Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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

i have a gridded moleskine for writing characters

its not meessy its 草写

yeah

they've started showing us completely irrelevant cultural videos this year. turnout has been poor, so i suspect the confucius institute is partially funding the course to keep it alive, hence all the sudden jarring 'now let's stop learning and watch this woman dance for 10 minutes'

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

i do want to hear this story, too: just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself.

i'm not going to lie, i did this as a early student of chinese, but even now outside of no-english-menu places or alongside native speakers that have already initiated a conversation in china, i file this under innocuous things that make you irrationally embarrassed but that's crazy and defeats the purpose of learning a language and is actually fun, so don't listen to me.

the story was this: i went into a dessert place in chinatown (amusingly called 糖人街, geddit) and they had a numbered list of menu items (presumably top selling, idk) on the wall. #1 was 雪花冰. i thought okay, yeah, an iced snowflake would be cool. the lady came over and i ordered 雪花冰 in chinese. she looked at me like i was an idiot, so i said it again like three times thinking i was pronouncing it wrong. then she showed me a menu with six pages of desserts under the category '雪花冰'. egg on face, 不好意思 &c.

you are otm about innocuous embarrassment. that cock-up won't stop me doing it again obv, but thinking back i should at least have correlated it with what was in the menu before asking for anything. if i had ordered 巧克力雪花冰 (or even 巧克力冰淇淋) it would probably have been fine.

tomorrow's exam is reciting, in pairs, 20 lines of dialogue each that we've had a week to prepare. the problem isn't the chinese, it's learning wtf we're supposed to be saying. even in english that's a ridiculous undertaking (we're not trained actors ffs). at this point i can't remember one line let alone 20.

there's also a written component that they won't tell us about (which will probably be fine), but i'm sure they'll have 15 minutes of 舞龙 to distract us before we do any exams

i was taught french by reciting roch voisine songs from memory and learning about making maple syrup, so i sympathize.

lion dancing would not be part of any chinese language curriculum i would devise.

haha maple syrup

i listen to HEAPS of taiwanese electropop, and it helps with listening skills, but i keep using words that the chinese teachers don't know (e.g. 等待, which surprised me)

it's annoying that i have stacks of knowledge (words, grammar etc) but am too shitscared to put it to use, so i'm stagnating in that regard. what i really really want is time with a chinese learner/speaker who also drinks, so i can get tipsy/tanked and shake this inhibition that's blocking my progress. it feels like i'm one blockage away from being conversant.

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait." always those twin character clusters for modern written chinese, where older forms pare it down to single characters. maybe partly to negate the possible other interpretations of the single character forms (because 等 and 待 have lots of other meanings but can only mean one thing as 等待). in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class, i think. there's the example of 棒. i think i've used that example before on this thread: i never saw 好棒 in a textbook. maybe a more contemporary example would be trying to puzzle out 给力 from context.

listen, just go to class drunk

considering it tbh

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait."

i thought so too, but the 中国人的老外 was all 'whaaat what is that word'

in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

you'd think so. 待 is in tomorrow night's dialogue (maybe because my speech partner's wife is taiwanese), so it'll be interesting to see whether the 中国人 teacher pulls us up

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class

i still don't have a clear view of what's meant to be spoken and what's meant to be written, so that's probably making me look a bit of a dildo

apropos of sod-all, i wonder how dog latin, etc et al are doing

Just hit a mid-semester break after a whole bunch of tests/etc - the listening one was more or less fine though I still have trouble distinguishing some initials/finals (+ whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway), written test wasn't aided by being on the same day as an essay was due so flubbed a bit on the more recent characters (语言学院的学生 is at a "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" level for me atm), & the oral test was just a relief to get out've the way - my partner was busier than I was (deputy high commissioner of the C00k Islands, whoa) & the questions were fairly softball. We hadn't memorised our dialogue, though, which the people heading in after us had. OTOH they were sticking to the textbook while we'd gone a bit further out of bounds for vocab.

Really, really need to drill characters; shameful how disparate my recognition and ability to write have gotten in the past few weeks.

that disparity is a killer imo: my reading is decent but my listening is still way too patchy

whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway

that is the worst when you're still learning

妈了个屄的！

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

some magic happened at some point (probably the wine) because this happened:

1. we knew there would be a 'written' exam first, but we didn't know what was in it, what we had to do, how long &c. it turned out to be 80 minutes long, all chinese questions (no pinyin) and handwritten answers about stuff we haven't even seen since last year. smashed it.

