chinese actually has lots of cognates, they are just between the different forms of Chinese, such as Mandarin and Cantonese. A Chinese gets the benefits of cognates in two ways. The characters are generally interchangeable across the languages, and provide a clearer way to read something written by a speaker of another form of Chinese than do the pronunciation similarities Moser refers to with French, German, and Spanish. The second form of cognate is the pronunciation cognate. I have only studied Mandarin, but I have seen a number of Cantonese words that have clear similarity to Mandarin and I'm sure the author has, too. Having said this, the lack of cognates does make learning Chinese difficult for the Westerner. I know when I started learning Chinese it was as if someone had made a language out of random syllables.

So that's my main gripe about the article. I otherwise agree with his sentiments completely. If you are studying Chinese this article will provide some good catharsis.

The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary

The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary is a dictionary covering lots of specialized words by using pictures. Each page has a thematic picture at the top with definitions below. Sample topics include the bedroom, dining room, meteorology, electrician and gliding (soaring). Using pictures to find the items is very helpful, because a lot of the time I don't know what the English terms are for some of the things, like diagonal spar or golf ball cap.

I'm of course highlighting obscure words, but a lot of them are actually useful and if you are interested in one of the specialized areas this dictionary will be helpful. Having said that, though, there are two problems with the dictionary. One is that the dictionary only displays the Chinese in traditional characters with no Pinyin. If you aren't familiar with the characters it can be difficult looking up definitions like the one for "line space adjuster", which is 5 characters long. The second problem compounds the problem, and that is the small font used for the Chinese. It can be hard to distinguished the strokes of the traditional characters when they are squeezed in a tiny font.

In conclusion, if you want to learn specialized vocabulary and know your traditional characters well then this is a good book to get. You should look at the book before buying, though, to see if it will actually be useful for you.

Using Google for studying Chinese

I found a way to use Google for Chinese study. I'm going through the book Making Connections and came up to a question that I didn't know and the book did not answer. In Lesson 6 the book has the student use 一点都不 and 一点也不 to answer questions. While these sounded familiar, I didn't really know what the two phrases meant. I typed them into Wenlin, copied and pasted the sentences into Google, and found good examples for both phrases. In particular I liked what I found for 一点也不. It gets used well at the end of a joke. Actually the example I found for 一点都不 worked out too. It showed up in a quote by Linus Torvalds, who isn't worried at all about SCO.

Followup on Making Connections

I have finished the first 5 chapters of Making Connections and have some some comments to follow up on my earlier review.

First, the book does much more than teach listening comprehension. Depending on what you want to learn, this can be a good or bad thing. Along with real life conversation, they include real-life ads, maps, etc. This would be OK, except that I bought the Simplified Character version and the examples use the Traditional characters. While this may be good for me, I consider it a waste of my time, as I'm not interested in learning traditiional characters, especially not this way. The publisher says a future version of the book will use simplified realia in the Simplified character version, and this will be a major improvement.

Another observation after listening to some of the conversations is that these aren't like the recordings you listen to in the language lab. The speakers throw in hmms and slur words together. The worst one for me was when I couldn't recognize the word ping1pang1, even after hearing it multiple times and having it pointed out by my teacher. She, of course, picked it right out. This is really annoying, but I've heard people speak a lot less clearly in real life so I consider this good training.

Spoiler alert

My last comment is on the storyline. What I'm talking about comes from listening to the recordings, so consider this to be spoilers.

The story is about a couple of students who are married, but not to each other. They are in a foreign country. One is a man and one is a woman. The man's wife is with him, but is always out shopping or doing something else, so these two students hang out. The woman invited the man out for dinner on his birthday and went to see a movie with him and his daughter another time. I don't want to think the worst, but this is the strangest relationship I've seen in a language book.

Chinese Character Test - How many Chinese characters do you know?

Clavis Sinica has come up with a fun test to determine how many Chinese characters you know. What you do is take a quiz where you need to identify the Pinyin and definition for individual characters. Based on your score you will be told how many characters you know. While I think their estimate for me was a bit low, it was at least in the ballpark. I have 776 characters in my Supermemo database and got a score of 623 when I took the 72 character test. I think the truth lies somewhere between the two numbers. Still, though, this gives a ballpark figure. Most people don't keep track of which characters they have learned, so this gives them an idea of how far along they are.

