In which I attempt to learn new tricks

by Doctor Science

This fall I've started to find out if I am too old a dog to learn some tricks: I am taking a course at the local Adult School in Elementary Mandarin. I tried a couple of apps, but I was an ignominious failure at reproducing the sounds and never really made it to Lesson Two, so I figured it would be worth seeing if a live teacher would do the trick.

So far it seems to be working, but wow: learning Chinese is not a trivial task, even though we're not learning characters in any systematic way. All the writing is in Hanyu Pinyin, a wonderfully WYSIWYG writing system. To my surprise I'm not having particular problems with tones, they seem to "make sense" to my ears. My biggest problem so far are the initial consonants, which don't map exactly to the Roman letters used to write them and which my ear just scrambles.

This particular class turned out to be especially challenging because of who happens to be taking it. There are four of us: me (over 60, interest in China but no personal connection), a 30ish white man whose wife is Chinese and who wants to be able to speak to his in-laws, and two late-50/early-60s women who are native speakers of Cantonese, but who find that travelling in the PRC really requires Mandarin. One of them is native-born American from New York's Chinatown, the other is a naturalized American who was born in Malaysia as part of the Overseas Chinese community there. Both Cantonese-speakers have some reading knowledge of Simplified Chinese characters but are by no means fluent.

Basically, we two white people are scrambling along, trying to keep up with the Cantonese-speakers. At least they're having to do a lot more work than I expected, which means that by working hard the young man and I can almost keep up.

There was a fifth student, briefly: a native speaker of Hungarian (!) who's married to a Chinese woman, but he missed the first two sessions and it quickly became apparent that he wasn't going to be able to catch up, so he dropped the class.

My only advantages are that I've read about China and the Chinese language for many years. In particular, I've been following Language Log for more than 20 years, where Sinologist Victor Mair frequently posts. It's due to Mair's writing about how hard it is for native Chinese speakers to understand "word" as distinct from "syllable" or "phrase" that I knew why the teacher (who's from Taiwan, btw) said something in the first class about how "each character is a word"--while also teaching us two-character words.

Mair also posts a lot about topolects, regional variation in Chinese (such as the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese), and about character amnesia, the fact that most adults start forgetting how to write some characters after they leave school, so they gradually become secondarily illiterate. The Chinese writing system is simply too difficult for most people to retain without *constant* effort.

Hmmmm, in the comments to that last post people are talking about the Heisig method for remembering Chinese characters--have any of you used it?

The textbook we're using is Experiencing Chinese, which comes with sound files for some parts of the lessons. Now that I have a phone that's not completely dumb, I'm using the ChineseSkill app to give me extra practice. Unfortunately, ChineseSkill doesn't seem to have a "review earlier lesson" function (or at least I can't find it), which is currently frustrating me.

What got me started taking Chinese was that back in February some e-friends (you know who you are) persuaded me to try an episode or two of a Chinese web-TV drama, Guardian. Pretty soon I was hooked, but I couldn't help noticing that the English subtitles, which are clearly written by native speakers of Chinese, are *terrible*. So I got involved in a fan project to write better subtitles, for which I was of course hilariously unqualified.

Meanwhile I also started watching Nirvana in Fire, a historicalesque Chinese palace drama that my whole family soon got caught up in, even though many episodes just involve two characters standing or sitting and talking to each other in front of a static camera. The plot is both complex and logical, and the characters are great: everyone, including the bad guys, is doing things for reasons you can understand and even sympathize with.

Although some of the plot elements in Nirvana in Fire are eye-rollingly implausible, it also has things like: a gripping, edge-of-the-seat episode arc where the issue is--will desperately-needed disaster relief funds get to where they're needed, or will the person picked to oversee the effort embezzle most of the money? As Young Science said, "you want gritty realism? Game of Thrones can't compete."

I'm not watching a Chinese drama right now, because the Good Omens TV series came out and roped me in like a calf at a rodeo. And the Cdrama my friends are currently playing with, The Untamed, hasn't grabbed me--though that may just be a matter of time.

