Snapshots of a Life

Learning Chinese

Learning Chinese

Learning, in general

Learning involves two stages. Learning how to learn, and then actually learning. That is to say, a substantial portion of the learning process for a new domain involves determining which practices, resources, and methods are most effective. Building an effective learning model or framework requires one first has choosen criteria for measuring or evaluating progress, which is typically satisfied by a set of goals.

Choosing Goals

My goals is to be able to have: 1. text conversations 2. translate and read a chinese classic piece of literature 3. participate in basic conversation 4. read signs in san francisco 5. travel to china without dying, or worse, offending anyone

Successful Frameworks

In some cases where we have prior experience, we can apply methodologies we've identified as successful to similar domains. Many techniques for learning French can be obtained, for instance, from having first learned another romance language. For a topic which is significantly foreign to us, we must rely on others' knowledge (e.g. take a course, read a book, hire a tutor) or evolve our own strategies and frameworks to structure our learning.

If this is an exercise which you find challenging, consider reading a book like Polya's, "How to Solve It" [3] or "How to Learn Anything Quickly" [4]. It may seem silly, but learning strategies for approaching learning (while quite meta in principle) is much the same as "teaching a [wo]man to fish".

Words of warning

My personal experience is, great resources can come from anywhere, but they are often incomplete (in terms of gaps in content or unsatisfactory features) and need to be supplimented with other sources. An example is relying on one website for learning stroke order and another for pronounciation. There is a lot of risk in relying on too many fragmented sources as they will likely have disagreements about what content should be introduced and when. Additionally, context switching (changing from concentrating on one source to another) is distracting -- it takes time to adjust to different teaching styles.

Building your framework or strategies on top a central foundation, like a lesson book or a native speaking tutor is likely the most effective (not necessarily the cheapest) way to bootstrap learning.

My Learning Philosophy

My personal preference is, I prefer not spending money on resources. I'd much rather repay the community with learnings of my own. That said, I appreciate some resources require significant investment and care in order to exist and if I have to pay for anything, I'd rather it be knowledge. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, for instance, have necessary server and electricity costs in order to be able to provide their services to the public -- I take pride in supporting these costly initiatives which aim to make knowledge more open and accessible.

That said, as I believe knowledge should be accessible to everyone, I am going to try to highlight resources which can be legally obtained, free of charge.

Why Chinese

Largest population. More than 5 times more people speak Mandarin Chinese than speak English. [1]

Applicability / Competitive Advantage. There is a large spanish speaking community in california. Spanish is a more widely spoken language than English, world wide. I took spanish for five years. Other than ordering food in Spanish restaurants, reading the occasional spanish news paper, and travelling to Mexico and Costa Rica, I haven't had many practical opportunities for applying the language. Perhaps this is due to cultural differences or a side effect of not having many spanish friends I can speak with on a regular basis. My personal experience is, I found a lot more Chinese speaking people in my computer science classes than Spanish speaking and honestly, being able to communicate with academics and researchers who share my interests is very important to me. Finally, a great deal of the world's manufactoring occurs in China. If you can't ask questions as a native, it's easy to be taken advantage of.

Friends. The top reason why I am learning chinese is, I have a lot of smart friends who I respect who decided to learn Chinese. I don't want to be left out of conversations.

It's different. German, french, spanish, and itallian are all relatively similar. They use roman characters, have comparable grammars, and even cognates. If you know a few words in a sentence, there's a chance you can guess the other words. Moreover, you can at least sound them out and read these languages, even if you have no idea what you're reading. Chinese, on the other hand, is like learning two languages: the written language and the spoken language. I am unaware of any way (patterns, strategies) of infering written characters from spoken Chinese or vice versa. By the way, did you know vice versa means "a change", "an alternate order" (vice) "turn about" (versa) -- thus the "order turned about"? I find etymology, as in this example, to be a great way to remember words, discover similar roots, and achieve greater understanding of a language.

Cultural Insight, Literature. The language has unique idioms and insights. There The Four Books & Five Classics [2], The Art of War

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books [3] http://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Solve_It.html?id=z_hsbu9kyQQC [4] http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Anything-Quickly-Ricki-Linksman/dp/0760728364

If not Chinese

I contemplated learning japanese, but there just aren't enough speakers outside of japan. I occassionally read manga or watch anime so I thought these activities could be a good way to keep myself engaged and accountable to practicing a language. I also have contemplated learning hebrew, croation, or russian, because I have family in these places and the languages offer similar challenges.

I can sound out basic german, french, and spanish phonetically. Given chinese characters (hanzi) I am complete illiterate.

Experiments

I am going to pick one piece of classic Chinese literature and start learning / copying its characters and translating it.
Conversations

Resources (in order of discovery)

Dialogues

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0A5BF42C1FBB672B http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/learningchinese/program/index.shtml

Phrases

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Lesson_2

Character Lookup

http://www.nciku.com/

Dictionaries

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict http://www.nciku.com/

Explained Texts

http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=20910

Pronounciations

http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/ http://www.standardmandarin.com/ http://www.nciku.com/

Stroke Order

http://www.chinesehideout.com/tools/strokeorder/index.php?c=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD

First steps

Learning Chinese so far has been a frustrating process, mostly because learning a language, itself, is an art. What is the best way to practice? What are the best resources? What are common mistakes?

I decided it could be helpful for me to document my progress.

Choose a Goals

My goals is to be able to have 1. text conversation 2. read ____ 3. speak basic conversation 4. read signs in san francisco 5. travel to china and not die

Process

graspchinese.com

I keep an electronic document with words as

Lined paper
Flashcards

I use paper flash cards as one of the most important elements to memorizing chinese characters (or hanzi) is drawing them using the correct stroke orders.

Literal meaning

Don't settle for colloquial translations, try to understand literal meaning. For instance, it is often taught that 你好 (Ni3 Hao3) means hello. It really means "you" (ni3) "good" (hao3). Once you commit to breaking phrases down to, and understanding, the language's simplest components, you begin to notice trends which make future learning much faster.

What to read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics

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