tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51932242011-11-12T08:19:17.494-05:00Thoughts about learning the Chinese language.Lemuelnoreply@blogger.comBlogger301100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-80088359168577116192007-05-18T17:24:00.000-04:002007-05-18T17:39:14.804-04:00

This isn't about Chinese, but it is at least about learning a language. A couple of weeks ago I flew up to New Paltz, New York, to attend a weekend session at the Language Immersion Institute. I thought it would be fun to try learning a language by the immersion method. I took Polish because I knew almost nothing of the language, so it would be a truly new immersion experience. I was

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1070426305379279582003-12-02T23:38:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.776-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1069209335804802212003-11-18T21:35:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.777-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1068863520734921982003-11-14T21:32:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.777-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1067224827868125612003-10-26T22:20:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.777-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1066188127714743472003-10-14T23:22:00.001-04:002008-09-23T09:26:02.579-04:00

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.

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1065924706551293952003-10-11T22:11:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.778-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1064802844507367472003-09-28T22:34:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.778-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1064461910834249992003-09-24T23:51:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.778-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1063735594148101652003-09-16T14:06:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.778-04:00

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,

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1063417219736975702003-09-12T21:40:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.779-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1062332404370286692003-08-31T08:20:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.779-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1061130091536681402003-08-17T10:21:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.779-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1061081497495989432003-08-16T20:51:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.779-04:00

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,

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1058021675506923972003-08-03T16:15:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.780-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1055026272630665692003-06-07T18:51:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.780-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1053204877394778662003-05-17T16:54:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.780-04:00

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.

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1053091236816955652003-05-16T09:20:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.780-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-1052867286610198302003-05-13T19:08:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.781-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2002703762003-05-09T23:28:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.781-04:00

Blogger Pro

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2002660572003-05-09T07:15:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.781-04:00

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.

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2001912912003-04-23T22:42:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.781-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2001593482003-04-16T23:06:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.781-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2001362302003-04-11T23:05:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.782-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2001362032003-04-11T22:56:00.000-04:002007-05-20T10:14:36.783-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2000975692003-04-04T12:01:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.783-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-2000674512003-03-29T23:29:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.783-04:00

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 (

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-915258952003-03-27T23:46:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.784-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-911922992003-03-22T15:24:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.784-04:00

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

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5193224.post-911831952003-03-22T11:25:00.000-05:002007-05-20T10:14:36.784-04:00

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.

Lemuelnoreply@blogger.com0