Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

i solved that "problem" by using google's ime, which was built by leveraging some non-google database resources/jacked wholesale from sogou pinyin

not available for mac unfortch

well there was a leaked 'beta.' but it crashes in mountain lion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnnlkLDqgPI&list=PLC175F3EC9EA4B856&index=2

antonioni in china

...but it was severely denounced by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist". The documentary had its first showing in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing with a film festival hosted by the Beijing Film Academy to honor the works of Michelangelo Antonioni.

i guess i meant that for the rolling china thread

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/use-your-language/check-your-skills.aspx

coming out of the chinese language programs at both universities i attended (esp ubc), the only serious attempts at recruiting us for future employment came from csis canadian security intelligence service

Starting Mandarin this week. Not the oldest person in the class, but everyone else seems to be some sort of Commerce/Law/Politics major, hmmn.

If you mind me asking, AA, which Aussie uni does yr course get accreditation w/?

ace! it's this one: http://rmit.edu.au

what textbook have you used in your courses? would you recommend them for an autodidact?

u looking for reading competency only or speaking/listenign to

both, really

i'm guessing it's probably like japanese in that the written and spoken word are almost like two different disciplines

yes

yeah, totally different disciplines. fortunately you're only learning one 'alphabet' and not three.

we don't use text books. the course is developing its own materials for some reason, so we use those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFRoILS1jY

We're using the New Practical Chinese Reader, which seems to be pretty widespread/standard - lots of relevant modules for various language learning/flashcard/etc sites online (Memrise, Anki).

re: characters & stroke order, I guess Skritter & equivalents would need to be smartphone/touchscreen-based things, right? Guess I'll have to make do with the more traditional rote copying on paper.

Starting Mandarin this week. Not the oldest person in the class, but everyone else seems to be some sort of Commerce/Law/Politics major, hmmn.

in my experience it was mostly biz/comm students in my classes. because it was the future international language of business. they rarely persevered. even if they ended up with a minor in chinese, their grasp of mandarin was so woefully incomplete that they would struggle to conduct any business in the language. (but the interest generated by crazy boosterism by ted talk financial "thinkers" about mandarin resulted in lots of cash and jobs for the chinese departments at lots of n. american universities).

new practical is the cream of an uninspiring crop of mandarin textbooks. it doesn't know how to deal with the written language but that's okay because you should be learning it somewhere else.

i don't trust skritter or equivalents (what are the equivalents? pleco? i have pleco on my phone and i use it mainly to look up unfamiliar characters because it has that little writing pad thing that actually recognizes my handwriting unlike previous programs) but i'm old fashioned and i learned with a pen + paper and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours copying things out. back in the day, i just grabbed any chinese text and went ham on it.

endless copying lets you discover your own methods for remembering character writing, your own mental shortcuts, your own little folk etymologies or explanations for characters that let you recall them later. it also drums into you that there are a limited number of building blocks. now, bring it all together and instead of 楼 a single character, you learn the building blocks of the character and come up with your way of remembering it (a little 木 tower and a broad inside 女 checking out some rice 米) and write it a few thousand times and it'll be automatic. and when you get those building blocks down, it gets easier to remember characters that use them in their construction. you got me?

grab a book of mo yan short stories or something, or check out a basic text like the three character classic 三字经 or get a bilingual collection of chinese poetry because those are easy to find, or hell, go down to your local chinese bookstore if you've got one and find one of those little intro character tracing paper flipbooks for kids that will show you the most useful characters and their stroke order.

write write write, buy a chinese-english dictionary and learn to look up characters by radical and stroke number and look up unfamiliar characters (at first, this will be every single one and then every second one). there might be a better way to learn to write chinese but i found this way effective (but slow) and fucking satisfying.

with spoken chinese, i've come to the conclusion that drilling pronunciation is crucial. it almost requires one-on-one training, though. tongue position, man. fucking tongue position. pay attention to that shit. getting the basics of pronunciation down is your first hurdle.

tonal shit is important but! i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words anyways and aren't in a position where tonal mixups will really hurt comprehension.

so, pronunciation. get that tongue in the right place.

