As a guy in my 40s I may be older than many of our Chinese learners. Anyway, here’s my problem with learning Chinese: vocabulary. In the old days (ah, the old days!) I used to retain vocabulary really quickly. If is was a European language, quite often I would retain a new word after just one or two encounters. These days I need a lot more than that. This is made all the more difficult becasue Mandarin has some many homonyms.
Of course, there are things even I can do to help in this situation:
-I write the new word somewhere
-I deliberately discuss the word (in Chinese) and try to use it
-I try to find words that collocate with it - that is, words that tend to associate with it
If I have time to do these things, they can be helpful. At the end of the say, however, nothing beats having a 25 year old brain for retention!
What are your experiences with retention and new vocabulary? Does anyone have insights to share? In upcoming posts I’d like to look at other areas. For now, I’m keen to hear your thoughts on vocabulary.
I started learning Chinese in my 40’s. The big thing that helped me with vocabulary was the program Supermemo (http://www.supermemo.com). It is a flashcard program with a big difference from plain cards. It manages the rate at which you see each card. Each day you are tested on a subset of your cards, based on what the program thinks you need to review. If you answer a card correctly it will be pushed farther off into the future than if you get it wrong. For example, I have gotten 去 correct 7 times and I will see it next on March 7, 2013. I don’t think I’ll forget it by then. On the other hand, I’ll see 断 tomorrow because I got it wrong today. The big benefit is that you can have a lot of flash cards and manage them efficiently. I have 1323 cards for characters and 8446 for general vocabulary and I mainly see only the cards I need to see. The program is available for the PC, but I use it on my Palm so I can do my cards wherever I am with some free time.
Hi Beirne, about your Supermemo cards:
I was looking into Supermemo, but I couldn’t find any bank of Chinese flashcards. How did you build your massive 8,000 plus character collection. I just know I am too lazy/undiciplined to enter them in myself. I have tried various flashcard programs, on paper and the computer, but I always find that after a while I get too ‘busy’ to keep making new cards. If I can find something to fit on a Palm or iPod device, that would make it nice and portable. I have an old PalmOS btw, in case there is some free/shareware that I can put on it.
About age-and-vocabulary: I think when we’re 40, we think our brains were better at 25, when we’re 25 it was better at 18, at 18 it was better at 7, at seven it seems the 3 year old is pretty quick. I’m hoping to hit 100 and can still remember my name. Absent other choices I guess I’ll just keep running till I collapse!
This Supermemo sounds interesting. I’m normally skeptical of study aids that make miraculous sounding claims, but Beirne’s description is plausible. At issue, for me, is context. Flashcards don’t have any context. It’s one thing to recognize a word on the card, but how about if you see it in a natural context?
Secondly, I agree that flashcards can be good at the level of receiving input. Once again, however, there is no context, so you learn nothing about how the word is used. But learnign to apply the word is pretty crucial. Supermemo sounds as if it has value as a tool l for improving recignition. Keep in mind, however, that if you doj’t know how to use the word, you really ‘know’ the word.
I’ll check it out and let you guys know how I get on.
Ken 凯恩
There is a book you can get by Dominic O’Brien called ‘How to Develop a Perfect Memory’ and it really does work. I’ve tried some techniques in the past and I used to be able to memorize a shuffled pack of playing cards in order and ‘pi’ to a hundred decimal place.
The key to it is to visualize images in your mind associated with what you’re trying to remember and if it’s a sequence of something you visualize a journey in your mind (like your journey to work or something) and pick a number locations along the way, then you visualize a scene at each point. When you run back through the journey in your mind you find you can remember everything at each point.
I haven’t tried the techniques on a language but there’s probably a way.
Bazza,
Ken and I were just talking about that over lunch the other day…
Something about the “World Memory Competition” or something?
Yes he has a few records show on this page: http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/memory.html
Looks like a lot of his records have been beaten now though. Looks like fastest speed to memorize a single pack of cards with no errors is now 32.13 s. I think I used to be able to do it in about 15 minutes hehe.
David - I had to create the flashcards by hand. There is a program SMCONV.EXE that converts CSV files, normally made by a spreadsheet program such as Excel or the free OpenOffice.org, to Palm files so I just made added words as I went through each chapter of whatever I was studying. This is easier than entering the cards on the Palm but I’ll admit it is still a bit of a hassle. If you write to me at beirne at neo dot rr dot com I can send you what I have. The collection is a bit haphazard but there should be something to get you started.
Ken - You are correct about context. I’ve found that knowing it via flashcards at least increases the odds that I’ll recognize it in real use and can remember it when I need it but there are times when I still don’t get it when I should or I use it incorrectly. What I’ve done that helps a little bit is to also memorize sentences. These are ones from my textbooks that give good examples of how a grammatical feature is used. It at least gets some proper usage in my head.
Bazza - I learned similar memory techniques from a 1970’s book called The Memory Book and have tried to apply it to Chinese. The problem for me has been trying to come up with things that sounds like xuan, xian, lue, etc. Too many Chinese words just don’t sound like anything I can picture. I had an idea that each of the 400+ basic syllables could get pegs, and then one would picture the pegs along with the tone indicators. I started on the pegs years ago, but never finished creating them. I guess I figured the system would be too cumbersome.
BTW, The Memory Book also has an example of how you can use their system to memorize Chinese characters. They show how one can memorize 龙 in traditional form. The method is a bit convoluted, though, and they don’t quite get the character correct. They may be onto something, but I’d take advantage of knowing radicals and the like rather than coming up with associations for each stroke.
hi–i have a palm os program for looking up characters and it has a built-in flash-card function that tests you on characters that you choose to put into flash-card lists. this is their web site: http://www.pleco.com/plecodict.html i’m pretty sure i have the most basic version and i have to say it has most things i want to look up but not every single thing. but it beats some portable consise dictioonaries. i’ve found it good for looking up an unknown character with just a few keystrokes (i’m too lazy to use the radical tables in dictionaries). i have just started learning chinese again in earnest so i’m planning to use the flash cards. good luck! i am an older learner and sympathize with your memory problem…
Hi All,
I’ve produced a hypnosis MP3 file which will help specifically with learning Mandarin. Download the FAQ track to learn how and why it helps so effectively, then download the hypnosis file and use it a few times.
www.sambrown.co.uk/chinesepod
All the best,
Sam
Just looked at the language section of Dominic O’Brien’s book and sound like it can be applied to Chinese, he says that he won 1991 Memoriad in the language section for memorizing the most Chinese words in 15 minutes.
His method is basically, visualise a familiar town in your mind, then pick a word you want to learn, imagine a key image you can associate with the word then place that image at the appropriate location suggest by the english and try to combine the image with the location. Then when you go back to that location in your mind you should recall the word.
As Beirne says above though the tricky bit is probably imagining a key image from the Chinese sound. I think you probably could visualise giant 3D Chinese characters at each location, it might work.
I think I’ll give it a try, see how it goes.
Hi I am 54. So I find alcohol helps a bit in remembering long ago stuff but is kind of useless for 5 minutes ago.
Seriously the one advantage of age is acknowlegment and experience to overcome youth. I now live in Taiwan and I use this skill when I go to the playground and play basketball with the local high school boys.
I also am planning to use Pleco with a Palm starting next month. Presently walking about I write down words on signs/billboards or newspaper headline and when I get back to my apartment I use Wenlin on my PC to learn them.
I think in the beginning you do need to build up a data base of character/words. But I have found unless they are used you will forget them. I no longer worry or count how many words I know. Instead we have to accept even what the not so good looking of our “laoshi’s” says. CONTEXT is the key.
So I think accept this and figure out how to use words and make them part of your daily life no matter where in the world you are.
BTW we all love Jenny but why are the female Cpod family members not so excited by Ken?