I think I need to decide what my goal is for learning Chinese. What do I want to do? Travel to China isn't it. I don't really want to read, or not enough to do the work to get fluency in reading Chinese characters. I guess I want to be able to watch Chinese dramas with their terrible English subtitles turned off. OK, that's a goal, and worth continuing for next semester.

I know a number of the people reading this have experience learning Chinese, so tell me your tips & tricks! For instance, would it help my ear learn to unscramble Chinese sounds if I had Chinese dramas or other shows going on in the background? What type of show would have the slowest speech? Because holy cow, Chinese goes *fast*, it's really difficult for my ear to separate the stream into recognizable syllables.

The Eighteen Scholars: Calligraphy by an anonymous artist of the Ming Dynasty. Calligraphy is one of the Four Arts of the Chinese scholar-gentleman, along with playing the qin, painting, and go (sometimes translated "chess").

I already knew about the Four Arts, but while writing this up I found a list of the Six Arts of pre-Imperial China, which included Mathematics as well as the martial disciplines of Archery and Charioteering. I wonder why math was dropped, and how the history of the world might have changed if the Chinese Imperial Examinations had included a math section.

Comments

[hairshirthedonist]

How would you characterize your musical aptitude, Doc?

[Doctor Science]

Medium, I'd say. I played the violin (poorly) in high school, can sing pretty well. Sight-reading vocal music is hit-or-miss, but at least I occasionally hit. I took a high school course in music theory and when we did "write down the notes you hear" I was better than some people, while still not being even remotely *good*.

[nous]

I have no experience with learning Mandarin beyond a crash course in Pinyin pronunciation so as not to butcher my students' names. Lots of internationals in my writing courses.

Was Drops one of the apps that you used? Liberal Japonicus recommended it to me for my Swedish and it's a good app for shoving sound and vocab into your ears and head. Good, intuitive interface and it has an icons-to-words model that helps you get over the urge to translate. No speaking, though, only ear training, but you can say what you hear and you will improve that way.

[russell]

My hometown buddy Larry had a little sister who started studying Mandarin in high school. This was in the late 70's, before it become quite as common as now. She actually ended up living in China for a few years.

At some point, I began studying Larry's little sister, because she was really smart and very cute. It occurred to me that she might be impressed if I, too, studied Mandarin. So I signed up for Mandarin in college.

Both the girl and the language eluded my grasp.

I can, however, count to three, and I know the word for "library" and "American".

Doc, your motivations seem more intelligent than mine, I suspect you will have a better result.

[Doctor Science]

nous:

I'll try Drops for Mandarin & see what I think, thanks for the rec. For my purposes, ear training is much more useful than speech training.

[wj]

I never tried Chinese, but did take Japanese for a couple of years in college. In a way, it was far easier, because there are no tones, relatively few phonemes, and there is a phonetic alphabet.

On the other hand, there are two phonetic alphabets (not counting "romanji", which is Japanese using the Latin alphabet) -- some of the symbols are very similar between the two alphabets, but others are not. Also, since a consonant can only occur followed by a vowel*, there is a seperate "letter" for each consonant-vowel combination. Thus, for example, ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko each has a seperate (unrelated) glyph, in both alphabets: か and カ, き and キ, く and ク, け and ケ, こ and コ. Not to mention the characters borrowed from Chinese.

It's still nowhere near as bad as Chinese to learn to write, but a lot more work than strictly alphabetic languages. But far easier to speak.

* Actually, N can also appear stand-alone. But it's the only exception.

[CharlesWT]

This back and forth between a Chinese woman and her South African husband might be interesting.

Some Crazy Chinese Characters that even Chinese people don't know! (YouTube)

A good Chinese police drama series.

