Beginning in the 1980s, computer-based studies (mainly of English) began to provide us with powerful insights into the workings of our language. Linguists fed millions of English documents into software programs to scan them and see what they might yield about their patterns of behavior. These studies were known as ‘corpora’ studies. From the beginning, the corpora studies began to reveal surprising insights into how words interact and behave with other.
The studies offered empirical data, based on a very broad range of English language sources. They allowed us to take a given word or expression and look at how it behaved over the course of thousands of examples - how it was used grammatically, where it was likely to be used, with whom it as most likely to keep company, etc. The results were often startling and they began to challenge traditional ideas about the role of grammar and even about how we defined grammar.
One outgrowth of these studies was the development of the ‘lexical approach’ to language teaching. The first description of a lexical approach is attributed to Michael Lewis, who wrote a book of that title in 1993. This book became a classic amongst language teachers and I myself have been greatly influenced by it over the years. I convinced that the lexical approach (with some revisions) offers very useful insights into how we might approach the study of Mandarin, so let me explain a little about what it is.
The most striking revelation from the corpora concerns how words tend to associate strongly with other words in the form of chunks, fixed expressions, collocations, etc. As an example, let’s take a look at collocation. The word ‘collocation’ refers to the tendency amongst words to collocate, or ‘co-locate’ (appear close to) certain other words. Some random examples (out of millions of possibilities):
seriously ill
serious problem
serious accusation
common cold
unfair advantage
decisive action
strong tea
join hands
commit a crime
If you typed the word ’seriously’, into the corpora software, it would yield thousands of sentences (taken from original documents) and show you the words that ’seriously’ was most likely to appear next to. In this case, ’seriously’ occurred much more frequently with the word ‘ill’ than with any other word. We can therefore say that ’seriously’ collocates with ‘ill’. The word ’serious’, meanwhile, is more likely to appear next to ‘problem’ or ‘accusation’ than with any other words, and so on.
The other phrases on the list above are every day expressions (or collocations) that every native speaker of English knows. But here’s the really interesting thing: even advanced level non-native speakers are unlikely to know these expressions! In fact a non-native speaker is more likely to make a mistake when using such expressions than to use bad grammar. (If ever you are in doubt about whether someone is a native speaker of English, just test his/her knowledge of these kinds of expressions.)
To non-language teachers, the examples of collocations I offer may seem trite, but let me tell you that they set off a firestorm of innovation and debate in the language teaching world that has continued unabated to this day. (Actually, while we’re at it, ‘to this day’ is a nice fixed expression, while the word ‘unabated’ tends to occur with ‘floods’ or ‘firestorms’ or things like that, for some reason!)
Over the next week or two I want to introduce the idea behind the lexical approach to you and get your ideas on it. After that I want to show how it can be used in the study of Mandarin. (In fact, the process has already begun as we’re embedding more and more lexis into the CPod lessons as we go along. )
In the meantime, I would ask you to consider how collocation might affect the way we should approach learning Mandarin. (I’ll try to take this discussion to a Mandarin-specific level a little later. For now, I’m using English examples.) Think of the implications that a lexical approach could mean for learning Mandarin. Then, please give me your feedback. (I bet David has some brilliant insights to share.)
Thisa could be an interesting discussion - and a first in the teaching of Mandarin.
Ken Carroll
In my BLCU textbooks there is a section on collocation of important new vocabulary in every chapter. I find that one problem I have with this section in the BLCU books is that there are usually eight examples of collocation, but only two are embedded in any kind of context, thus I often find I can’t work out how I would use a given collocation in a sentence without a model to work from.
For instance:
维护
［动～］继续～｜要求～…｜希望～…｜加以～｜进行～
［～宾］～维护秩序｜～团结｜～和平｜～权利｜～…名誉
（1）维护人民利益是我们义不容辞的责任。
（2）他这样做，是为了维护公司的名誉。
In this example, as long as you have the necessary vocabulary, it is easy to see how 维护 is used in collocation with 权利 and 名誉 because of the examples in the two sentences. However, there is no example of how to use 要求维护 and 加以维护 in a sentence and I would be very hard pressed to come up with how on earth one would use either of these in a sentence.