most of the chinese kids i know dont even know how to write anymore they just know how do type

well thats an exaggeration. but u know

that is basically how i study japanese, dylannnn

i've seen chinese university students whose writing is a wasted battlefield of slumped logograms leaning against misplaced 单人旁, substituted and wrong characters, sudden pinyin with tone marks. but those fuckers put in a decade of rote learning and mindless character copying to get to even that point, once they abandoned calligraphy for pinyin input. so, i still say, if you want to have any hope of even struggling with written chinese in a world where you simply choose a character off a menu, you better sharpen your pencils, boys.

but... yeah, there are very few paths for a casual chinese student that will end with them needing to write anything by hand.

i ended up taking notes in chinese lectures, having to write exams without the benefit of a dictionary and now i use chinese at work and my writing is unsightly enough that i don't want to spoil it further with wrong/substituted characters.

okay, and a few more arguments for being able to write chinese by hand: i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

but this is relatively far down the road for most chinese learners and they should probably focus on just being able to speak it and read characters and have fun learning and using the language, which is possible without being able to write a grocery list by hand.

i found that a lot of the old guard of chinese department guys in western universities can express themselves beautifully in writing and have a great understanding of chinese as it exists in literature and poetry (and their interest in anything written after the ming is fairly limited and they were only forced into looking at modern literature as there became increased popular and academic interest in china and the sinosphere as a living thing that began in, well, let's say the early 1990s but who knows if that's fair to say or not) because... there was no use for chinese as a living language, no one was going to china. and chinese departments in universities functioned as a place where people were taught the chinese written language, how to read classical chinese and decode old texts. that's just passing maybe inaccurate observation. but it's interesting to see how the teaching of chinese unlike a lot of other languages people considered serious and important to learn is a relatively new area of scholarship and experimentation!

i don't trust skritter or equivalents (what are the equivalents? pleco? i have pleco on my phone and i use it mainly to look up unfamiliar characters because it has that little writing pad thing that actually recognizes my handwriting unlike previous programs) but i'm old fashioned and i learned with a pen + paper and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours copying things out. back in the day, i just grabbed any chinese text and went ham on it.

this is otm. i use skritter heaps, but it needs to be used with other things. you can't just hole up with skritter for a year and expect to come out with any applied knowledge, e.g. i can see a word in skritter 60 times and have nfi what it was within two hours, but if i see the same word in context twice it's usually locked in.

re chinese texts: i've taken to carting a copy of this

http://read.189.cn/loadFile.do?xzType=img&xzywType=cfmtxz&fileName=2000000000005883758.jpg

around with me everywhere; there's a load of stuff that i can't comprehend yet, but usually there's a handful of articles that i can get the gist of at worst and a fairly vivid idea about at best. you can get this mag (and also this

http://www.zazhipu.com/bookpic/20133/20133614520.jpg

slightly more teeny-love mag) in pretty much any chinese newsagency/bookshop; i never have trouble finding recent issues for au$1–2.

recently i've also started forcing myself to listen to chinese language podcasts (and i do mean ~listen~) for at least half an hour every day. i'm only understanding fragments atm (my listening is my weakest skill atm), but already my comprehension is improving.

if you're in a position to do it, and if it's easy for you to sit down and watch something, go to the aforementioned chinatown areas and pick up a dvd-rom full of chinese soaps. usually you'll get six billion episodes on a disc for just a few bucks. heaps of them come with chinese subtitles as well, so you can even read what's being said.

instructional texts are a great step up, and will always have value in your learning, but unless you try to immerse in proper chinese you won't really have a chance to see what you're learning in full application. even if you're only at the level of going 'omg that's 中 i've seen that character before somewhere' it's at least hitting the right language circuits in your brain.

i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words

ime tonal drilling isn't done enough. too many of the students i've studied with are so hopelessly atonal that i have no cocking idea what they're saying most of the time.

you want to at the very least be mindful of the tones as you learn. don't ignore them with the intent of picking them up later.

i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

so very otm. there was a point last year when my chinese handwriting (although surely conspicuous to a native speaker) was tidier and more fluid than my english handwriting (which has gone to shit in the age of keyboards), and it was a pleasure to just sit and bang out a page of audio dictation. i've done a lot less recently, and it really shows.