Hi all,
I’m 36, and never have been that good at memorizing vocabulary, in English much less in any other language.
I use iFlash, which is very similar to Supermemo. Right now I have figured out a process for moving the words from the xml export to Word/OpenOffice to iFlash. It takes about 20 minutes to work out the bugs and have a new deck of cards. David & Ken, you might see if you can easily import the words into Supermemo.
Ken, one of the things that I really like about the Word Bank is that it often has phrases rather than individual words. As you said, there are so many homonyms that it’s impossible to use single word flashcards (with pinyin anyway). I often modify my cards as I’m going through them to add a bit of sentence from the lesson if I remember it of if I guess a homonym when going through my cards. So I’m learning phrases rather than words, and it seems to have helped.
The next thing that I’d like to do is to add sound bites to my flashcards. I think that would be immensely helpful. (Please take note, fabulous Tech Guys.)
The only reliable way that I have for remembering words on the first try is to make a mistake. For some reason, the sound of Chinese laughter is very memorable, and so it is suddenly easy for me to remember that it’s “sha ge zhou mo” rather than “ming zhou mo”. (Just as a note, my Chinese friends are very nice about it. They just can’t help laughing, and always try to explain.) If only I could harness that in a less embarrassing way.
About Learning New Words—it’s about adding ‘new’ social inputs
After Ken posed this question I started to think back a bit. I figure my English is pretty good, but I know I never sat down with flashcards to build my vocabulary. There was a very short period of time in high school when I had spelling tests, about 20 words each test. And nowadays I see that my nephew has spelling and vocab tests each week, about 10 words. Other than that, the only time I really used a dictionary or thesarus was writing essays in high school and college. So what was it? I know that thru college my vocab definitely increased.
Here’s what I came up, 80% of the factors that influenced my buildup of vocab was ’social’. I do believe that there is a biological/organic component to all this, but I don’t think it factors THAT much into the social factors. Before I go thru the social factors, here’s what I think can overcome/mitigate some of the biological changes.
Biology: After the early teens, studies show that language acquisition starts to go down different neural pathways, it becomes more conceptual and less ‘deep’, thus recall and retention is harder. I think Ken’s occassional mention of ’singing’ the words taps into this ‘deeper’ pathway. Also, hearing words in a natural environment and all of a sudden ‘knowing’ the word is also an example when this pathway is tapped. Words that ‘just’ become known after repeated exposure are also part of this pathway.
Social: I think that as we get older our social environment ’stabalizes’ you might say. In other words, we start to do the same routines, see the same people, talk about the same things. Who knows whether this is ‘biology’ or our own destiny, but it’s pretty much true right? Well in college we are meeting new people, reading new books, writing essays. When we are teens we are taking lessons, watching all the latest tv shows, making friends, talking about everything, and in college it was all about reading and writing constantly. For young kids…well evvvverything is new to them.
So here’s my theory, and I don’t think it’s necessarily that easy to do, but the internet does help because it’s so vast, and for example on this Cpod we can talk with so many people about so many things…..to learn new vocabulary it’s not so much a matter of rote memorization, b/c very few of us are successful at the various memorization techniques, rather we have to expand our social context. That context has to be in the target language, and there must be interaction and interest.
I bet if Ken took some time to find a Chinese-only speaking laoshi in some subjet that he likes, say calligraphy or some Chinese instrument, etc., his vocabulary will increase. Just to pick on Ken, he’s not a newbie at Chinese that would have a really hard time ‘immersed’ in Chinese and fall back to some sort of Chinglish-English interaction, so this sort of ‘new’ exposure would help. His problem (and mine) is that his current circle of friends (and not necessarily his age) is reletively static, so everyone is used to the words, accents, topics that everyone always talks about, so there’s no ‘progress’.
I think what Mike is/going to do in Taiwan is an example of that kind of ’self-exposure’ to a new context. He has cleared the hurdle/hassle of Chinese character lookup by using Pleco and Welin–which in the past was a huge hurdle, but which has now been made moot by the technology. I think also, in previous years “Ken” might have had a lot of trouble doing any sort of review, word lookup, because going the old-fashioned stroke-count, paper dictionary route is very time-consuming–and for a busy professional that is very tough.
If I were Ken, I’d find something/someone online in some new context that he is interested in, have in that context some sort of online Chinese vocabulary–that way he can just drop it into Adsno for popup review–notice the make vocab list radio button option! (http://www.adsotrans.com/new.html), and MDBG (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=practice )for instant flashcard creation, and ….hmmm…maybe he has an intern that can help him….have someone read that vocab into an mp3 file so that he can ‘listen’ to it in his free moment. There ya go–instant vocab.
About Cpod. I think what has ‘engaged’ many of the learners here is that each daily podcast is about a new topic. Just think about textbooks, the stories are outdated and relatively boring. The tapes just go over how to be a tourist. There isn’t really any interesting, constant, and new exposure!
That said, I think Cpod may be falling back a bit on what is ‘easy’ and ‘what the learners want’ a little too much. Because we adults are now mostly relying on a ‘conceptual/cognitive’ route to learning, there is not enough in Cpod to tap that deeper neural language-acquistion pathway. (hmm, I think it was Brandy that gave me a very interesting link to this, but I can’t find it, Ken, we definitely need a way to ’search’ this blog!).
I think when listeners mention things like ‘they want to hear a real conversation, see a video pod’ or ‘that they like some Pimsleur’ type of exercises, etc., it is learners searching for ways to tap into this. Right now there is very little emphasis by Cpod on getting listeners to ‘vocalize’ while listening to the podcast. I’m sure Ken knows, ’saying’ it is key to learning, retention. I’m very sure with a little effort, there is the creativity at Cpod to make interesting and engaging segments of the show where we can ‘help’ listeners vocalize, whether it is attaching a fun music-clip to a word, cutting the word out with a little context from a Chinese show, using repeat-say exercises, making short 2-3 word quiz like snippets for the show, having a little stream at the end where a few vocab words are presented with various conversational umms and ohhs.
Last thing, I think it might be worthwhile…ok…I REALLY want this…to add another cycle or stage to your production cycle. I am guessing your show production goes like this: someone creates a script, you take a quick glance at it and signoff, you and Jenny ‘do’ the show, it then goes into post-porduction for editng, adding the fun music, editing for time, parallel to that that your grammar whizes are making the review exercises and recording the extra dialogue clips, then it gets published. ….Wellll…you and Jenny ad-lib a lot and we all love it, but there is no one adding value to that. There’s no time/stage in your cycle for your grammar people to take a look at what you and Jenny actually said in the show and to make specific exercises and review for that. Why not add an extra section in your learning center like “Exercises for What they Said”. This would be a KEY section and way for learners to get from one stage to the next, and it would provide so much more ‘interesting input’ for learners to review. Right now the grammar bank is soooo unrelated to the day’s lesson. I think if you did this, you could easily increase the amount of ‘vocab’ acquistioin of learners by 2 fold, from a few paltry 8 word vocab review exercises–which is plenty by the way–since it taps my ‘memorization’ skills, to I bet if you did a fun review of your conversation to an easy 15-20 word jump–progressively getting easier because the typical conversational words get used all the time—leading to a hundred/two hundred bank of retained rich conversational vocab that would pretty much get someone going!
Okay, I’m gonna go find something new ta do! lata
y’know, if chinesepod had functions for moving vocab flashcards to my ipod or palm, i’d pay up. this should include the buzzwords and more advanced but often-encountered-in-chinese-daily-life words and phrases.
as for the ken/jenny question, i am a female chinesepod user but not frequent user of the site. have there been any pictures of ken? nothing has registered. sorry ken.
one problem with ipod flashcards is that not everyone has a lot of memory. am i right? but even just a list of some kind would be helpful for reviewing characters when you have a few spare minutes, sitting on the bus or something.