So Ken, I’m looking forward to any insights you have to share so that I can, we all can, be more productive in our Chinese study.
I agree with Kevin that the context is crucial, but I suspect that Ken would have said that too, had he wished to go into even more details than the current brief intro.
I often do web searches that contain the word “knit”, and have exclude “close knit” and “close-knit” in order to find anything at all related to knitting, which surprised me
On the other hand, you never see “knit close” or “closely knitted” or “close knitting” or “knit them close(ly)” - or even “open knit” - except in the context of knitting itself, a fact that might escape a courageous learner discovering a new term.
It’s amazed me how fluent English speaking migrants I’ve known usually have one or two pet phrases that they’ve adopted in their class room days and used, several times per hour, for the next several decades. This in spite of the fact that they never hear them spoken that way, or not in the range of contexts which the second language person includes. Some are simply archaic or stilted, such as “in point of actual fact” before everything that’s not a question, or leaving out the article or a word ending in one, but only one, of those everyday sayings like “wait minute”, “what’s time”, “it’s rain!” People who don’t normally make these mistakes will do so in their personal pet phrase, ad nauseum, and can’t believe it’s a problem. That’s where I get a bit nervous about learning very useful phrases myself
So I’m thinking, there’s a mental process that goes with collocation, the words get kinda chunked together in a way that removes their details from our attention. That’s why we are not consciously aware of collocated words until an analysis points them out, then of course, yes!
Now if you make that chunking in the wrong context, or without realising the narrowness of the corresponding context, it can become difficult to correct because the error is not great if spoken once or twice but its repetition makes the wrongness become inaudible to the speaker and hilarious to the listener.
I’m not sure now if I’m still talking about what Ken said and how useful it is, or a worry that arises when I think about it, or both.
One thing I’ve noticed in the podcasts I’ve listened to is that the chatty style is great for getting these points across, like the freedoms and limitations to place on the use of our words. It sinks in immediately and you own the concept personally, unlike reading it in a book. This feels like a safer way to learn at the crunchy end of the language and avoid the gotchas.
Sure, there seems to be a lot of English in the lessons, but it’s good time value. I wouldn’t like to read two pages of dry abstract grammatical proselytizing when I can let it stick permanently after just two seconds of witnessing Ken’s voice moan “Nar, you’d NEVER SAY that!” Let’s not underestimate the amount of information packed into those great English tones
I think that’s why ChinesePod works so well.
[ My minds eye ]
I think Parrot and Kevin have pointed out something about the ‘magic’ in our minds. The BLCU approach and most dictionaries have a sort of ‘collocated’ words format. But as Parrot points out some patterns fossilize/lock despite corrections or analytical knowledge. Most people w/o crazy personal self-analysis love of their own speech don’t particularily like to pick-and-poke at their own speech and I would even argue that for the most part picking-and-poking won’t change a lot.
Kids when they first start speaking, and I say speaking since I think they are ‘learning’ way before they speak, do make grammar mistakes, often times mistakes stick for some time, but then magically poof they stop making that particular mistake. Adults seem to have a harder time doing this. We go the forced academic study, make the error, correct, try to remember, try again. Is there no way to unlock this magic kid path?
I think yes and no, we are simply not kids so both biology and social circumstances put certain handcuffs on us. But I do think that there are approaches that get us much closer, and thus make it easier. I am so looking forward to Ken re-asserting some of this in the Cpod formats.
Going back to what’s different about the way ‘collocating’ is presented in BLCU texts or a dictionary, I don’t think that that presentation format is particularly effective, although there really are not many other alternatives. For really bright students and some gifted it does work b/c they can memorize the variations and produce them with rapid recall. But the other 80% need to learn the language differently.