(nothing directed *at* you obv dylannn)

oh and the first time i saw a native chinese speaker (chinese born, chinese academic, newly in aus to study interpreting at uni) bugger up the handwriting of a reasonably simple character was one of the most reassuring moments of my entire life.

endless copying lets you discover your own methods for remembering character writing, your own mental shortcuts, your own little folk etymologies or explanations for characters that let you recall them later. it also drums into you that there are a limited number of building blocks. now, bring it all together and instead of 楼 a single character, you learn the building blocks of the character and come up with your way of remembering it (a little 木 tower and a broad inside 女 checking out some rice 米) and write it a few thousand times and it'll be automatic. and when you get those building blocks down, it gets easier to remember characters that use them in their construction. you got me?

yeah this is why i kinda hate simplified, so many of the traditional characters were simply just a bunch of 部首 put together, and then they just turned em into a bunch of ink squirts on paper with no organizing principle, a lot more arbitrary ime

plus, something like 龜 is badass but 龟 sucks turds

i was pretty surprised to learn that most chinese dudes use pinyin. in HK everybody told me that they used cangjie. but i guess mandarin pinyin is not 'natural' to them and they aren't taught cantonese jyutping at all. i guess pinyin is taught concurrently in china now so most kids are super familiar with it.

i do wonder if you were to design a ground up character input device for the computer what it would look like. like, no need to reverse-fit onto a qwerty keyboard.

having struggled with zhuyin/bopomofo and wubi, i have a lot of love for the simplicity of pinyin and it probably works the best if we're stuck with qwerty keyboards

http://data.bangtech.com/tips/mm/vista-zhuyin-ruby-and-soft-keyboard.gif

yeah that seems right to me, esp with databases that get constantly updated w/ netslang like sogou

still have not installed sogou yet :>

yeah pinyin is great xp, although imo there's a gulf between (a) using it as an input method/training wheels for new words and (b) totally relying it instead of learning characters. too many students in my third year do everything in pinyin.

tonal shit is important but! i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words anyways and aren't in a position where tonal mixups will really hurt comprehension.

Yeah, it's p.brutal - the smallest groups in which we get to interact w/a lecturer/tutor are still about 25-30 people large. The professor taking the course is French, and had to keep in mind the Kiwi accent when explaining vowel sounds ("... like in ten, but not the way you say it here which is tun" etc).

I'm trying to show my head at the uni's Chinese Language Club though as someone a few weeks into a first-year course there's not a lot of use yet. The Confucius Institute here is pretty active - people I've met have been nice & they have a decent library (I'm a sucker for the Foreign Language Press box sets of The Water Margins etc) ...

okay, and a few more arguments for being able to write chinese by hand: i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

Been trying to get this down, though it's p.brutal with the gulf between beautiful calligraphic characters and my cramped grubby strokes with a ballpoint pen in a 1B5 exercise book. Though as AA said, will probably be better than my English handwriting which has gone to shit in an ages of keyboards etc.

i found that a lot of the old guard of chinese department guys in western universities can express themselves beautifully in writing and have a great understanding of chinese as it exists in literature and poetry (and their interest in anything written after the ming is fairly limited and they were only forced into looking at modern literature as there became increased popular and academic interest in china and the sinosphere as a living thing that began in, well, let's say the early 1990s but who knows if that's fair to say or not) because... there was no use for chinese as a living language, no one was going to china. and chinese departments in universities functioned as a place where people were taught the chinese written language, how to read classical chinese and decode old texts.

Yeah, I can see this (though here in NZ/Pacific Rim I think we have more academics from China doing contemporary (or at least 20thC) things); reading a book on the creation/context of Du Fu's canonisation atm for something else. There's a third-year paper on Classical Chinese I'll hopefully get to do, but I suspect I'm the only person in my language class who's into T'ang poetry/紅樓夢/Yu Hua or w/e.

recently i've also started forcing myself to listen to chinese language podcasts (and i do mean ~listen~) for at least half an hour every day. i'm only understanding fragments atm (my listening is my weakest skill atm), but already my comprehension is improving.

if you're in a position to do it, and if it's easy for you to sit down and watch something, go to the aforementioned chinatown areas and pick up a dvd-rom full of chinese soaps. usually you'll get six billion episodes on a disc for just a few bucks. heaps of them come with chinese subtitles as well, so you can even read what's being said.

instructional texts are a great step up, and will always have value in your learning, but unless you try to immerse in proper chinese you won't really have a chance to see what you're learning in full application. even if you're only at the level of going 'omg that's 中 i've seen that character before somewhere' it's at least hitting the right language circuits in your brain.