Hi Froggie,
Click on the Wiki tab, Ken and company have mug shots there.
Ken,
Have you seen/read John’s Sinosplic, he lives in Shanghai, you guys should meet up. Next to your Cpod site, his has been the most helpful to me, and only after one afternoon of browsing on his site, I know how to do my ’shi’ and ‘ch’ now.
http://www.sinosplice.com/lang.....g-chinese/
All words have a habit of changing their meaning fromn one context to another. The average entry in the Webster’s ditionary has 2.3 meanings (according to Goulden, Nation, and Read, 1990). If you take the word ’set’ for example, there are over 40 definitions (set in, set out, set up, set-up, etc)
I would argue that this effect is even more prevalent in Mandarin than in English. That is why we always present words in context - so that you can see the various shades of meaning, nuance. To me it is important to realize this when you use flashcards or the Supermemo - it’s OK at the level of recognition, but it will not give you any idea of how the word is actually used in the various contexts.
David, I’ll have a look at Sinosplice.
Ken,
I can think of a few of ways to deal with the context problem in Supermemo, but up front I’ll admit that I’m generally glad to know one meaning for a word. One way would be to memorize sentences as I mentioned above. You wouldn’t be formally learning when to use a word but you would get some patterns into your head.
If it is helpful to just know the different shades of meaning, you can make multiple cards for a word, each time leaving out a different meaning. You will then fill in the blank with the missing meaning. The PC version makes this fairly easy through setting up something called cloze deletion.
A third way is just to have the flashcard include the context. I have some like that to help me learn which words are used in writing and which in speech. The cards will ask things like: Is 与 written or spoken, what is the common written form for 和, etc.
I think age and context make a big diffrence (except for those natural language learner types). Being 53 and living in the US without a group of Chinese speaking friends makes it hard.
Think about it, for us middleaged folks, we are dealing with jobs and families, kids, etc., and language learning is near the bottom of the list in terms of free time. I came to that conclusion a few weeks ago and stopped beating myself up on my slow(at least by my standards) progress.
When I was 19 I lived overseas for a junior year abroad program. Justing being immersed in a culture and being forced to use the language for daily social intercourse made it much easier.
Jeff 果戒
Hi all,
David, the link that I sent to you was : “Neuroscientists have discovered why children excel at learning languages”
http://www.acfnewsource.org/sc.....guage.html
Again, I have to caution readers that brain science is a work in progress — we don’t actually know the physiology and biochemistry of this yet.
CPod and my fellow Podsters:I have to admit that I don’t do CPod’s review exercises. The review exercises are just too easy, and don’t really continue the lesson. Not to mention, on a lot of them the first thing I’m faced with is “this lesson was about….” or “In this lesson, Mr. Li said…” or something like that which, quite honestly, I don’t remember if I haven’t just heard the lesson, and that’s just not how I use the website. Sometimes I just like to “review”… with no particular lesson in mind.
I’d really love to see review exercises that carry forward some of the supplementary parts of the lessons… I just relistened to the lesson on colors, so I’ll use an example from that. Jenny lists a whole slew of people whose hair is black. That was a great review for pronouns, and even included “everybody”. Then a bunch of things that are blue. You do this often in the lessons… repeat a sentence structure and replace a noun, or an adjective, or a verb phrase. So, make up some exercises that do more of that (beyond even the supplementary material in the podcasts). It would help me to figure out the grammar patterns and to review high-use vocabulary. It would help me to build my own sentences. That’s what I’m looking for, and what I find on the podcasts, but not on the website. I think this is the sort of thing that David has posted about, above.
Jeff, there’s no substitute for exposure and immersion, but it’s easier when you’re 19, immersed or not.
Ken, with regards to context and flashcards: put example sentences on the flashcards? Flashcards are a reviewing tool, not really an acquisition tool, but if you heard the word in a sentence, you could put that word and it’s sentence on the flashcard, and if you hear the word again, put the new sentence on the flashcard, until you had enough examples to build a good understanding of the contextual use of the word. I know flashcards are not an ideal way to learn a word’s meaning, but they are a good way to review and remember a meaning that you already understand. Learning new words is a matter of input, as you say on the lessons…
Hi Ken and everyone. This is a fascinating discussion, (even if I’m arriving after everyone has already left the room).
Of course, that’s the whole issue - how do you continue a “conversation” when the other person is no longer present, and all you have is this small rememberance, this shape and look and sound of a “word” or “phrase” to use to bring that interaction back to mind. So, here’s the questions I tease out of the earlier discusison above. Main question: why do we forget stuff? Alternative: why do we ever remember stuff?
Side issue: How can we use new (or old) technology to help? By “help” we are talking various scales, from helping look up or learn the meaning of one character once, to undertaking the life-long process of becoming an unthinking natural user of this new language and culture in your routine daily life. (The “best” approach on different scales may conflict, of course - so that a tool to master word-recognition for lesson 12 of “integrated Chinese” might not actually be helping you feel good about yourself and Chinese, or meeting new Chinese friends or business associates.)
This gets into questions of “where” we record information about “a word”, how children do that differently than adults do, and why it’s often no longer “there” when we go back to find the record / word. This gets into what “shape” this thing called “a word” is, and as Ken strongly asserted, paraphrased - there is no such thing as “a word” - there’s “right word in THIS context” and “right word in THAT context” and no such thing as “right word without specifying context” - way more so in Chinese than in English.
I think that’s not just an interesting academic point, but the key to the whole problem: with an “associative” memory, the mental “context” is, in fact, not only the determinant of what the “right” word is, but it is the medium on which the word is recorded in our brain, or could be, or should be. Out of context, there is no meaning for “the word”, and no reason to have it intruding on our consciousness - so, we only need it “in context”, and, odds are (both anecdotally and from theory) that it is precisely in that “context” that we somewhat holographically record the word. No, let me be clearer - we don’t just work IN the context — the MENTAL context itself IS the rice-paper on which we are writing the word / phrase/ conversational-interaction-snippet.
Imagine that we have a tiny stadium filled with ants that are each holding up signs that can be changed, so that collectively they spell out some word, such as “Go TEAM!” and you as a giant human take a huge brush and write a character on the collection of signs. Then the ants move on to their next word “BEAT OHIO STATE!”, some ant’s keep their signs up, others switch to different signs. Only PART of your character is still visible, the part that’s on the signs held up by ants that didn’t just change over to the new group word.
If you want to read your word clearly, you need to get the ants to go back to what they were doing when you wrote the character, namely, you were holding up “Go TEAM!” and reconstruct (”re-member”) that context, on which, in which, you wrote YOUR word.
But there are millions of contexts, more and more as you become older. And, (from personal experience and training as a stage magician), as people get older their actual working set gets smaller and smaller of foreground tasks, because they have so many
background tasks running. (computer analogy). Kids are here, now - Buddha would be happy. Adults have 98% of their brain worried about the rent, the next exam, is that really a lump I felt, what’s this rash, is my boss really unhappy with my work, etc. My experience in stage magic is that adults sample the world around them about once every 30 seconds to 2 minutes to see if it’s changed, and spend most of their time distracted - if college age males, a lot of it spent fantasizing about sex. You can start the scissors moving towards the rope, and adults who were actually asleep at the switch won’t look again until 30 seconds later, when their brain will “fill in” that they “saw you” cut the rope with the scissors, even if that’s not what happened. They’re trivial audiences. Kids, on the other hand, are terrible audiences, because they actually are present and watch what’s going on, instead of extrapolating and stealing a few seconds for microsleep or fretting about the rent.
What’s that say? First, managing your own “state” while learning is probably undervalued, whether you use hypnosis or not, what fraction of your attention can you actually deliver, undivided, to the task at hand? If you’re not trained in state management, this is probably very little as an adult. Second, do you methodically build “a context” for “a word” before you “memorize” it, or do you just sort of try to force it into (paint it onto) whatever local context you’re in at the time? If so, when you need it, it will still be “THERE” - but “THERE” is the context you wrote it in, not the context you NEED it in.
