Earlier this week, I discovered the addictive Skritter, a tool for learning simplified Chinese characters and the tones of those characters. As promised, on Thursday I got the chance to let my four-year-old daughter use Skritter. She naturally likes to play video games, so I asked her, "Do you want to play a Chinese character game?" Naturally the answer was yes. So I sat her down in front of the screen. The first character, if I recall correctly, was wǒ 我 ("I"). Out of context, I'm not sure that she knew what it was, even though she heard it, so I gave her some quick example sentences so she definitely knew which wǒ it was. To make this easier for kids, it'd be great if you could replay the pronunciation and if it had example sentences in Chinese, or even if it at least could read the English meaning out loud. Then I could just show her which button to push and she could go at it all on her own. Once she knew what she was writing, I showed her how to press the "show" button to reveal how to write the character. She knows very few characters at this point, so she had to show pretty much every one. A few she only showed once, and then, beaming, she said, "I showed it once and then just remembered it!" Bingo. I hope getting kids to learn remains this easy forever. Once she knew what she was writing and how to figure out how to write it, I just let her go to town. For each new character, she'd ask me what the word was. Some, like rén 人, she knew, but for the most part I had to give her examples so she'd understand the meaning. But she happily sat there going through them. This certainly looks like it can be a great tool for her to learn Chinese characters. Related: Skritter to learn Chinese charactersLabels: children's language learning, Chinese, Chinese characters
I've written before about switching between foreign languages and how it can pose some difficulty. Today I just had another run-in with a lag in switching between languages. I was in the shower listening to my mix of five-star (according to my own personal rankings in iTunes) foreign-language songs. Now normally I tend to listen to podcasts, but sometimes you just need to get your groove on and today was that day for me. The playlist, which is supposed to be random, spit out a bunch of Spanish songs all in a row: El Niágara en Bicicleta by Juan Luis Guerra,  El Último Beso by Los Boltons (a Spanish cover of Last Kiss by The Cavaliers),  Esposa by Tony Vega,  Estoy Aquí by Shakira,  Mirando el Mar by The Sound Lovers, Buscando América by Ruben Blades, and Ciega, Sordomuda by Shakira. Naturally I was singing along with these songs, which, in addition to keeping me entertained (my wife, not so much), is a good repetition of the vocab contained in the songs. After I got out of the shower, I had to go downstairs to tell the Chinese-speaking babysitter that she could go whenever she wanted to. As I was walking down the steps, I was thinking about what I'd tell her and I heard in my head, in Spanish, " Si quieres ir..." ("If you want to go..."), and it occurred to me that that was a bit odd. Here I was about to tell something in Chinese to a Chinese speaker and Spanish was coursing through my brain. I'm pretty sure that if that hadn't run through my head as I was walking down the steps, the first words out of my mouth to the babysitter would have been in Spanish. Listening to and singing along with those songs had put me in Spanish mode, and I didn't snap out of it until I consciously thought about it. This phenomenon intrigues me. Anyone else who speaks multiple foreign languages ever run into this? I'm curious as to what is the relationship between this and language learning. I suppose it's a good thing that my mind just kind of switches automatically into another language, but how can I improve my ability to bounce between languages? The obvious answer is practice, but with better understanding of what's really going on in my head, it'd be easier to really figure out how to utilize this best for language learning. Labels: Chinese, music, Spanish
Ramses of Spanish Only, Geoff of Confessions of a Language Addict, and Josh of Language Geek have recently written about what Ramses calls the "anti-grammar" position ( here, here, and here, respectively). The basic premise of the position is that you don't actively study grammar but instead learn it by induction through exposure to the language. Let's clarify one thing here; both the pro- and anti-grammar camps share the same goal: learning the grammar. It's the how that is in question. The most extreme pro-grammar position would have you start with a grammar and not do anything else until you have the grammar down. The most extreme anti-grammar position would have you parachute right into the middle of the language zone with no background and have you learn it all by observing the language in use. Neither approach optimizes efficacy. Many high school kids in the U.S. have studied 3, 4, or even 5 years of a language, but just try talking to them and you'll realize that the hidebound grammar-centric approach most of those schools are using is a complete failure. On the other hand, learning completely by induction requires huge amounts of time and leaves gaps for things that are less commonly encountered, especially when time is limited, as it is for most language learners. Ramses did make a good point: It’s just a pity to see that many people in the pro-grammar and anti-grammar camp just focus on LEARN grammar or DON’T LEARN grammar, and don’t come up with alternatives. Let me see what I can do about that. My alternative, after the jump. Read more...As mentioned above, the goal of both camps is actually how, not whether, to learn grammar. And we learn grammar rules with good reason; memorizing a short rule—say, how -ar verbs are conjugated in the present tense in Spanish—is a heckuva lot easier than memorizing individually all of permutations of all of the -ar verbs separately. This of course even applies to irregular grammatical rules, such as irregular Spanish verbs, many of whose forms are actually regular and whose irregularities even follow some patterns (such as an irregular -g- in some first-person singular irregular verbs, stem-changing verbs, etc.).