Note: Reading instructions is never fun, but it is worth checking out the background document. It explains what the skill level means and how to set it. In short the higher levels contain tests for more words. By picking an accurate level you will get a test more finely tuned to your knowledge of Chinese characters.

Understanding Spoken Chinese

I'm trying a new book called Making Connections from Cheng & Tsui. The book focuses on understanding spoken Chinese. This is exactly what I need, because I always have the hardest time with understanding a foreign language. The book has 45 lessons and 2 CD's worth of listening exercises. Each chapter starts with some warm-up material to prepare you for the audio lesson. You then listen to the audio once or twice and answer a few questions to see if you got the gist of the conversation. There are then deeper questions for which you can listen to the audio as many times as you like. Finally there are some written exercises to reinforce the subject.

The recordings are designed to sound like real people talking, with run-together words, ums, etc. The real test for me will be if they have people talking while eating. Or if they have a mumbler.

The lessons fall into three groups, Novice-High, Intermediate, and Intermediate/High-Advanced. When I first got the book I listened to the first recording and the last. I could generally understand the first one, but couldn't get the last one at all, so this should be a useful book. Note that while the first level is Novice-High, this book is designed as a supplement to regular instruction. It will teach new vocabulary and usage, but only in conjuction with the material. Also, characters are used, with pinyin only employed for new words, so if you don't know the characters this book won't be very useful. Also, a number of the exercises involve reading real Chinese from maps, posters, and the like. While the course emphasizes listening comprehension, it could also be said to help one learn useful reading comprehension as well.

Note that the book has both Simplified and Traditional versions.

I have finished the first two chapters. The first one included map reading exercises. These wouldn't have been too bad, but the characters are scrunched real small. Having seen real maps that had the same problem, though, I suppose this is preparation.

I'm really looking forward to using this book. I wish I had something like this when I was learning my other languages.

Listening to Chinese on VOA

VOA's Internet broadcasts are a good way to practice listening to Chinese. The announcers speak clearly, and if you know the news otherwise it will help you understand VOA. The only thing is that you will need a broad vocabulary, and the sentences can be somewhat convuluted. If you want to read what they are talking about check out the text archive. Finally, if you read the text archive, copying it into Wenlin will help a lot with the vocabulary. Its Chinese-English is full of VOA words.

Running Wenlin on Linux

Wine has advanced enough to run Wenlin, and it does it quite well. I'd give it about 90%, but this is enough for me to not bother using it in Windows under VMWare anymore. If you aren't familiar with Wenlin, it is the premier computer reference program for learning Chinese, but it is only supported on Windows and the Mac.

How I set up Wenlin under Wine

I installed Wine on my Debian system. I currently am using version 20030709 of Wine, but other versions before that worked as well. I then set it up as a pure Wine installation, without using any installed Windows files. I then popped in the Wenlin CD and installed it according to the regular instructions. I put it on my virtual C: drive, so to start Wenlin I then enter: wine ~'/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Wenlin3/wenlin.exe'.

That's all there is to it. It you want to try Wenlin without installing it, mount the Wenlin CD in Linux, start Wine with wine wcmd, go to our CD-ROM and enter ./wenlin.exe.

I will list my test results here. They are based on Wine 3.1. I initially tested Wenlin 2.0 and it seemed to work alright, but I did not spend much time on it, preferring to use 3.1. I used 3.0 a bit in between and found that it mostly worked except that I would get errors opening existing documents.

Things that work well

1. Instant Lookup
   
2. Regular lookup (Ctrl-L)
   
3. Opening, editing, and saving files
   
4. Handwriting recognition
   
5. Transformations
   
6. Character lists
   
7. Searching, regular expressions
   
8. Stroking box
   

Things that don't work

1. Open the Stroking Box and switch to another desktop in KDE. You get a little Unhandled Exception box and the program freezes. As long as you stay on the same desktop and close the Stroking Box when you want to switch, the Stroking Box will work fine.
   
2. Open a file, click on a character to open another window, and scroll to the bottom of the new window. Switch to a different KDE desktop. You may get an unhandled exception error.
   
