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.