What's more, grammatical rules tend to follow patterns. and, as I recently noted in relation to music and language learning, "The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns". Rick Aurtus has a nice summary of how patterns help:Your mind tends to organize the impressions it receives, and to reduce them to simple formulas wherever possible. This saves it, and you, a lot of trouble, because the knowledge that something fits into a certain pattern gives you a head-start in trying to remember it. ...
How does this tendency toward pattern act upon your ability to remember? Well, for one thing, rhyming lines of poetry are more easily memorized than are sentences of prose. Words are easier to memorize than nonsense syllables. Sentences are easier to memorize than groups of unrelated words. Try naming all the letters of the alphabet, stating them at random without relying on the order in which you've learned them!
Furthermore, you'll find that it's easier to remember things in groups than singly, and less difficult to memorize lists when they are placed in alphabetical order, or in size place, or chronologically, or in any established pattern that will lend itself to your list. This can, of course, easily be applied to languages.
The inductive method to learning grammar, however, is not the way to go. There are two reasons for this. First, the inductive method is inefficient in its use of time and effort. Second, you're likely to be left with gaps in your understanding for things that don't appear often, especially if you're time is limited, as most language learners' time is.
The inductive method is often billed as "learning like a child". What could be more simple, more effortless, than learning like a child? The problem with this is that you need to read the fine print. Think about how children learned their native language. They spent years and years in an immersion environment, and on top of that spent years and years in classes that aimed to refine their understanding of their native language. If you've got time for that kind of exposure, you can probably learn like a child, but chances are that kind of time is not available to you.
Limited exposure due to time restrictions exacerbates another problem with learning by induction; the risk that you'll miss out on less common (but necessary) rules or that you'll think you've gotten how a rule works when in fact your understanding of it is flawed. You might argue that if the rule isn't that common, why bother? I'd counter with if a native speaker knows it, so should you.
So, finally, as an alternative, I propose something of a compromise position that's somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Get the grammar rules in front of you. Read them. Organize them into a way that makes sense for you, whether in your head or otherwise. Understand them. This allows you to know what's out there and what to expect. Those declensions in Russian or those verbs in Spanish won't seem quite so mysterious, even if you forget what a particular ending means. What's more, you'll have a complete picture of any given rule, so you won't need to wonder if there are any gaps in your understanding or blatant misunderstandings that you picked up by trying to guess how the rules work.
Once you've got the rules in your head, even if only lightly so, jump into exposure. By seeing the rules in action rather than starting from a rule and going through abstract and inane drills, you'll learn how native speakers use the rules in practice and end up sounding more natural than grammar-centric learning would leave you. This beats learning like a child because you don't need to fumble around for the rules, but you do get the same exposure. Repeated exposure will then help cement the rules. If a rule gets fuzzy, go back to the rule and review it, and then go right back to the exposure. Then all you need to do going forward is to repeat this process. This will result in an ad-hoc spaced-repetition system that will eventually result in you knowing the grammar rules, and with a lot less time spent than using an inductive method.