Here’s where I think “Ken” is important. And I now really realize how big a challenge it is to change peoples conceptions of this, but what Ken offers is something a native-speaker of Chinese cannot, he’s not native! Let’s look at that collocated list that Ken gave, a ‘native’ English speaker cannot produce that list if you ask her ‘Tell me all the words/phrases you associate with seriously’. And just as Parrot mentioned with ‘knit’, it’s not intuitively or explicity accessible to us what goes with what. So absent a Google-like parser to scan a Cpod dialogue how does one ‘embed’ this natural collacating process into the show. And why do this? Because it will make the ‘learning’ natura, easy and retainable.
I’ll give you an example. In Chinese there are a lot of two-verb ‘words’. It’s very natural and pop up very soon in native-language speakers speech after their initial baby-talk period. Words like: 吃完，打开，通过。 I, however, find them very hard to learn. I think partly it’s because my English tricks me when I am ’searching my mind’ for a way to express something in Chinese. I’m sure English also has two-verb like pairings, let’s see…finish eating, open up, pass-thru….but besides finish-eating, I think open and pass-the would pop up first. So how do I let my mind ‘learn’ this kind of Chinese grammar? How do I get that Chinese foundation into my mind so that I can just ’suck-in’ new vocab?
In one of the Cpod lessons, Ken was chatting with Jenny. He said to her “I think when you attend class, you were a model student” or something to that effect. His Chinese came out as ‘上课‘, it’s a one-verber, it’s like Parrot’s friend saying ‘wait minute’ all the time. It’s because all of us Chinese learners have been taught “我们上课“ in our newbie lessons. And the bless-their-hearts good intentioned teachers continue to give it to us in varied contexts and over and over. There’s a saying ‘I learned a lot despite having gone to school.”
Well, and here comes my big point, Jenny corrected him! No native host is going to make that same error. I argue even a super-Chinese teacher would have a hard time noting such ‘common mistakes’. And even if she did, because her students make that error all the time, her just saying doesn’t have that emotional ‘punch’.
Jenny said you mean ‘上学’. She didn’t say “you mean ‘上学’ , the verb to study”. She just corrected him. And I know Ken knows both of those verbs ’shang’ and ‘xue’. He might even already know the verb-pair ’shang-xue’, but his mind is fighting English and all that other ‘exposure’ to ’shang ke’ that he’s gotten. Plus, and here’s the real point. There was an emotion from both Jenny-felt a little bad having to correct him; and Ken-a little embarrassed, but there was a ‘meaningful-input’ given to Ken and he also produced ‘a meaningful response’. Ken learned it, and I –that’s with a big capital I- learned it. I FELT the emotion too. It’s the only thing I can recall from the lesson. Kids get this ALL the time, the lucky buggers.
Kids say “I want play”. Mom says “Well you go outside if you WANT TO, but don’t get your pants all filthy.”
Kids say “I’ll do my homework.” Dad says “No, you will do that homework NOW” –teaches placement of time word at END of sentence.
Kid says “Can I eat cookies.” Mom says “What’s the magic word?” Kid: “Please.” Mom: “I want a whole sentence” Kid “PLEASE, mom can I have a cookie.” Mom “ok, my little much’i'kin.
Can one ’script’ this? How do you ‘lesson-ize’ this, how do you make a curriculum to cover all the major connections/grammar of Chinese grammar, well that’s not easy, it hasn’t been done…it could be done.
It could be done one-podcast lesson at a time.
—–
And yah I wouldn’t want a non-native teacher either b/c I doubt they’d have that natural-lexicon wiring in place.
Just to clarify one idea. I think Ken is important in a ‘podcast’ one-directional listeners are just listening format. If I can get a native-Chinese speaking teacher to teach me in this way, heck no I don’t need Ken!
Oh, one last thing before I go ‘吃饭‘, a nice English and Chinese verb pairing I must say. I think for the sake of ‘the business model’ (and remember Friends and Family for that CPod IPO) there’s no point in taking away the quick hits, singles and successful formats you have going now for your Newbie, Int, Adv shows, but you could go ‘all experimental’ with one other feed, think of a new name. See the response. Watch it grow like a ravenous wild-pig weed!