3. Copying and pasting characters between Wenlin and Linux. This could be a configuration issue on my system, since aside from installing Chinese fonts I haven't otherwise tried to hard to make a Chinese environment. Letters transfer fine, though.
   

Cosmetic issues

1. The grabber shows up as a white disk with a black edge. Still perfectly useable.
   
2. If you switch desktops in KDE while you have the Brush Tool open the Brush Tool window follows you to the new desktop. Unlike the problems with the Stroking Box, though, this does not cause Wenlin to freeze.
   
3. Open a file, then click on a character to open another window. The title bar for the new window will not appear until you click somewhere outside of the Wine window.
   

Untested features

Wenlin has lots of features, and there are some I just don't use, so the following are untested:

1. The mouth tool
   
2. Flashcards
   

So overall Wenlin works quite well. If you prefer the convenience of running Wenlin in Linux you should definitely try it with Wine.

Thoughts on Rosetta Stone: Chinese Explorer

The first software I used to learn Chinese was Rosetta Stone: Chinese Explorer. I got off to a good start with it. The idea is to hear Chinese and identify the picture that the Chinese refers to. It also works in reverse, where you are given a picture and you have to identify the Chinese. This isn't too hard and you pick up vocabulary quickly. The problem is that the program gets REAL BORING. The worst is the drill where you are given 4 pictures in order and have to listen to 4 sentences to identify which one matches the picture. You have to listen to the same 4 sentences 4 times each. I finally gave up when I couldn't take it any more.

Things for the student of Chinese to Avoid

• Instructional books that use Pinyin without tone marks. Even though your use of the tones may not be very good, if you know what the tones should be you will do better than if you don't.
  
• Dictionaries without Pinyin. If you already have a vast knowledge of Chinese characters this won't matter, but otherwise it is really difficult to use a dictionary without Pinyin.
  

Measure words in English

One of the things in Chinese that the student has to learn are measure words. They seem like a strange concept because they are required for all nouns when enumerated, even simple ones like person or car. English actually has measure words, though. They fall in two classes:

Necessary:

These nouns have to have a measure word if you want to specify a quantity. These were called non-count nouns when I went to school.

Noun	Measure Word
bread	loaf
grass	blade
cattle	head

Aggregates:

These words refer describe units of items that are otherwise count nouns. The Chinese equivalents cause no conceptual problems for the student. The only examples I can think of are for animals, where there is a different measure word for just about every type of animal.

Noun	Measure Word
geese	flock
dogs	pack
puppies	litter

Flashcard killers: diao4qian3 and pai4qian3

Earlier I wrote about Supermemo, my favorite flashcard program. I use it to manage 6342 vocabulary terms and a large number of other items. Sometimes, though, there are words that are just hard to use with flashcards, because it is difficult to differentiate them. Today I got both diao4qian3 and pai4qian3 wrong. I got these words from reading the news at VOA. The Wenlin definition for diao4qian3 is "dispatch; assign", and the definition for pai4qian3 is "send; dispatch". There isn't really a whole lot of semantic difference between these two words. I suspect I may need to fold them into the same flashcard, unless I can figure out how the words are different.

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The Chinese have a word for everything: zhui4xu4

One thing that keeps surprising me in Chinese are some of the words to describe things that we never thought of in English. My first word in that category is zhui4xu4, a son-in-law living in the house of his wife's parents. On the face of it this sounds like a precise term in a society that clearly delineates family position. What makes this word more fun, though, is to look up the characters. Xu4, of course, is a bound form character meaning son-in-law. Zhui4 is a bound form meaning "superfluous." Other words using zhui4 include rong3zhui4, verbose, and rou4zhui4, wart. So, the technical term in Chinese for a husband living with his in-laws is the superfluous son-in-law. Archie Bunker would have understood completely.

Review of Wenlin

Wenlin is at its heart an English-Chinese-Dictionary, but it has a number of extra features that take advantage of running on a computer that there really isn't a term for this type of software. In any case, it is a software package that any serious student of the Chinese language should have.

Dictionaries

Wenlin contains three dictionaries: English-Chinese, Chinese-English, and one specific to individual characters. The English-Chinese dictionary is mediocre, containing about 20,000 terms. It is OK for basic vocabulary, but one would not buy Wenlin for this dictionary.