To give an example of this approach, I'll actually turn to Josh of Language Geek. Although Josh's post would seem at first glance to put him squarely in the anti-grammar camp, he's actually practicing exactly what I'm preaching:I’m finding that I grasp grammar more fully after learning the grammar points via the Penguin course, and then seeing the grammar in use repeatedly in the Assimil course. Bingo.Labels: grammar, inductive learning
What do spring and spaced-repetition systems (SRS) have in common? They both seem to be in the air this month. There's been a lot of buzz in the language-learning blogosphere about SRS lately. See Mastering Mandarin parts 1, 2, and 3, Ramses on Free Technology for Teachers, Tower of Confusion, Flashcard Aficionado, and The Linguist on Language. After the jump, a few highlights. Read more...For the uninitiated, here's a brief definition, courtesy of Wikipedia:Spaced repetition is a learning technique in which increasing intervals of time are used between subsequent reviews, rather than studied frequently for a short time... Although from last year, it's worth pointing out that All Japanese All the Time has a pretty in-depth series on how to make the best use of SRS.
The consensus appears to be that the big players in SRS software are SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, and Anki. Mastering Mandarin has a brief overview of these, Cunning Linguist has a slightly longer one, and Nihongo Pera Pera has one that's much more detailed. I'd fault them all for leaving out Smart.fm, f.k.a. iKnow.co.jp.
Everyone seems to love their SRS, but Steve Kaufman goes against the grain, arguing that SRS might not be the most efficient way to learn, at least in part because it lacks "resonance".
If you're interested in implementing an SRS system in a classroom, Ramses of Spanish Only has some useful ideas for you.Labels: spaced repetition
I just stumbled across Scritter today. Scritter lets you study Chinese character by writing them on the screen. And it's awesome. The implementation is very smooth. They ask you to write a character, and if you don't know it you can press a button to show it. It appears and then fades away before you can write it all. You can of course show it again, but short term memory should hold it there for you, and then you get some muscle memory action by writing it out there. I started toying around with it to see what it was all about, and I'm addicted. Since I pretty much only type in Chinese, how to write characters is something that often slips my mind. This makes for a great refresher. And what's even more fun is that they cover tones as well. If I have one weakness in Chinese, that is it. But what I'm most excited about is sitting my four-year-old daughter down in front of this thing. "Wanna play a Chinese game?" We'll see how that goes tomorrow hopefully. So far she's only started to recognize characters, not write them, but this seems to be a great device for getting kids to learn. My only complaint as far as children's learning goes is that the feedback that appears in the window—"Should hook", "Stroke backward", "Excellent!" and the like—are all text only. For a kid who's just learning to read, it'd be great if these were audible. Labels: children's language learning, Chinese, Chinese characters
With my obvious interest in language learning, it's great fun to have kids and watch how they learn languages. If you've been reading this blog, you know that my four-year-old daughter has long been a part of my language-learning observations, and now my son had joined the speaking world as well. We've got what is essentially a trilingual environment set up for the kids. I and my mom, who lives with us, speak only English to the kids. My wife speaks only Japanese with them and we make them speak Japanese with each other (which has so far consisted of our daughter speaking Japanese to our son). We use only Chinese-speaking babysitters or nannies and have them around enough that our daughter speaks Chinese as well as English and Japanese. Our son's first official word is nenne ねんね in Japanese, which means "sleep". It's the an infantile form of neru 寝る ("to sleep"). We give if the official designation because he's clearly saying the word and linking it up to a meaning that he can use to communicate with. More observations of a one-year-old learning to speak, after the jump. Read more...He's said lots of things that happen to be words. Mama, baba 爸爸 ("father" in Chinese), dada, etc., but he didn't seem to use these consistently enough to indicate things as to really count as his first word. He'd at times call me "Mama", or just yell it out randomly, for instance. However, he clearly uses nenne to convey a single meaning.
However, his interpretation of nenne meaning is a little different. When he says nenne, he lays down flat on his belly on something soft, whether a pillow, a bed, or a person. If you say nenne to him while in the living room, he'll grab a pillow from the couch, lay it on the floor, lay down on top of it and say "Nenne!" He'll use it when he lays down to go to sleep, etc.
There was one earlier contender for his first word, and that was ge 个 in Chinese. He'd point at things and say, "Ge!" We speculated that he got that from the ge in zhège 这个 ("this") nàge 那个 ("that"), which he heard from the babysitters. However, since the ge was only really part of the word, we couldn't really count that as his first word.