So one big techno-challenge is to make a “context=processor” not just a “content-processor” out of the computer or iPod or whatever you have to work with. A word without context is meaningless. It’s probably less correct to say that ‘this character” means 8 things, as it is to say that “this character” is used for 8 totally unambiguous, distinct meanings in these 8 distinct contexts. “IT” doesn’t mean 8 things, “IT + 8-CONTEXTs” mean 8 different things. In a given context,that word or sound or character may be 100% unambiguous.
Another techno-challenge is how to quiet the voices in your head, shut down the background processes, and “be where you are, so you don’t miss it.” That can probably be a learned behavior and ritual, techno-assisted, biofeedback assisted. If you only deliver 1% of your attention to a task, it probably will only be 1% effective. Duh. You’re carefully writing your lesson onto a context that’s 99% going to evaporate by the time you need it.
Finally, on the micro-scale, say you’re 100% focused on a context, and 100% focused on one word or phrase, and even then, at that single point it time, it refuses to “click”. It “fights back”. Forget next week, you can’t get this phrase to stick for 1 second, let alone a week. How does technology or process help there? Many unresolved questions, and many vague generic answers about “use it” or “do something with it.” Of course, if you’re going to DO something, use your whole body - don’t just subvocalize it - say it out loud, act it out with your arms and legs, sing and dance it, totally embrace it “Y-M-C-A it with your body” (that’s a song here in USA that involves spelilng the lettetrs with your arms and legs.)
If it still fights, open question. I have had a lot of success with a very different approach than I see anyone else use - I start with the characters or words I actually WANT to know, the ones that LOOK FUN today. (this is how I taught my daughter English as a first language before she got to school. We just sifted through words till she found one she LIKED and did that. - A terrible approch once you’re in school, which I’m not, but a very helpful one if you have all the time you need and can pick your own path. First, some large-scale ground cover has to be put in, while retaining joy, happiness, fun, so this activity is one you look forward to. LATER, you can get to ugly words.
So in English we started with moveable flashcards with words like “I” “Love” and “you”. Happy words. Relationship words.
I go on too long as usual. Anyway, there’s some new ways of looking at this issue, that might reveal some new approaches to the problems. As statisticians say, ” All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
We have astounding technology available. portable devices. Gigahertz processors on our desktops sitting idle. Instant global communications and always someone, somewhere who is up, awake, and interested in talking and even willing to put up with newbies of all levels. Wow. Go ChinesePod ! Go Users! We’re Almost there !
Wade
An afterthought - once you get into thinking in terms of context, you really have to think in terms of contexts (plural), and moreover, nested contexts of contexts of contexts. The word has a context, but so does the sentence, and so does, say drinking tea, and so does “social interactions” and so does “Chinese language study” and so does “Chinese Culture” and so does “My life”.
When you “learn a language” you’re changing (or building) all of those simultaneously.
And, they interact. And, each one has “aspects” or “colors” or “tones”. DNA, the genetic stuff we’re made of,
has “CATG” alphabet, true, but scientists are realizing more and more that what those letters “spell” is heavily
context-dependent, and that DNA itself actually is “colored” or “modified” by attached molecules that ARE locally
variable, and may vary on whether that phrase of DNA came from your mother or father, and may vary on other
quality control issues regarding that word or phrase or sentence or paragraph of genetic informaiton.
So, you need to manage the whole nested hierarchy of contexts. If you learn 1000 vocabulary words and
hate every minute of it, odds are about 100% that you will never go on to be comfortable in the language.
What’s the actual “retention rate” or “success rate” for those who START to learn a language to those who
make it all the way through to comfortable, self-sustaining effortless fluency? Which matters more?
To high-school or university students, “passing the exam” matters. I had to actually fight with my college,
and change majors to continue taking a language, because they said I’d had two years of it, and “that was all I needed to graduate”.
What a metric! The point of language had been entirely lost and ritualized. My ex wife had 6 years of French, got straight “A” top grades, and when we went to Montreal (Canada) she couldn’t even carry on a conversation at a restaurant, let alone complain about the attitude of the hotel staff in French.
ONe thing I really like about ChinesePod is that Ken and Jenny have fun, and sound like real people who you wouldn’t mind having over for dinner - so this builds and colors a context that maybe this whole thing, this “Chinese” thing, is not reallly so alien and foreign and different from English. Without that supportive context, memorized vocabulary words are all tagged with “forget this as soon as possible” tags.
This is absurd. We should have 95% success rates at language acquisition, not 95% drop-out rates.
Go ChinesePod!
Wade
Wow, when I get wound up and start tallking loudly to the birds and my wife, it’s hard to stop!
Anyway, second after-thought. Our DNA in our genes, and our body’s immune system has two broad
categories for “stuff”. There’s stuff that’s “ME”, and stuff that’s “NOT ME”. There’s also stuff that’s “RIGHT”
and stuff that’s “WRONG” with some sort of quality control parity check-sum or something.
So, if our immune system detects a foreign cell (a bacterium, say), it basically grabs a spray-can of
bright orange paint and marks that cell “FOR REMOVAL”. (This is called “opsonization” if you care.)
Then, later, the garbage truck comes, finds any cells marked “FOR REMOVAL” and carts them away.
On the other hand, in DNA itself, there is a huge daily quality control program at work trying to
repair damage. If some transition or small cluster of DNA letters (nucleotides) doesn’t “make sense”,
our body has systems to REMOVE it. Or if it “almost makes sense”, we have systems that REPAIR
and sustain it. Everything is flagged one way or another. If’ it’s not “ME” , then it should be REMOVED.
All that is on a micro-scale. It may be that something similar happens with whatever the basic units
of learning language turn out to be. If the chunk of stuff “fits in” and “is me”, it will get carted to
the right place, marked for daily repair if damaged, and fit into things. If the chunk of stuff is sitting
around loose with no context or higher order work-group it’s part of, then it must be “a mistake”, and
it gets flagged for removal at the next car-wash.
By that model, the single thing that matters the most is the ATTITUDE we MARK the word/phrase with,
before we “put it into the system” and walk away. If the ATTITUDE we color it with says “save me,
I like this, this goes HERE”, that will happen. If the ATTITUDE we color it with on intake says “this is junk,
I hate it”, then the garbage trucks will come, dissolve it, and flush it away.
It’s an interesting model, or theory, and one that could be tested in practice to see if it seems to
work that way or not.
Wade
Short comment. By a great coincidence, I work with medical transcriptionists a lot at a hospital, and they and ChinesePod users
have a lot in common.
Having spent all my money buying a nice iPod for my son, I ended up just buying myself a small tape-less dictation device - a SONY IC Recorder ICD P210, which seemed to be the cheapest one that also could upload and download mp3s to a computer.
What’s relevant is not that, but that it came with a “Digital Voice Editor” which seems like a product that ought to be marketed or available on it’s own. I guess it was designed for transcriptionists who take dictation and have to replay the voice, or go back into the voice multiple times and need to “bookmark” indistinct phrases so they can type them out. (The transcriptionists I know use foot pedals to control location.) But, here’s what’s almost great so far as learning Chinese goes.
I can play a ChinesePod lesson at any speed, from 50% of normal speed to 150% of normal speed, and it adjusts the pitch so it doesn’t sound wierd, it just is faster or slower. I can cut and paste snippets out of the voice. I can “bookmark” points in the lesson and get back to them with a single click on the “next bookmark” button. And, I can set a start point and and end point with sliders for autorepeat.
So, I don’t need “lesson Nth Time” - I can repeat it myself, starting very slow, and adjusting the speed upwards slowly until I’m playing it at almost twice normal speed, then go back to normal speed and it sounds so easy at that point. And, I can set the brackets to just repeat the first sentence over and over till I have it, then set up the next sentence, then the next, etc.
