Language Immersion Institute

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 disappointed to discover, though, that most of the class was taught in English, with Polish just during exercises. We were taught grammar in English, and when we got to the three rows of desks covered with realia, the teacher talked about it in English, except for when she got to a few pictures of her family and she gave us their relations in Polish. Those of us in the class also had been asked to bring realia, and we talked about it in English, too. Plus, the teacher's grasp of Polish grammar was weak. While we were learning verb conjugations, including a verb that appeared to be irregular to us, one of the students asked if Polish has irregular verbs. The teacher said that it doesn't. I knew better, because I know irregularities creep into every language. The next day when the teacher was reading a grammatical description to us in English she found herself telling us about irregular verbs. Not a good sign.

I'm told that this isn't typical for the Institute, and that they normally really do use the immersion method. I won't be finding out, though, because it isn't worth it to me to take a second chance and fly to New York and pay for a hotel, both of which cost more than the class itself.

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.