The Chinese-English dictionary, though, is one of the key features of Wenlin. It is the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary by John DeFrancis, and contains about 200,000 words and phrases. I am amazed when I browse through the dictionary at all of the obscure words and phrases it contains. There are also a number of sample sentences associated with vocabulary which help in learning usage. Another nice feature is that noun entries include the appropriate measure words.

The character dictionary is also very impressive. It has about 10,000 characters. Each entry provides a definition if available, historic forms, stroke order in both static and moving form, and lists of characters and words using that character. It also lists the components of the character and often includes an explanation of how the components were chosen to form the character.

Conversion

Wenlin provides a number of ways to convert Chinese. You can convert full form characters to simple ones, and vice-versa. You can replace tone marks with numbers and back again. You can convert characters to pinyin. I have used the character conversion to write a letter in simple form characters, and then transform them into full form so that I could send the letter to someone who was used to the traditional characters. I have also practiced reading pinyin (I've been slow to learn the characters) by copying simple form characters from the VOA web page to Wenlin then converting them to Pinyin. The only problem is that sometimes Wenlin crashes after doing this conversion. It has otherwise been very handy, though.

Stroke order

As mentioned above, each character entry includes a display of the stroke order. What is really nice, though, is that you can see the characters being written, and can walk through the strokes forward and backward.

Flashcards

Wenlin includes a flashcard feature for learning characters. I haven't used this much, but it provides several types of drills to reinforce learning.

Other features

• Wenlin supports handwriting recognition for Chinese characters. You can use this to look up a character or to test yourself to see if you can write the character correctly. Wenlin won't show the character unless it is entered with the correct stroke order or you disable stroke order checking.
  
• Wenlin supports both simplified and traditional characters. You can select which one you prefer to view, and if a character shows up in a dictionary entry that has a different form in the other character set it will be listed.
  
• If you wave the pointer over a word of either language the dictionary entry for it will appear at the bottom of the screen. This makes lookups very easy.
  
• You can hear the pronunciation of any character in either a man or woman's voice. This feature isn't as useful as it could be because the characters are pronounced much more slowly than the would be in even slow regular speech.
  
• Wenlin functions as a text editor. It makes no claims to be a word processor, but it provides the same king of editing you could do with a simple editor like notepad.
  
• You can open up Chinese documents for reading. Wenlin comes with a number of public domain ancient and modern texts for practice.
  
• Lots of other features that would take up too much space to list.
  

Gripes

While Wenlin is an excellent program, there are a few areas of improvement that would be beneficial:

• When closing a window with user-entered text there is always a prompt asking whether you want to save the file. There are a lot of ways to use Wenlin without it being a text editor, and these prompts get annoying. A configuration option to disable these prompts would be nice.
  
• The English dictionary covers only basic vocabulary. There is a workaround, though, that works pretty well. You can bring up the entire ABC Chinese-English dictionary in a window, and then search for the English words there. You can even use regular expressions when searching, which makes it easier to find special usage.
  
• Wenlin often crashes in Windows 2000 and Windows XP when converting text from character form to pinyin. This is a long-running problem with versions 3.0 and 3.1.
  
• A number of the sample sentences have typos, mainly incorrect tone marks.
  

A Note on the ABC Dictionary

The ABC Dictionary included with Wenlin is also available in paper form. It is called the "ABC" dictionary because the Chinese-English entries appear in alphabetical rather than character order. DeFrancis believes the character system is a bad hack and a failure (see The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) and feels that the language should be represented by an alphabet. His dictionary is consistent with that belief. I have to say that as a student of Chinese I don't always know the characters so it is a lot easier looking up the words by their Pinyin representation.

Title Clarification

The full name of the programs is "Wenlin: Software for Learning Chinese". While it is very useful as a reference tool, one should not mistake it for an instructional program. You will still need books, teachers or other educational software to learn Chinese. Wenlin will complement whichever of these you use very well, though.

Conclusion

With only a few minuses and a wealth of features, Wenlin is definitely worth getting. The list price is $249, but is available for $199 from several retailers. Updates have been free except for major upgrades such as from version 2 to 3.