IT’s not quite perfect for language learning, but it’s way better than nothing. Now, all it needs is to synchronize visual text with the sound. Which, it turns out, I think the major transcription companies provide in their products for transcriptionists, so they can read the text and listen to the voice, and mark an “unknown word” - then give the whole file to another person who can see the text,
click on “next bookmark” and it takes BOTH the pointer in the text AND the voice to the next bookmark point.
You guys should get together and repackage that transcription software as language-learning software.
(oh, yeah, - the dictation device will auto-trigger a voice-to-text software-package in English like Dragon, if you have it, so it will
automatically convert the english voice to english text reasonably accurately. THAT should be of interest to the English-Pod users as well. )
Actually, a recorder and transcriber is not a bad idea for another reason . You could go to someplace, such as a business meeting or social setting, and record the conversation or meeting (openly, not secretly please), then take it home and just be able to replay it at half-normal speed while you figured out what those words were you didn’t know, plus be able to “cut” a few sentences out as a separate file and post them on Chinese/English Pod Blog and ask if someone can tell you what THIS phrase means. This could actually be pretty useful for 80% fluent speakers who are already immersed slightly over their heads in a foreign culture and are trying to clean up the loose ends.
If the users of ChinesePod just dissected each other’s puzzles on a site CPod monitored, occasionally something really interesting would go by that you could grab and use as a very real example of current usage, and it might help scale up the service to many times more users and have a huge search engine (users!) seeking out fascinating new twists in language to post as candidates for the Ken and Jenny show.
The CEO of the largest transcription company is on site today - I’ll see if I can get a few minutes of his time to sound him out as to the interest they might have in such a cross-platform development.
Wade
About Fossilization
This article is a very academic discussion about inter-language and fossilization. It doesn’t have anything particularly new to say but it did make me ponder a few items.
1. It’s the first time I’ve heard about inter-language. This is a sort of mid-way point grammar that a learner cobbles together based on their first language and target language. I thought it reflected something I have been doing recently. Lately I have ‘plateu’d’ a bit with my learning and was doing new things to keep up my interest. One of these things was to look at my texts and ‘re-write’ sentences. What I would do (and you need a good Chinese-language book with proper English) was to first take the English translation and slowly ‘translate’ it word for word. Then I would write out the sentence in full, unmodifying the grammar. It helped me see how ‘totally wrong’ that path was in my mind b/c the sentence that came out was always garbled Chinese.
Then I would ‘think’ the sentence in Chinese and start to write it out. I paid particular attention to what I know about Chinese grammar in an an attempt to form good Chinese sentences. Then I compared the two. In essence I believe I’m force feeding my inter-language in an attempt to convert it to the true target language.
I find that when I start to speak Chinese on a subject that is new, not rehearsed like typical questions about my family, job, etc., or when I start to want to talk quickly, my Chinese comes out with English grammar and of course is almost uncomprehensible sometimes. Thus my inter-language is good for stock situations, but I have yet to switch completely to the target grammar and fall back on my first-language grammars in tough situations. I hope my writing exercises help with this.
2. About fossilization. I think since most in this field are not neurologists they tend to assign a higher weight to social factors. I find it fascinating that even with ‘direct’ correction, the fossilazation remains in place. The factors they found though:
* - affective factors
* - amount of exposure - input
* - opportunities for expression
* - negative feedback - (note - not correction, but signalling incomprehension)
* - absence or presence of pressure on communication
seem to me all factors we can influence to varying degrees, freeing me from biological restraints. I like to think free will still exists.
opps, the Fossilization/Inter-language Article link
http://tmason.club.fr/WebPages.....nguage.htm
Wow, that’s a great article. I have been experimenting with the theory that my process of learning Chinese should be structured into phases, beginning with listening comprehension. Towards that end I’ve been amassing as much listening material as I can. I have a stack of Chinese textbooks that come with CDs and I just go through the books as fast as I can, listening to the dialogues as I highlight the new words and try to figure out what the speakers are talking about. I edit the dialogues to cut out the boring word lists and put them on my ipod and I listen to them over and over again at work, on the train, on the street. My listening comprehension has improved radically with this technique. When I can understand 60 or 70 percent of what a native speaker can understand then I’ll take it to the next phase, the speaking and reading phase.
Honestly, at this point I don’t find Chinesepod the least bit useful for learning Chinese. I would really like it to be useful, but I find that it really doesn’t expose the listener to much Chinese. In fact, I am about to experiment with listening to Englishpod instead. Hopefully it will follow the same structure as Chinesepod, and I will finally get to hear a wide variety of Chinese language structures within the context of a specific vocabulary.
That said, I’d like to let you guys at Chinesepod know what it would take to make me a subscriber. I would pay money for dialogues recorded entirely in Chinese, accompanied with English commentary in text form that would display on the ipod as the dialogue played. I know that this is technically possible in the podcast format. In other words, assume the listener knows perhaps the 1000 most common words and provide a translation for the words in the dialogue that are outside of the basic vocabulary.
Anyway, I think you guys are on the right track and hope you keep with it until you come up with the perfect formula…
Hi David X,
I think your ‘divide and conquer’ approach might work really well for you, but from personal anecdotal experience I can tell you that besides my first language, my head is wired for another language for listening and comprehension but I have no verbal output or literacy in that lanquage. I personally think all the parts should be learned in synch. Keep posting though, I’d really like to hear how things go. If your experiment works, maybe I can kickstart another language in my head then!
Regarding the Chinese dialogue with a running English commentary. Why don’t you get some Hong Kong (but with dubbed Mandarin dialogue) dvds/vcds which have English and Chinese sub-titles, convert into a iPod playable video format and watch that way. I personally find that I cannot ‘not’ read the English and what happens is that I just land up reading the sub-titles and the Chinese just becomes background noise. These days I try to watch Chinese movies with three different purposes, those with English, those with only Chinese subtitles and those w/o subtitles.
Opps, I just realized maybe you just have an iPod and maybe not an iPod video…hmm.
I have a 60gb ipod video and I am in the process of filling it with such material, including a great number of cartoons, which I find to have very clear voices. It is amazing how much material is actually available in China, and for how little, and I’m talking about legit stuff.
I downloaded an Englishpod episode but it too was all in English. If Englishpod is all English why isn’t Chinesepod all Chinese?
I don’t disagree with your point about the importance of learning to speak. My French comprehension is at 90 percent but I can’t speak much. My Dutch reading comprehension is almost as good as my English reading comprehension, but I can’t speak at all. However, I don’t think the learning process for input and output has to be simultaneous. I haven’t seen any evidence that these processes need to happen together and if you read the whole article mentioned, you’ll see some clear evidence to the contrary, the experiment with self-learning French in Canadian schools.
The Great 100% Myth
If I swallow the pill of listening, speaking, writing, living in 100% Chinese I will ‘magically’ learn it.
If I take the ‘magic man’s’ potions of fun and wacky tasting elixers I will destroy my Chinese.
Hi David X,
Ohh how I envy your 60Gb iPod. I have a Archos 30GB DVR that I use to tape Chinese tv. I like this b/c then I have Chinese ‘dialogue’ and sub-titles. Only thing is my DVR can’t read pdfs or have a flashcard program and such. It does play MP3s but I like my smaller mp3 player for walking/listening around town. I hate adding more devices to my collection, but…. how long does the iPod battery last when you’re really using it? Do you have a separate external USB charger adapter?
About full-immersion schools. I haven’t read up on the studies of late, but I remember reading that it was a mixed bag. I find it quite interesting that LKY of Singapore once remarked that almost no country has really succeeded in creating a full bi/multi-lingual society. He specifically points out the French-speaking in Quebec vs. the English speaking in Vancouver. I think actually maybe China…has succeeded. From all the discussion of late on tones, etc., it seems even more apparant to me that the ‘dialects’ of China may be academic, because for most practical purposes they are mutually incomprehensible ‘languages’!
