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.