He's also got a few other close contenders. When an airplane flies overhead, he says, "Woooo!" in imitation of the noise it makes. When a car drives by, he says "Vroom!", again in imitation of the noise it makes, which happened to be among my daughters first words as well.
One interesting thing is that he got basic intonation down before he ever said a word. He could long ask a question by pointing and saying some syllable with a rising intonation to make a tone. He would give a warning when something was amiss, like a door being open that we usually kept shut, with a sharp, high tone. He's use a fall tone to indicate comfort or the like.
Gestures came in before words as well. That's a well-known phenomena; children whose parents use sign language end up learning to communicate with that long before their peers learn to speak. Pointing, nodding his head, shaking his head, clapping after doing something good, tilting his head to the side to indicate inquisitiveness, etc., are all among the gestures he learned early on.Labels: children's language learning, Chinese, English, intonation, Japanese
Ever wonder why it was so easy for you to learn "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?" in French (" Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?"), but you had to exert a lot more effort to learn anything else in French? You can thank the brain's relationship with music for that. Today's New York Times sheds some light on how it works: “The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination,” said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. “From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear.”
A simple melody with a simple rhythm and repetition can be a tremendous mnemonic device. “It would be a virtually impossible task for young children to memorize a sequence of 26 separate letters if you just gave it to them as a string of information,” Dr. Thaut said. But when the alphabet is set to the tune of the ABC song with its four melodic phrases, preschoolers can learn it with ease. What's this mean for language learners? It means that songs can be a useful device for memorizing, especially the vocabulary contained in a song's lyrics. So look up all the vocab in your favorite target language song and then put that track on repeat. If you get the song in your head, you'll get the vocab in your head as well. Labels: French, mnemonic devices, music
Old age begins at 27: Nevertheless, "abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increase until at least the age of 60." That, of course, would include languages. The Economist translated into Chinese by Chinese readers (in Chinese) (via Waxy): If you like The Economist and are learning Chinese, here's a chance to read all of the articles translated into Chinese. What's great about this is that you can always refer back to the original English if you're confused. Now I'm sure there's a copyright issue or two to be found in here... Where Education and Assimilation Collide: The New York Times discusses the debate over how to teach all of the non-English speakers coming into the States. 日本語を勉強する (in English): Aspiring Polyglot has a nice bunch of Japanese language-learning links. Labels: age, Chinese, English, Japanese
If you've ever done any serious running, you're probably familiar with the runners' nod. When two runners run past each other, there is a sort of ritualized greeting. It's like you're both members of some club and thus have to greet each other with the secret handshake, even if you've never met before. While two strangers walking past each other on the street hardly feel the need to greet each other, runners generally do. In the U.S., this is the runners' nod; you meet eyes with the other runner and just nod at them briefly, with a brief smile being optional. (We'll often do the same to cyclists as well. I wonder if they call this the cyclists' nod.) A nod, as opposed to a vocal greeting, is used by necessity; often, on a run, you don't want to say anything because that could screw up your breathing, potentially resulting in cramps, side stitches, etc. A nod is subtle enough to let you greet the passerby and maintain your form at the same time. The nod, however, is not universal. Nevertheless, some mystical runners' bond does seem to be somewhat universal, so that even in places where strangers would rarely greet each other runners still seem to do so. What changes is not the fact that there is a greeting, but rather how it is done. In Japan, for instance, the runners' nod becomes the runners' bow. Instead of a brief bending at the neck, you do a very brief bow, bending instead at the waist. In order to avoid breaking your running stride, this bow is generally very limited; even in cases where politeness would require a somewhat deeper bow, runners don't bother. Here the typical rules of politeness take a bow (lame pun fully intended) to the rules of good running form and allow you to minimize the bowing. If you do the nod in Japan, people will probably get your drift, but it's like speaking with an accent; they understand you, but you're clearly not quite there yet in the "language". Yup, I'm saying that body language is part of learning a language, and it's one that's very rarely covered in any book. So be sure to not just listen and read, but to watch as well; watch how native speakers move when they're talking. Mastering the body language used by native speakers will go a long way to making you seem more like one. Labels: body language, Chinese, English