Timing. Hmm. Personally I find it a bit of a mental block to build up too much listening comprehension and then switch over to building up the speaking skill. But I know this is the path for example of overseas university students arriving in America and letting their ‘voice’ come out so to speak. I just find this a tougher and long road, let me walk and talk at a nice pace till I can run. You really don’t think so for your French and Dutch?
Ken,
Yah why don’t we pick on your English? Why don’t the Yanks pick on your English? Isn’t it disruptive to their ears? I find that very fascinating. You really shouldn’t have brought this up, you say “Listening and Spoken Chinese” ….umm shouldn’t it be “Listening Comprehension and Spoken Chinese”, and you said “Across the boards” once…well that should be in US-talk “Across the board.” What else was there..darn it, and all your typos, how do we put up with it? ‘
David,
I don’t quite understand this “Magic Man” post. Perhaps you are misinterpreting me. First of all, I know from bitter experience that without some perception of meaning, there can be no learning of language. When I listen and only hear random noises and nonsense sounds I don’t learn anything no matter how many thousands of hours I spend at it. It is only by adding meaning that our brains begin to parse a new language into comprehensibility.
Second, I don’t think that by listening to a fellow Chinese student speak Chinglish I will somehow damage my own ability to speak. Far from it.
I wasn’t just commenting on the article linked to. I was commenting on the entire series of 12 articles. THere are some very interesting links in there too. Check out http://www.tprsource.com/asher.htm for example.
Ken, I realized the importance of learning Chinese about 2 years ago. I knew I always wanted to be bilingual, and even multilingual, but in what, I did not know. Now at 18, I constantly test myself, even when I should be focusing else where. I hope to take Chinese in college as a major doubled with int’l business.
To retain the vocab I learn, I repeat it and repeat it, as a system of rote learning.
But for some words, they just don’t stick… so I decided to relate those words to words that sound alike in English… for ex:
‘Kan Ding’ = Candy
‘Ma Fan Yi’ = My Funny!
‘You shi hou’ = Yoshi
The words don’t even relate in English, but I say those words in English and it sparks my memory… anyway, that’s how I remember those tough words.
Ken, I have a question for you…
How long did it take you to become fluent in Mandarin?
Hi Ken and others who write pretty well in Chinese,
In your post, you mentioned that you write down new characters. Do you write down just the one character or is it embedded in the sentence that you heard it, and that sentence written down?
Actually, my question that I wanted to raise is about reading. I’ve started to read blogs in Chinese, written by Chinese-natives and non-natives writing in Chinese. I’m wondering how ‘errors’ in the non-native Chinese writings might affect me. In spoken Chinese and listening, I have a pretty good ear so I usually know when there is an accent or the ’structure’ isn’t quite right, but I lack this in written text.
I noticed also since you started (so it seems anyway) speaking less Chinese, people are really starting to pick apart Jenny’s accent, wonder when people will realize Liv’s is pretty strong too. LOL.
Any Chinese writers out there, so should I just keep reading anything and everything?
Dan,
‘Fluency’ is a relative term. I could say I’m fluent in the sense that I can mroe or less survive (and be understood) in most situations. As numerous people have pointed out, however, I have problems with my tones - particularly with the second tone. Retaining new vocabulary is another problem for me, do I tend to rely on a set of known elements thaty I use all the time.
I never formally studied Chinese - I came here to work, rather than to study. I would say that it took me 3 - 4 years of living here before I could call myself functional in Chinese. Again, I was in my mid-30s at that point, and I did not study formally. For someone in his 20s, with a study regimen, it should be possible to gain some degree of fluency in half that time. If you can study full time, all the better.
David, I usually write the pin yin. I don’t have time now to study the characters. I think it is best to write the context - especially if it is embedded in a nice, high-frequency, lexical chunk.
Keep reading and keep writing. The more you write, the better you will become - there is no question about this. If you can get someone to give you feedback on it, great. (That should be easy where you are!) Proper, formal writing in Chinese requires formal instruction, but for the purposes of somethign like this blog, just keep writing, practicing, and asking people for feedback. Trust me - it will improve. Writing in any language gives you much more insights and depth into how it all works.
Online Flashcards of High=Frequency Words
Andreas just showed me this link over in a comments thread
http://www.yellowbridge.com/la.....ionary.php
If you drill down in it,there’s an online flashcard feature that works very nicely. What I REALLY liked is that it has sets of cards based on some studies of high frequency words. I decided to give it a shot. For the first 100 simplified, I knew 99 with very good recognition! Whatever ‘method’ I’m using at least has put in my head the top 100, I like this! Let me see how I do with the next 100 and so on.
I don’t really like flashcards, but for when one is in the mood, this site’s was sure nicely set up and loaded fast, etc. I ..dare say it may outdo Cpods…
Fascinating. In the high=frequency simplified character flashcards. I have almost total comprehension 1-100, 101-200. A few misses in 201-300. Then in 301 and onwards it just drops percipetously. I can definitely work on that 300 range for a bit. This is in contrast to the HSK top 1000 list where it comes at me randomly and every other vocab word was hit or miss for me. Only confirms more strongly for me that my not being very focused on HSK is ‘not’ hurting my Chinese…if the point is to learn high frequency Chinese vs HSK Chinese.
I really like this ‘high=frequency’ list, the levels in chunks of 100 seem do-able, and I feel because it’s frequency based, I’ll be more likely to see them in my various readings/writing/talking. OK…looks like I’ve got my homework for the next little bit.
Hey Ken, where does your ‘recognition’ start to drop off in the list?
http://www.yellowbridge.com/la.....cards.html
List of High=Frequency Words
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese.....p?Which=MO
Easier yet, just scroll down this list, when do the characters start to ‘not’ pop into your head. I started getting fuzzy around 500. How about other Cpoders out there? I’ve noticed in the comments that people actually have very different ‘mixes’ of fluency in writing vs reading vs speaking vs listening, etc.
I’d be curious to know for the listeners who found the first few advanced casts at their level or easy, where do the characters start getting hard for you in this list? Is it in the 800s or over 1000? I’m just wanting to guesst’mate how much work is ahead of me!
Dear Chinesepod,
Your advanced lessons are great! Please keep them up!
Thanks!
Hi Ken,
Mondays are great huh!?! Even better to see Cpod and John from Sinosplice have started a new relationship.
http://www.sinosplice.com/life.....e#comments
You can now say to him ‘yoroshiku’ (Glad to meet you/let’s kindly take care of each other). BTW, 元気ですか’genki desu ka’ is Japanese for ‘ni hao ma?’. Don’t forget to ask Haruka for me! Aiyou–you’re doing such a great job today (noticed you kicked some tush too with our favorite cynic)….How are’ya Ken!
So hey, do I get a free burger or something. (If on the other hand, things go sour, pls blame it on Aric and his interns)
————————
Ken,
Have you seen/read John’s Sinosplic, he lives in Shanghai, you guys should meet up. Next to your Cpod site, his has been the most helpful to me, and only after one afternoon of browsing on his site, I know how to do my ’shi’ and ‘ch’ now.
http://www.sinosplice.com/lang.....g-chinese/
Comment by David — February 25, 2006 @ 4:46 pm
#
David, I’ll have a look at Sinosplice.
Comment by Ken — February 25, 2006 @ 10:22 pm
TONE PATROL - I think I’ll refer to them as ‘patrol’ now vs. police, because saying police implies someone supports them or they’re necessary. Over the last few months I’ve noticed something and I think it indicates a somewhat firmly entrenced paradigm partly induced by academia, culture and our own insecurities. To be clear, I’m still very much at an intermediate level and nobody mistakes my Chinese for a Chinese person, despite the sometimes very encouraging compliments I get at times, so maybe in the future my views will change as my Chinese gets better.