2. that 10 minutes of dialogue i couldn't remember last night somehow became me delivering ~the whole thing~ without a script or cue cards or ANYTHING. smashed it.

two reasons i'm ditching ios skritter:

1. the guided stroke writing (which you can't turn off) always tells you what the character is, even when you're getting it wrong. the consequence is that you don't learn it using your own brain because there's training wheels are in your face the whole time. (i think this has also damaged the neatness of my handwriting btw.)

2. if i go off and do, you know, ~actual language~ instead of just flashcards for a few weeks, i come back to find 3,930 (i am not kidding) overdue flashcards. right now i could either (a) be wracked and assailed by guilt and hole up with this thing for like a month or (b) just ignore it completely and get on with doing language instead.

pleco's flashcard system is primitive by comparison, but it stays the hell out of my face. if i have no idea what a character is, it lets me make the entire mistake before correcting me (at which point i can open the scratchpad and freestyle the correct character).

what does "doing language" mean?

congratulations on the exam stuff, too!

are you done/almost done your first year/certificate now? what has the attrition rate of fellow students been?

thanks! it's actually my third year/certificate, although my complete lack of confidence in speaking/communicating is holding me back a bit.

this year we started (two months ago) with maybe 10 students and we're already down to six. tbh i'm amazed the demand is so flat for a city that's (a) basically in asia and (b) choc full of native chinese. it's not like there are a billion accredited courses running here.

by 'doing language' i meant reading, watching video, listening to podcasts/music &c., i.e. real chinese as opposed to flicking through a load of unconnected words on cards. these days i get far more out of reading 读者 than doing flashcard reps.

http://gbtimes.com/lifestyle/education/dial-beijing/challenging-chinese-language-myths

he's a bit glib about the writing system

kind of shooting fish in a barrel or 瓮中捉鳖 if you want

If you visit Spain, it can be easy to pick up common phrases on the street. Is it similar with Chinese?

No. The problem is the textbooks teach you certain things, but then maybe you go to Beijing and they speak with a certain kind of accent.

but why wouldnt that be true with spanish, too? and sure, you definitely can pick up common phrases on the street. why couldnt you? come on now.

If you go to Shanghai, for the most part they are going to be speaking ‘Shanghainese’, which is a dialect of Mandarin, but the words they use and the way they use them are very different. My spoken Chinese is okay, but if I go down to Shanghai and someone tries to speak Shanghainese to me then I will probably have no idea what they are saying.

the fact that these two languages are not mutually intelligible should be the first hint that one is not a dialect of the other, i think. theyre both from middle chinese, just like nearly every other sinitic language/dialect spoken in china, and shanghainese and wu dialects as they exist today are influenced by northern languages but shanghainese is not a dialect of mandarin, okay?

Does the Chinese language have any influences from other languages, such as Japanese, Korean or English?

No, as far as I can tell. Historically speaking, both Japanese and Korean are derivatives of Chinese to different degrees. When it comes to outside influences, if you look at the actual language, Chinese is the mother language… it came before Japanese and Korean.

i dont know enough about the history of the korean or japanese languages to really go in on this but i korean and japanese fall outside of the sino-tibetan language family and to call them derivatives of chinese is even more than claiming shanghainese as a dialect of mandarin.

also, chinese doesnt have as many loanwords in popular use as english and unlike japanese the writing system and the deep history of the language renders the origins of loanwords opaque in most cases.

if you want to talk about words borrowed from japanese, var qing early republican intellectuals and writers either studied in japan or read japanese texts and took lots of words from japanese that didn't exist in chinese, esp literary , political , philosophical concepts that the japanese were exposed to because of japans intellectual climate and exposure to western philosophical etc works. so, 文化 民主 逻辑 资本主义 共产主义 革命 among many others were borrowed from japanese texts.

Do you think that young people will keep using the older, correct language?

Yes, they definitely will. Again, if you think about the role of education in Chinese people’s lives… in every public school in China they are all teaching the standard Mandarin, so that is definitely going to be a very strong force in the direction of the language. In the end, when you look at something other than internet slang, there’s really not that big of a difference in the way that the older generation and younger generations speak the language.

leaving aside the prescriptivist correct language line and leaving aside that he seems to be talking about both nonmandarin languages in china AND "slang," chinese is as dynamic as any other great big modern language-- there are hundreds of millions speaking modern standard mandarin-- the chinese language referring to modern standard mandarin has changed in major ways over the last eighty, ninety years....