Intesting subject! At breakfast yesterday my wife said “There’s snow on the roof-tops…”, pointing out that it had been
shirt-sleeve weather the day before. But, I had stopped listening, as I was writing “roof-top” on my white-board excitedly.
“That’s it!” I yelled. “Huh?” she answered. “That’s just like Chinese — adding a seemingly-pointless second word to a first one that would seem to make sense all by itself!” I mean, what’s wrong with “There’s snow on the roofs” ? It just “sounds terrible.” And, there isn’t such a
thing as a “roof-bottom”, or “roof-side” — only a “roof-top”. I wonder how many other word-pairs there are in English that have these secondary helper-words and come as pairs.
As to the order of the colocated words, hmm. In American, at least, color seems to “naturally” come before size. I can refer easily to “the big, white house”, but can barely manage to say “the white, big house.” It’s so … wrong, somehow. Maybe, in our natural selection, when yelling at someone, it was more important to get the SIZE than the COLOR out rapidly? “OOOG, Look, there’s a BIG …” may be more urgent to living another day than “OOOG, look, there’s a GREEN…”
I’m doing a study of keystroke dynamics lately, and it provides a fascinating look into how the mind is racing ahead and organizing what it’s getting set to do next. The exact nature of the errors produced reveals a great deal about what has to be going on, “under the covers.” Handwriting, speech-production, keyboarding … ba … all have a great deal in common. (Look mom, I’m patterning in Chinese!)
For a great read (for the other 3 people who like such), see Rosenbaum, D. A. (2005). The Cinderella of psychology: The neglect of motor control in the science of mental life and behavior. American Psychologist, 60, 308-317. He argues convincingly that there is a great deal we can learn from studying activities where the “brain” meets “the body”, but there seems to be academic bias against even looking. There’s a lot to do with predictive feed-forward loops and giving them the right clues, becuase there isn’t time to actually analyze the stream of sound or keystrokes post hoc. You have to try to establish sort of a phase-lock loop with your communication partner, and then be on the lookout for unexpected turns that tell you to focus some brain energy NOW, or soothing confirmation words that tell you you can steal a few cpu-cycles to go work on something else. Maybe, with all the parallelism, Chinese needs to SLOW DOWN the speech stream sometimes, just as QWERTY keyboards were designed to slow down typewriters, so they wouldn’t jam.
But, the biggest puzzle to me is WHY word X was given FIRST TONE, but word Y was given THIRD TONE. What an amazing, massively parallel computation it took to decide what made speech, overall, somehow “easier”. Is one of the tones associated with more surprising words, or more important words, or pivot words, in general? Is first-tone used to break a sine-wave rhythm? That’s a “co-location” (tone and information content in context) that I’d like to hear more about.
Oh oh, PS, as always. I totally forgot to add today that I just LOVE Ken’s banter, and the Ken and Jennie real live animated chat. It’s magic and it’s captivating and it works! I can only guess exactly as to WHY it works, but it does. It definitely hits a way of learning that is much more like the ease of children taking in knowledge than the totally structured lesson model. Keep it up!
Wade
Hi Wade,
Snow huh…brrr. I’m glad I got my t-shirt weather here.
Very interesting stuff, just like it’s possible to deciper an English word just from the first and last letters “Do yu hve a aple fr me to et? I’ve started reading recently about ‘rhythm’ in Chinese, in word pairs, the first word ALWAYS holds it’s tone. It doesn’t morph to neutral or second or whatever like the back-end word in a Chinese pair. There also is ‘meaning’ imbedded in the ‘beat’ of a sentence and it helps native Chinese-language speakers tell if a sentence is ‘correct’ or not. There is certainly some kind of underlying order and linkages to all this, much like why DOES English put size before color?
By the way, if you have any of your references at some sort of online source it would be really handy, unfortunately there’s no library near my part of the woods.
[Roof-top]
Just to add a little to the ’similarities’ of languages, if you take the English ‘top’ and say “Please top that off.” It becomes a verb. Much like how many Chinese prepositions/co-verbs morph.