But being in China I have gotten used to the diversity in Chinese and how extremely context driven this language is, there simply is no way to know what the sound ‘zhang’ first thru fourth, fifth tone means unless you hear a certain sound (word) before or after it, it is said in a specific social context, you see it written…and you hear the tone. Notice that tone is towards the end in this chain of context.
However, everyone who first comes to Chinese gets pounded with a couple ‘truths’, one: it’s the hardest language in the world; two: there are four tones. It’s like a sacred mantra developed by Chinese teachers, academia, culture, students. I think what we have seen here with Chinesepod is the revolutionary way that you’ve ignored this mantra, Cpod make it seem like Chinese isn’t really that tough, and the tones are as they should be, farther down in the context-chain. And Ken, I already have the trademark rights on ‘context-chain’ and ‘chain-of-context’. You’ll have to pay me residuals to quote it.
I re-bring this up because it seems that many learners get stuck on joining the ‘tone patrol’ because, well it’s what the ‘old school’ methods of Chinese teaching have told them to do…we must ‘first’ learn ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4. We’ll worry about the situation, words before and after, accent, rhythm, pitch after. Nobody seems to tell students that the sound ‘zhang1′ first tone has about 45 different possible meanings. And if they say ‘zhang4′ instead, well then it limits the possible field to 28 possible different meanings their listeners have to guess at.
AND ohh, why oh why don’t we tell students that tones often vary, morph or play tricks when we talk in Chinese? Just like money is good to have, tones and correct tones are good to have, and just like it’s good to take care of your money, one should take care of one’s tones, but just like money, tones aren’t all there is to life, and it certainly shouldn’t be the first thing one always thinks about.
I was not going to belabour this tone discussion, but it came back….over in the Jpod comments this morning! Ken, have Haruka translate this for you. And don’t you let her get all discouraged and paranoid about her tones! The chemistry and format that Haruka and Steve have right now is in my mind, just about perfect! At least the Jpod students are really polite when they go on ‘patrol’. ;p
———
こんにちは。初心者37で「因为」を沈さんがyin1wei4と言ってその通りに発音しているのはわかりますが、はるかさんのはどうしもyin1wei2に聞こえてしまいます。沈さんは注意していないのではるかさんの発音は正しいのだと思いますが。
Comment by arip — 2006-04-15 @ 9:07 am
———
FAKING A SIX - There’s a thread topic over at Talk Talk China (beware, it’s an extremely sarcastic rant driven entertaining site) about how it’s not too difficult to get the basics of Chinese down, but that getting over that ‘intermediate plateau’ is another story. This author provides some entertaining colloqialisms that can help one fake being a little more advanced than one really is.
http://www.talktalkchina.com/i...../04/idiom/
BTW, I was looking for a good place to post this info and decided on this Cblog thread. Noticing my previous comment, geez sometimes I sure do talk a lot.
Hey Ken! Glad to see the new search function for the blog, I was able to find this thread with it!
Question, well first let me say I am in a phase where I am a bit burnt out, and also not getting enough, if anyone can get that. The question is, I’m at a level where the newbie, elementary content is already a part of my conversational bank. I used to go thru old casts and listen to improve my pronunciation and I would pick up other real basic words. The easy intermediate casts I still find I ‘learn’ words with the most stickiness. The intermediate-advanced challenge me with vocab at times and the conversational sentences are about at my level. The monologues and extend upper-intermediate, and vocabulary torrents are too much for me unless I sit down and study old school.
As you know I am not into old school, I don’t like to sit and review. With the Jpod casts gone and the the Epods irregular with Jenny speaking intros and review, I don’t think I get enough input via Cpod. The Advanced tuesday cast always keeps me grounded. But then with two or three days too easy, and one day just right, well that’s only one day just right. It’s not enough input to load up my very small non-iPod mp3 player as I walk about town and engage in Chinese on the street.
I bring this up because I figure other longer-time Cpoders at different levels probably have the same reaction although the specifics would vary. Do you see Cpod as a one-stop shop or am I gonna still have to get out and scamper all around town to load up? The Word on the Street, Buzzwords help btw, but I still like the tried-and-true Cpod scripts for high-return listening/learning experiences versus albiet pleasurable high-entertainment casts.
Would the staff revolt if I said, why not TWO casts a day? Or maybe just two every other day? Just on Tuesdays? A burger today which I’ll gladly pay you for next Tuesday? Hey, Haruka and Steve are available now….what are THEY doing?
Lantian
I am probably just a little behind you but close. Part of this problem is something we all discussed a while back. How to keep old CPodders happy while bringing in new people who can not jump in at Newbie Lesson# 85. So it means if you are a mid-Elementary to low-Intermediate. Its Groundhogs day. You never graduate. And unlike before the Newbie lessons are really, realy for Newbies now. Your solution is the best.
But, a while back Ken asked about improvements for Elementary Level. I would suggest the Elementary Dialogues are too short and maybe we are getting smarter and they are too easy as well. But too many of the Intermediate lessons are moving to High Intermediate. On those days I feel I get a half lesson and make up for it with “old school” learning. Sitting down with the printed dialogue and highlighting high frequency chunks. So not always bad but not as much fun as having Jenny and Aggie with me and only me for 15 minutes.
I think what is needed are (1) a longer Elementary Lesson everyweek with some Chinese banter and (2) a Low Intermediate that is longer as well and perhaps the banter is maybe 30%-50% in Chinese. That might be a challenge to me (you?) to listen/study a few times (re-study on Newbie day) to begin the climb up to real Intermediate. Maybe a special assignment for John.
Mike in Jubei
Lantian, The search function is not quite what I woudl like to see, but it’s a start.
How many times do you listen to each lesson? I’m not one for revision myself, but I think I would tend to listen to each one several times. Perhaps we could step up the number of suitable popdcasts… Let me see about that one.
Haruka is working on her master’s degree (in economics) at Fudan university. Meanwhile, Steven Shen has just opened a pet shop - no, seriously. The ‘whole pet thing’ is taking off around here and Steven plans to tame it, as it were.
Mike, I think it is possible to make the elementaries longer. Good suggestion. As to the level adjustments, I think John P is the man.
I doubt that we need to worry about absolute newbies any more, there’s no way for them to get in and find the early podcasts, is there. How hard can that be to fix?
Pets — great topic for a lesson!
Lesson length — Call me slow, but for the first couple of lessons (only!) there’s too many words for someone who is completely naive. It took me a week before I could pronounce and remember hello, one week to remember and six weeks to get my tongue around goodbye. By the time I’d finished claiming to be or not be American/German/Whatever I was consuming whole lessons before breakfast.
My problem with Chinese is that I never understand anything of the dialogue at the beginning. “Don’t worry, just try to get the gist of it.” Well I never could. Not the merest trace of a gist, which I suppose makes me really stupid. Occasionally I could muster a guess, always quite wrong, because there are no words that I know. It’s better if I fast forward to the translation chat in order to avoid feeling inadequate already before I reach that part. Maybe that part has more meaning when one’s vocabulary becomes larger.
My other problem with Chinese, as a beginner, is that I find no confidence boosters. Everyone else can pick up an easier podcast, or talk to and help more naive students. I tiptoe around here selectively avoiding any confidence snuffers, because there’s no antidote (ten confidence boosters) at my level. I have some minutes, a few times a week, not the hours per day that some invest, therefore my time is stretched longer and I’ll be advancing only very slowly so I need to make adjustments. I’m looking for other ways to get confidence boosters and protect myself from confidence snuffers, and I think those ways will have to be external to Chinesepod. One is to work on my own from a traditional book tracking progress however small, and another is to form the habit of stepping away immediately when my linguistic self esteem takes a blow, go do something easy like turn a cabriole leg or play a concerto or build a mail server. At the stage when the subject area is a bit less foreign to one’s experience, there begins the potential to be independently motivated and self-rewarding. Reaching that stage successfully depends on the comfort level found leading up to it. I wouldn’t mind being way down below the rest of the class on the odd occasion, but it becomes wearisome. At the moment the only class of equals I can find is the class of one student.