I remember having to shelve those mags a lot at Auckland library, AA! What kind of podcasts are you listening to? I guess I should dig around for more story-based/narrative radio shows (children's bedtime stories?) or equivalent to start off with.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130315-a-better-way-to-learn-chinese/1

i still contend that producing tones is relatively easy and isn't a huge hurdle for early learners. by that i mean, simply knowing what a flat tone sounds like and being able to make that tonal contour match what native speakers are doing.

the difficulty comes in attaching tones to characters, and then learning to properly employ them (moving from single character + tone to figuring out how tones are used in a full sentence or phrase). and i think that needs to come after basic pronunciation.

the first thing is figuring out how to make the sounds that the tones are going to be laid over. i think pronunciation is too often left at a "good enough"/"yeah, that kinda sounds the same" level. even when i deal with 2nd language non-chinese speakers of mandarin that speak the language at a high level and it's nearly flawless, the first thing i notice is that they're pronunciation is off because they're producing the "correct" sounds but in a way that's just mechanically different from how a native speaker does it.

i dunno. i guess consistent mispronunciation is better than nothing.

I suspect I'm the only person in my language class who's into T'ang poetry/紅樓夢/Yu Hua or w/e.

intro chinese classes attract the corniest fuckin crew of lames that you will ever see. it gets better.

my final thing is, like: just figure out what works, man. make learning an active thing. find your interests and set some goals. i mean, study your balls off and you can sit down in three or four months and read a yu hua story with minimal help from a dictionary. go on from there.

xpost

right. i think most people that study the written language eventually work out their own way to stack and unstack characters and it's not

...not less intuitive or whatever than other languages.

With virtually no Spanish, I can figure out in the right context that baño means bath, but that word in Chinese (洗澡) seems to offer no clues about pronunciation, let alone meaning.

but you could guess the meaning of 洗澡 in context:

我家洗澡用的是太阳能热水器.

right? if you can read most of the other characters in that sentence, you're going to get the meaning, at least. depending on your knowledge of characters you'll be able to guess the initial consonants of one or both characters in the duo, too.

i find written chinese massively intuitive. this is a language in which the word for computer is 'electric brain' and giraffe is 'long neck deer', i mean you can derive a hell of a lot of meaning from the characters that make up a word, much of the time.

dylannn: the big tonal stumbling block i have (and see in plenty of other learners as well) is knowing the tone, intending to use the tone correctly in speech, and even think you're saying it correctly, but being told by others afterwards that you got it wrong. i think it's just that when you're learning your brain tends to get itself into a knot where what you think you're saying and what's actually coming out your face are two different things. I'm really not explaining this very well btw.

etc: your first period of writing characters will necessarily be blocky as, and it'll look hilarious against real chinese handwriting. as you progress, though, you'll start to develop a style. i don't believe my handwriting will ever look native, but i'm well aware that i've picked up a sort of amateurish aesthetic that i'm quite pleased with (e.g. the 喜 in my 喜欢 is elongated and a bit brush-stroky, an effect i picked up from one of my teachers).

the two podcasts i've been listening to recently, mainly because the audio is clear, are:

- 友的聊播客: tech
- 到世界各地过春节: travel

just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself

we get back on the 马 and we keep going

sigh

also this is what happens when the teacher scribbles a load of answers at breakneck pace and i scramble like a mad bastard to keep up (if anyone cares, probably not)

http://i.imgur.com/0S7D0fL.jpg

I care! Damn sight neater than me; had a tutorial-kinda thing where one of the exercises was to see how many times you could write a character in a minute, got v,ropey p.fast.

I think what I need to raise my rote character game is writing out sentences that use the characters, hmmn.

do it, again and again and again and again

i've just started carting around a cheap exercise book so i can just spontaneously scrawl out great wads of text and get my writing back on track

it's not bad!

one of the things that writing characters on character graph writing paper (do you know what i mean? the 'basic characters 4 kidz' chinese character teaching books use this too and it's what chinese kids practice characters on) trains you to do is more attractively size elements of each character. it also helps to develop the skill of consistent character sizing in general.

yeah you can download them online and print them out https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/PRC-Character-Writing-Sheet.pdf

yeah i did some of that back in the day, and i bought 'er indoors a little griddy practising book just recently

i don't worry about it so much because 99% of all authentic chinese handwriting i've ever seen is messy as fuck

although having said that