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.