The New York Times today is reporting how Chinese people are using nigh homophones to say things that would otherwise be censored. The thing about some of these homophones is that they're patently vulgar and demonstrate one of my rules of language learning: learn profanities. Why learn profanities? Surely civilized society has no need for such vulgarity. Well, that may indeed be true, but it doesn't change one basic fact about profanities: people use them, and hardly infrequently. For instance, according to this word frequency list showing the top 1,000 words in English, the f-bomb is the 605th most common word in the English language. That list is created from TV and movie scripts, so I'm guessing that puts it higher up in the rankings than it would otherwise be, but even if you drop it to 2000th place, that's still within the range of words you'll need to learn to be reasonably fluent in a language. So, while it may not be necessary for you to be able to spew vile invective in your target language, you should at least be prepared to understand it. And the Chinese grass-mud horse is a case in point. Be ready for some profanity, after the jump. Read more...China has recently been cracking down on smut on the internet. Among such smut are vulgarities. A well-known though seldom-invoked curse in China is cāo nǐ mā 操你妈, which means "fuck your mom". The phrase cǎo ní mǎ 草泥马, on the other hand, is a nigh homophone which means "grass-mud horse". These only differ by the tones, but, when sung, tones are gone or much less noticeable. This has unsurprisingly led to a bunch of grass-mud horse songs videos. It has also promulgated a bunch of tongue-in-cheek "nature videos" about the grass-mud horse. And the grass-mud horse is only one of the puns used in these videos. Others are either vulgar, politically subversive, or both. I'll leave you to dig through and find the rest, as I'm sure there are some that I didn't even get.
To bring this back to language learning, where would you have been without knowing profanities in this case? Knowing them, it's clear this is a joke. Without knowing them, you might come to think that you just learned that the Chinese call an alpaca (the animal used to depict the grass-mud horse) a grass-mud horse, and you might end up embarrassingly asking a friend, "Why are songs about the cǎo ní mǎ so popular lately?" By understanding it, you'll at least be able to avoid a situation like this.
So learn your profanities.Labels: Chinese, profanity
A friend of mine recently sent me a mildly off-color joke in Chinese that goes to my earlier post about native speakers using foreign languages in their native tongue. Read more...The joke is as follows:有一个小伙子，去一家外企应聘，面试结束后，乘电梯下楼。电梯在中途某一层停下了，门打开后，小伙子看见一个衣着性感的女郎，身体斜靠着电梯门，用挑逗的语气问：够淫荡吧？小伙子很幽默，回答说：淫荡是淫荡了点，但我喜欢。没想到那个女郎冲进电梯，猛打小伙子，嘴里还骂到：你这个臭流氓！直到晚上睡觉之前，小伙子才醒悟过来，原来那个女郎当时说的是: Going down吧？ And here's a rough and dirty translation:There once was a [Chinese] guy who went to a foreign [i.e., non-Chinese] company for an interview, after which he got on an elevator to leave the building. When the door opened on one of the floors on the way down, the guy saw a sexily dressed woman, learning her body against the doorway of the elevator. In a seductive voice, she asked, "Loose enough, aren't I?" [In Chinese, this sounds a lot like the English "Going down?". More below.] The guy jokingly replied, "Yeah, you're pretty loose, but I don't mind at all." Before he knew it, the woman jumped in the elevator and slapped him, yelling "You damn pervert!"
That night, as the guy was laying down to go to sleep, he finally realized what the girl was trying to say: "Going down, right?" OK, so it doesn't work quite as well in translation, but let me explain.
Chinese speakers who use a lot of English will often throw in English words with Chinese, including the word ba 吧. Ba can have various meanings, but one common translation would be "right?" or "isn't it?".
Go into any Western law firm's office in China and you'll find them using terms like "M&A", "capitalization", etc., and even words like "contract" mixed in with their Chinese. There are perfectly good Chinese words for all of these, and yet they throw these in there anyway. The same is true in other foreign companies in China; English is frequently used, and English words will be mixed into the Chinese. That's why the joke specifies that he interviewed at a foreign company.
Thus, you could very well hear someone say, "Going down ba?" That's what our joke's sexy lady was saying. What our less-worldly guy heard was, "Gòu yíndàng ba?", or "Loose enough, aren't I?" "Gòu yíndàng" of course sounds a heckuva lot like "Going down", followed by the ba mentioned above. And therein lies the joke.Labels: Chinese
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