Review of Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

This thick volume by Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson is a very well written guide to Chinese grammar. It combines detailed technical explanation with examples and clearly worded and useful summaries.

The book starts with background information on Chinese phonology. Not technically grammar, but useful information. It then covers other topics such as word structure and then gets into sentence structure. Chapters include topics such as questions, negation, ba3, and bei4. Each chapter starts out with some heavy technical discussion combined with sample sentences. Once you wade through this you are usually rewarded with a practical section giving advice on how to use the grammatical feature being discussed. Having both the heavily technical part as well as the practical usage advice is what makes this book good.

The only thing lacking in the book are Chinese characters. All sample sentences are given in pinyin. I have focused more on spoken than written Chinese, so I don't actually read the characters that well, but I feel the meaning of words is much clearer when the characters are included. Having said this, the sample sentences include word-for-word English translation, so not having the characters is not a big problem. It just seems strange not having them.

Overall this is a detailed reference that is well worth getting.

What makes learning Chinese hard

• Tones. You need to be able to both speak and understand words using the correct tones for each word.
  
• Characters. Learning the characters is a lot harder than learning an alphabet.
  
• Pronunciation. Several groups of sounds have subtle pronunciation differences that require mouth diagrams and words like hard palate and blade of the tongue to understand how to pronounce.
  
• Grammar. Beyond basic sentences, Chinese grammar gets complex.
  
• Way of speaking. Often the problem when translating English to Chinese isn't grammar, but rather rephrasing the sentence into the way the Chinese speak. With its own rich history and idioms often things are just said differently.
  

What makes learning Chinese easy

• You don't have to conjugate verbs.
  
• You don't have to decline nouns.
  
• Declarative sentences have simple structure: Subject-Time-Verb-Object
  

Why I started studying Chinese

I have wondered how Chinese works for a long time. The character system is much different from an alphabet, and I had been read incorrect information about how the language works, that lead me to believe that the language should not work. For example, a 1965 World Book article said that every word in Chinese is one character, and with tones there are 1600 or so different sounds. I could not imagine how a useful language could reuse those 1600+ sounds to cover tens of thousands of words. I worked with some Chinese and asked them about the language, and things started to make some sense.

In 1998 I learned that the 2000 Unicon would be held in Beijing. Unicon is the world unicycling championship meet. I had gone to a number of US national meets but not the international ones. China sounded like an interesting place to visit, though, so I decided to go. I hate going somewhere, though, where I don't know the language, so I decided to study Chinese.

I then had to figure out where to study Chinese. On Thanksgiving my brother suggested Berlitz. I called them the next day but they were closed for the holiday. I then looked in the phone book and found the American Institute of Languages in Hammond Corners, OH. I found that they teach Chinese, and have been studying it ever since.

Since then I have learned that the World Book is wrong. While most characters can function as words, not all words are one character, especially in spoken Chinese. They have since fixed this in the encyclopedia. Also, I didn't end up going to the unicycle convention. My interest in unicycling was flagging, and I wanted to spend my time in China seeing the country. In the end I went with REI Adventures and had a great time. Knowing Chinese made the trip a lot more fun, and it was especially helpful when I spent the night in a rural hospital.

Supermemo

The program that made mass vocabulary learning possible for me is Supermemo. Supermemo is a flashcard program with one real handy feature. It learns from your answers and uses the information to adjust the testing rate for individual cards. This means that you don't get tested for easy words like da4 all of the time. Instead you concentrate on harder words like interrogate or impeachable (they may not be hard for you, but you get the idea). This greatly increases the number of flashcards you can have. For example, I have 6214 active flashcards in Supermemo. Think about how you would handle this many flashcards on paper or in a simple flashcard program. You can't review that many in a day or even in a normal week. If you try to cram them all in, you will waste a lot of time on words you learned a long time ago. One can try solutions like retiring old words, but what if you think you know the word but then forget it? With Supermemo, today I was only tested on 90 out of the 6214 words, and they were the words that needed testing.