When a Snail Falls in Love — 如果蜗牛有爱情: Mainland China, Crime & Mystery

[Nigel]

If you really want to combine language and watching a TV series, the 50 episode ‘Tree With Deep Roots’, a fictionalised but loosely historical account of King Sejong’s invention of the Korean alphabet Hangul, is tough to beat.
Includes extensive debates on the nature of government, and some cool swordplay.
Available with the usual semi-execrable subtitles on Netflix (which has made some major investments in Korean drama).

Hoping to get around to learning Korean next year. Mandarin I long since decided is beyond me, after watching my son get a GCSE in it. I think he’s forgotten most of the characters he learned, too.

[CharlesWT]

Nigel, have you watched the Netflix fronted Korean drama series, Mr. Sunshine? The production values give the impression that Netflix wrote the production company a blank check.

[Nigel]

I saw the first couple of episodes. A bit ponderous.

Some of the Netflix funded stuff is a predictable disappointment. It has imported US production values and tends to have lost what makes Korean drama interesting, in an attempt to find a larger audience.

The recent My Country (also on Netflix) is vastly better.

[byomtov]

Because holy cow, Chinese goes *fast*,

I think most foreign languages seem to go fast when we are trying to learn them. We may be able to pick up some words or phrases but the rest races by.

It has seemed to me that at some point learning to actually converse is in part a physical skill - a matter of reflexes - as well as a mental one.

Anyway, good luck.

[Areala]

Speaking as someone who studied Japanese, I can say that Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" was a huge help to getting over the initial hurdle of just how many dang characters one needs to know just to navigate the newspaper.

The method used in that book involves basically teaching you the character and a basic meaning for it, which is then built on over additional lessons and reinforced likewise. What it won't teach you is anything about pronunciation. It's strictly about character recognition. But you'll build up a great foundation for later learning how to pronounce them, because you will already know the character, instead of trying to learn everything at the same time.

It worked wonders for me, but as always, YMMV. :)

[wj]

The whole "make sense to my ears" thing applies to the eyes as well. You see differences where you are accustomed to spotting them. Equally large differences that you've never seen before can slip right on by.

I've been working on a project which, among other things, is trying to work out which variations on letters people will notice in a domain name, vs which ones they won't see -- not least because it won't occur to them to look. For example, in French they use a letter C with a cedilla (that's the little squiggle underneath). Most of us, even if we've never studied French, have seen it enough that we can see it. But a letter M with a cedilla? Unless you are familiar with Marshallese, you'll never notice. Even though the diacritic is the same size in both cases.

[liberal japonicus]

Thanks Doc for the post. I can only give a bad example of studying Chinese. I've taken 5 runs at it, twice using chinese characters, once with pinyin, once with bopomofo, which is like a chinese syllabic script used in Taiwan and then once totally aural/oral. The chinese character approach was always unwillingly mediated by my knowledge of Japanese characters, the phonetic differences between pinyin and standard sounds was too great. Bopomofo didn't have enough easy reading material. I think I would have had a chance with the oral/aural only if I could have gotten to a place where I could go for immersion, but that's not really possible.

You may want to try the Chrome language learning extension to Netflix
http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html#language=Chinese%20(Mandarin)&country=United%20States

You may also want to try calligraphy, not because it will supercharge your learning, but you can remember some characters that way and if you find yourself doing well, you'll get a bit of a charge when you see the character. Even more so when you can read a handwritten character. Even if you do it with a pen or pencil is good, but doing it with a brush is even better, but there is a time committment that can be tough.

The Heisig is interesting, but I want to know the real story, not use a story that he made up (or I make up) to remember it. Though Areala's point about knowing the meaning and then adding the pronunciation is one way that Chinese pick up Japanese quickly.

I'd also recommend you get some easy children's books and read them out loud to a point where you could read it to kids.

[Doctor Science]

lj:

ooo, thanks so much for telling me about the Netflix extension! That is exactly what I was looking for!

The Heisig is interesting, but I want to know the real story

Me too! WoMingBai seems to have a good, simple guide.