[Adso Translation]
http://www.adsotrans.com/new.html
I figure that the various high-frequency words and patterns that you put in your shows are coming from a very organic approach, basically they come up after some of the academics put the dialogues together, from story ideas, off-t he cuff while taping shows, etc. I don’t know, however, if there really is any other possible approach right now.
With big productions like Blues Clues or Seseme Street they have researchers, focus groups, time and resources to build and test shows and scripts. Cpod has us Cpod 迷 to thrash things around a bit. A suggestion, is there a way to take the vocabulary from sources such as HSK, or BLCU texts, 汉语水平，词汇与汉字等级大纲, run them thru a simple ‘practical test’ ie. if Ken knows the words then it’s likely high-frequency, AND get in contact with some others like Adso that may have computers working on exactly this type of thing.
Over time, day by day you could build up tracks where you would even be able to say (and market), completing the Nano-pod lessons covers vocabulary in most daily situations, spans a range of topics that make scanning commonplace signs and text possible, and 80% of HSK level 5 terms.
BTW, today’s intermediate show on tea was really excellent. What in your mind separates it from an “Advanced” show? Minus your occassional English? What was so ‘low-brow’ about the show that makes it intermediate?
Fascinating comments. The issue of levels is becoming greater as we go along. For now, the levels are arbitrary and inconsistent. I’ll take a look at he HSK, and BLCU texts/levels to see if we can use them.
What I’m actually thinking of, however, is a way to allow users to tag the levels, so that this too is ‘democratized’. I’ve discussed it with Hank but it is somewhat tricky from a tech perspective - I didn’t understand a word of what he said about it, so I may revisit it next week.
Wade is asking some heavy duty questions that I certainly can’t answer. (I’m not sure that anyone can right now.) They do point to some fascinating ideas, however. As he points out, the degree of complexity invovled in language is staggering, one of the most complex things in the very universe if you drill down into the science of it!
David, can you be more explicit about why you particularly liked the tea lesson?
The collocation approach is good at helping the intermediate student (like me) learn language in chunks rather than words. It helps increase listening comprehension, spoken fluency, and provides vocabulary practice. When I speak, the shades of meaning that I miss make my new language less effective. Think of the difference between “in-home development” and “in-house development”. And, the collocation approach gets you over the hump of thinking you can translate a string of words in English to Chinese, and vice versa.
The collocation approach, and the banter where Jenny demonstrates similar structures (like, I don’t know what to buy/do/eat/wear) provide good practice.
You guys talk about Ken’s speech, but sometimes Jenny will not choose the best English word. It makes me braver to forge ahead with learning. Everybody makes those mistakes, and they are less frequent as you learn more.
Hi Ken [Why Tea Tasted So Good],
About the Tea lesson. Firstly it was an emotional reaction. I enjoyed the chat and topic. Pace wise I think you and Jenny converse in a more relaxed manner. The pauses are longer. But I don’t think the conversation was ‘un-naturally’ slow or you two said individual words or phrases ’slowed down’. I contrast this with the banter between Liv and Jenny which is at a faster clip. It’s more like hearing two teenagers chatting on the phone: I can’t keep up even in ENGlish!
Interestingly I don’t think it is the speed with which any of you (Ken, Jenny, Liv) say individual words, it’s a combination of a relaxed chat vs. rapid-fire exchange and depth of vocubulary. Over in Jpod I find also that Steve’s Chinese is much like Ken’s in terms of pace, being relaxed, and pausing for reflection and response from Haruku. As I ‘learning’ environment I find this more helpful. This is in contrast to the more ‘exposure’ like environment in Jenny and Liv’s recent casts. I’m very fortunate to be in China for the plethora of reasons, but to be honest, I don’t find that my chatting, sometimes even for an hour or two in Chinese with native speakers, necessarily helps me that much.
As I noted, and Jenny so graciously gave me a pep talk (Thanks!), I found the How Chinese Socialize dialogue much more difficult to follow. After listening to it I tried the brute force method to make it comprehensible to me and tried to transcribe it. It was fascinating to find that I knew about 330 words out of 400 in their banter, that’s over 80%, yet I felt like I had almost no real meaningful comprehension. After seeing Ding’s transcription I realized they weren’t speaking Greek. I reflected on why/how did I get to the point where in the intermediate lessons I can easily ‘hear’ and transcribe word-for-word but can’t in the ‘advanced’ level. I think to Ding, he probably ‘hears’ the advanced level like I do the intermediate.