Supermemo handles the problem by giving each card a difficulty level and a date for the next test. Each day you are given a set of cards to go through. After answering a question you grade your performance on that card, from A through F. "A" means that you answered correctly with no difficulty. "F" means that you not only got it wrong, but you don't even remember ever knowing the answer. There are degrees of knowledge in between. Generally if you get an A through a C, the interval to the next time the question shows up will approximately double or triple. If you get a D through an F you will see the question again tomorrow or the day after. The grade will also cause an adjustment to the difficulty level. The actual degree to which a successful answer is pushed into the future is based on the difficulty level. The lower the level the farther into the future.

After taking the daily test, you are drilled on the questions you got wrong. The drill continues until you get all of the answers correct.

Supermemo is available for Windows, Palm OS, and PocketPC. I use the Palm version, which is very handy because I can work on the daily test anytime I have a few free moments. The Windows version has a number of extra features, but none making it worth me using instead of the Palm version.

The documentation for Supermemo is a bit obscure at first. The authors don't explain the process of using Supermemo real well, but rather emphasize menu options and learning theory. Here is the flow for how Supermemo works:

1. Enter some words into Supermemo. At this point they will not be included in any test. You can run drills on them if you wish, which is like using classic flashcards. This is only useful for initial learning or cramming.
   
2. As you learn words, you want to commit them. This means that you know the words well. Nothing will happen that day in Supermemo as a result of committing the words.
   
3. The next day when you run Supermemo you will find that you will have a test containing about half of the words you committed yesterday.
   
4. Take the test and grade yourself on each answer. After the test, do the drill on the words that you got wrong.
   
5. The next day you will have the rest of your new words in the test, as well as half of the words you got wrong yesterday.
   
6. Every day take the test and drill. Over time the number of words in your daily test will decrease unless you are adding new words.
   

There are three methods to adding words to Supermemo for Palm OS. You can enter them into the program on the PDA, you can convert them from the Windows version , or you can convert them from a comma-separated-values file. Entering large numbers of words on the PDA can be tedious but it is fine for a small amount. I have never tried converting words from the Windows Supermemo, but once converted you can't bring them back into Windows, and there is no conduit, so there is no real way to coordinate the two. Converting a CSV file is fairly straightforward. Enter the data into a spreadsheet and save it as a CSV. You then the file through smconv.exe to get the PDB file.

Some people gripe about Supermemo. They scoff at the science that the creators say underpins the application, and say it is just another flashcard program. I don't actually know if the science is correct or not, but the program works well enough that I'll take them at their word. Another common gripe is that you can't easily reverse the questions. If you want both Chinese-English and English-Chinese cards for a word, you need to enter the data twice. This is true, but it is a reasonable trade-off for Supememo's card management. Since Supermemo keeps statistics on each question, it needs separate entries for each one. There is a way to reverse a drill, but this really doesn't help any. A final stumbling block is the daily grind of the tests. The key is to stick with it for a week or so and see how quickly the number of questions in the daily tests goes down.

As much as I like the program, I have a few gripes and wishes.

• Supermemo resizes fonts using its own algorithms. This works well enough on the Latin alphabet, but it makes some Chinese characters hard to read. I wish it would use the built-in font sizes.
  
• It would be nice to be able to export a database to a text file, just to get an overall view of how you are doing.
  
• A conduit between the Palm and Windows versions would be handy.
  
• It would be nice if the data files were interchangeable or convertible between the Windows, Palm, and PocketPC versions. I'll stick with Palm forever because I don't want to start over with a fresh database on another platform. This isn't a problem because I like Palm OS, but it does feel restrictive.
  

You can get a demo copy of Supermemo but it won't give you the full effect because it won't do testing, only drilling. It is cheap, though, with the Palm version costing only $16. Whatever form of the program you use, I strongly recommend any student of Chinese, or any other language use the program.

The Chinese Learner's Palm Pilot

Over time I have installed several programs that make my Palm OS based PDA an ideal Chinese language study tool. I will list them here, and provide more in-depth reviews later on. BTW, I know they aren't called Pam Pilots any more, but writing about the "Chinese Learner's Palm" sounds a bit strange.