Hi Ken,
[quote] How many times do you listen to each lesson? I’m not one for revision myself, but I think I would tend to listen to each one several times. Perhaps we could step up the number of suitable popdcasts… Let me see about that one. [quote]
I would say if the show’s are interesting (Ones that aren’t have a format that being with ‘mono’.) I listen at least 3-4 times. Usually I will listen the first time casually, then later in the day once again hitting the pause/rewind button a lot, another time after I have looked at the transcript, review exercises. I like trying to figure out as much as I can w/o seeing the transcript. Then a few days later I’ll reload it onto the mp3 player for another listen. Then it goes into the 3-4 random previous podcasts which I put onto the mp3 player daily.
I think dialogues and the realitively simple chatting holds my interest the longest over time and I seem to ‘hear’ new words over time. I notice that in the intermediate lessons a new word is often said in some form or another over 15 -20 times, whereas in Advanced shows words get said on the order of 5-8 times, and often just with a kind of definition-kind of explanation, or an explanation using other words that I don’t know. I don’t find any particular words in the advanced show harder to remember, I think it’s more the format. You know–vocab overload.
Your Epod casts this past week have not included Jenny/Chinese—not sure if that’s just a May day holiday production lag, but this along with Jpod gone takes down overall new daily input for me (and yes I’m going out A LOT these days), looking forward, if you could free up the sample clips in the review exercises, or allow some sort of play area where listeners could help mix/match, generate new content, then we’d be talking W2.0 wouldn’t we.
My Mp3 player is loaded with it’s ONE new show, going out for lunch and about town now. BTW, I tried some input from some other learn-Chinese podcasts, tried’em, dropped them. Cpod still the BEST. Cheers.
BTW AuntySue, You’re the BEST AuntySue I know. In language learning don’t compare, I’d shoot myself trying to be like John, and the 1.5 year old toddlers know grammar better than me, what Chinese have you taught your parrots lately?
Brandy - Please, can you help the rest of us that are trying to get Chinese out of Excell and into iFlash. I am exporting as .txt., .csv etc.. and I am getting the correct number of cards - but the text is not in Chinese - just that old jumbled roman text. Also tried changing the fonts to a Chinese font in iFlash - no go. - please if you have any suggestions it would be helpful
Thanks in advance
Well one of my biggest problems with Chinese was just solved with the arrival of my learner’s Dictionary. It has big print and lots of sample sentences with pinyin and it loves me. (You know, some textbooks and dictionaries make you feel like they can’t stand you.) Or maybe I’m projecting a little bit. Anyway I love it. Then I dug out my copy of “Wit and humor: an easy Chinese reading book” with CD. It has pinyin too. It was useless to me without a dictionary. So right now I’m reading a little anecdote about an absent-minded man whose wife wants him to mail a letter. The vocab is not too much to learn especially if you are interested in what’s going on.
That’s just my way though. When I started first grade, I hated school and my great consolation was to take home our first-grade reader and read the stories in it. It helped me forget my dread of class the next day. It also helped me skip first grade. (Then I was even more upset.) In third grade I went to school in a faraway town (20 miles away, like a thousand miles to my mind) and when I would first arrive in class and miss my mom and start to cry, I’d open a book and start to read (I especially remember “The Bully of Barkham Street” ), and it had an immediate teddy bear effect and tears would stop! So now that I can make my way through an easy story in Chinese it helps me, ironically, to forget about the Chinese language and feel more consoled. Yes one does need lots of encouragement and hopefully de-emphasis of conscious learning process in the beginning. (But this being Chinesepod, learning process will ever be emphasized
)
P.S. Re: the easy reading in Chinese. When I read a section and learn the new vocab, I play it on the CD and make an effort to pick out and recognize the new words. I’ve had the experience before of learning a language “by the book” and being lost when a native speaker actually spoke the language… so I’m really trying to listen to Chinesepodcasts as much as I can and keep it “in my ears.”
Also I’ve found it helpful (in remembering what I think I’ve learned but actually haven’t)– to make a recording of myself on tape, saying the English expression and then pausing to let the listener (myself) fill in the Chinese, and then reading on tape the correct answer. Whew! Recording the “correct answer” in Chinese really makes me pay attention to tones, and when you play back your own bloopers on tape it is more obvious than when you say them into the air. Ken mentioned something about having problems with two 2nd tones in succession and I hear myself saying them as 2nd and 1st tone. Anyway. It’s just a low-tech way to make my own crude home-produced audio course. It helps capture little interesting asides that I see or hear and want to remember– such as “zhe shi4 wo3 zuo2 tian1 mai3 de shu1″ This is the book I bought yesterday. What a weird way of saying it. I saw it in a dictionary sample sentence and thought– I don’t want to forget this! Put it on tape!! I’m sure Chinese is just trying its best to find its way into my brain, if I can only find out where the entrance door is so I can open it…
Sorry to triple-post on one thread… isn’t there a law against that, like electing a President 3 times in a row??
Anyway I was thinking about Aunty Sue’s last post… Aunty Sue don’t be discouraged! Your dilemma reminds me of my Russian lessons, where my tutor would play videos or songs and ask, “Can you pick up some of the words?” and instead of admitting the truth and shaking my head no, I just assumed a neutral blank look on my face. It was about 1.5 years into the formal lessons that I began the arduous task of being able to understand spoken Russian… which I *wish* had been emphasized more at the beginning. (Russians are SO into grammar, and conversation is just incidental.) So that’s why I’m just listening, listening, listening to Chinese now. The aural comprehension will definitely be there as you keep at it. (Unfortunately no shortcut, just a lot of exposure over time…) And there are lots of people in your boat, but they probably don’t have the desire or courage to post about it.
One thing that works for me is listening to Chinese as I’m falling asleep… something happens in your brain and you can understand it better. (Maybe the worry or the “trying hard to understand” inhibition is lost.) In fact an Australian person described a memorable incident of this– that explorer named Robin (I forget her name)– the one who rode a camel across the Outback– another time she was traveling with camel herders in India and trying to pick up their language (and feeling very frustrated), and one night as she was falling asleep she felt that suddenly all the barriers to understanding were gone, it was like all the asphalt covering her brain was removed and all the words, instead of bouncing off the asphalt, were sinking into the fertile soil, and she could understand the whole conversation that was going on around the campfire. Unfortunately the next day the effect was lost. But it was like a harbinger of what was to come… when she eventually was able to communicate with the Indian herders.
Maybe drinking 2 glasses of wine would help reach this state also?
Hi John (Ken or Jenny, Cpod)
The threshold hypothesis states that there may be a level of proficiency that once attained, enables the attriting language to remain stable. After perusing the Wikipedia a bit and reading about language acquisition and loss, I came upon the previous term. I realized that this is my goal for my Chinese studies.
I find it interesting that each of you are quite advanced in your second (hmmm…actually it’s second for none of you, how do I say in 30 words or less, the language that is not primary) langauages and so the concept of all of you having reached some sort of stable threshold may apply.
How do each of you feel about being at a ‘threshold’ where there is some stability to your Chinese (or English for Jenny) where loss would not be quick once out of the language environment. How could one measure this for oneself? Are there indicators of this level? Are there specific ways of learning to get to this? Is fluency and pronunciation more stable once at their thresholds, in comparison to vocabulary or listening skills or reading/writing?
活到老，学到老！