Here are the useful tools I have found:

CJKOS

CJKOS stands for the Chinese-Japanese-Korean operating system. It provides two features, the ability to work in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters or letters, and the ability to have standard applications display Chinese menus and icons. My main interest is working with Chinese characters, so that is what I will talk about here. CJKOS will display Chinese characters in pretty much any application on the Palm. It supports several font sizes and includes both Simplified and Traditional fonts. It also includes hi-res fonts for PDAs such as the Sony Clie which have 320x320 pixel screens. CJKOS has several methods of data entry, although I only really understand one, Pinyin. Fortunately this is all I need. As you enter the Pinyin you will see a progressively smaller list of matching characters. When you see the one you want you select it and continue to the next character.

Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary for Palm OS

This is a very well-designed dictionary. The designers put a lot of thought into the design to provide a program that provides features that take advantage of the PDA. There is a price to pay for this, but it is well worth it. The text of the dictionary comes from the Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary, which I have written about previously. This provides a dictionary with solid scholarship behind it and a good selection of vocabulary. You can look up words by Pinyin, characters written by hand or pasted in, and by radical. The handwriting recognition is licensed from Motorola and is quite slick. You write the character and it gives you a list of most likely matches. The program supports both Traditional and Simplified fonts, and you can instantly switch between them if you have the requisite files installed. You can use the program with CJKOS or with its own fonts.

Supermemo

Supermemo is not specifically a Chinese study program, but rather a very clever flashcard application. One problem with most flashcard programs is that they test all words at the same rate. That means that you get tested on simple words like "dog" as often as you are tested for less frequently used words like "syllogism". This make for really tedious drills. What Supermemo does is provide a daily test of items that you have either missed recently or just need a refresher for. As you answer each test question, you provide your degree of a grade from A to F indicating how well you did. Based on this grade and your prior results Supermemo will reschedule the question test. If you get it wrong you will see it again in one or two days. If you get it right the testing interval will generally double or triple. I have some words that I won't see again until 2008, although the vast majority of them are somewhere in between. Using Supermemo I can manage a set of 6170 vocabulary words, which would be impossible with a regular flashcard system.

Honorable Mention

If you don't want to spend the money on the Oxford dictionary, or just want more definitions, check out KDIC. This is a dictionary engine that uses the CEDICT dictionary from the Internet as well as several others. CEDICT is a very large Chinese-English dictionary, and there is also a reversed version for English to Chinese. The program is inexpensive and unenforced shareware, so it is worth getting if you are considering it at all. The problem with it is that it isn't very polished, so there are a lot of junk symbols that show up on the screen, and it doesn't do handwriting recognition. It has a big dictionary, though, so it can be handy to keep around, at least until the next version of the Oxford dictionary comes out, which will have the ability to use custom dictionaries.

Chinese-English-Chinese Dictionaries

When learning any language, a dictionary is vital. Unfortunately it is hard to find a comprehensive modern English-Chinese-English dictionary. For one thing, most good dictionaries only go one way. This was a switch from my experience with other languages like Spanish and Hebrew where dictionaries normally included entries from both directions. The two-way dictionaries aren't as good as a good one-way dictionary, but some are adequate for everyday purposes.

Dictionaries come in various media. Today I'll just talk about the paper variety. The best English-Chinese-English dictionary I have seen is the Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary, Second Edition from Oxford University Press. While concise, it has a good selection of definitions and it is easy to carry. It is available at regular bookstores. The base character type is simplified, but tradititional equivalents are included. The Chinese-English dictionary is orderd by character. If you only want one dictionary this is a good one to get. BTW, it is also available for Palm OS PDAs from Pleco.

An interesting English-Chinese-English dictionary is Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. The dictionary is organized by root character components, which are not the same as radicals. The idea is to break down the components of the characters to show how they were formed. The genealogy is divided into 182 components. For each component it lists characters that use it, and then for each character there is a list of words that start with it. To look up a word, one goes to one of the indices at the back of the dictionary. There are English-Chinese, Chinese-English, radical and stroke-count indices. Emphasizing character genealogy, the characters are in the traditional form, although the simplified forms are given as well. If you have a special interest in character formation this is an excellent dictionary to get. It is inexpensive and easy to carry. It is available from Zhongwen.com, where you can also use it interactively for free.

Introduction

I have been studying Chinese for four years and wanted to share some of my thoughts on the language. I have some topics in mind that I'll be writing about over the next few weeks, including the difficulty in learning the language, software, and background.