So I relistened to the Tea cast and the chatting section, here’s some of what Ken said:
大家都喜欢喝
dajia dou xihuan he
而且，这个龙请茶最好了。
erqie, zhei ge longqing cha zui hao le
那么，你自己觉得真么样？
neme, ni ziji juede zhenme yang?
你爸爸那？
ni baba na?
我觉得龙请最好
wo ye juede longqing zui hao.
对，从那里来
dui, cong nali na?
湖南我没去过
hunan wo mei qu guo
Each of these conversational queries and interuptions from Ken are reletively short, less than 10 words. Contrast this with Liv:
Liv:其实我个人认为呢，因为在每个国家人都各数各样的，或许有些人天生有很善于交际，有些人或许天生就是不善于交际。
http://www.chinesepod.com/wiki.....17%2C_2006
She responds to Jenny (all very natural I might add, but DIFFERENT from Ken in intermediate) with a richer set of typical colloqial words AND she expounds on what she just said. I’m not saying this is bad or not right, rather it is what distinguishes them as ‘advanced’. I’m waiting for one of the advanced casts to review an ‘advanced dialogue’ versus their current ’stories’ and see if I find that as helpful as the intermediate shows.
I’m still not sure exactly how it is that I am ‘picking up’ vocabulary because for the most part I do not use flashcards or do many attempts to ‘remember’ words. I find that the words I remember I remember. If that makes sense. With my daily exposure, reading, writing I find that characters are getting easier to remember, it seems that some characters I used to see as complex all of a sudden parts are familiar and rememberable. And hey, I did know 330 words in the advanced show, so I am learning vocab somehow. (I think it will build as my lexis, and the natural Chinese grammar in my mind build up)
I bring this part up about the vocabulary b/c I don’t think that there’s going to be any one approach that really helps everyone magically ‘memorize’ vocabulary. The flip-card contest is a GREAT idea by the way. Even if you had a format like: say new word: give definition: give comparable English: say it in a sentence: say it in a variety of sentences: hear it in the dialogue: review: drill. I mean, of course this works to a certain degree, but really–will we all learn 4,000 words this way?
So I finally get to my important point (at least I think it is), what is it about the Tea show that I liked so much? I just took a long time to say that Ken spoke in simple Chinese, didn’t use a lot of words, I already knew the words anyway, and they followed a pretty typical introduce the topic, dialogue and review format. I believe I liked the show because Ken gave me MORE conversational comprehensible-lexical input. In the course of using words/phrases I already know, he juxtaposed them with Jenny’s new vocabulary, new topic and her natual speech. This improves my conversational lexis and links/collocation. I heard him use phrases and words that aren’t the patterns in my academic texts, he used these patterns to chat, interupt, expand and participate in a conversation with Jenny. THIS I believe helps me to learn conversational Chinese.
Now, although I fully appreciate Ken’s Chinese and skills, I do think it is entirely possible to have say Steve do this, or even Liv. How bout a test with one of these natives in a intermediate show? Just to be frank, I think Liv’s academic background and style may have a much harder time notching down to this level in a natural way versus Steve. I think if you look closely at your chats post-production you will see the patterns emerge, you’ll be able to make an intermediate-plus show just by having the conversational participants notch it up a bit by making their sentences and queries…just that little bit longer. In fact, if you do a little more work post-production you can ‘attach’ review exercises that add more variety and meaning to the examples.
Lest I forget, another plug for THREE people chatting for the intermediate-plus shows!
Lantian aka David
[Tagging the Levels]
Ask Hank if it’s really that hard to add a ‘voting’ engine to the blog/comment application that you are using. Much like Ebay allows you to rate other buyers/sellers. I think it would be fun to see at least two types of ranking, one for ‘likeability’ and as you mentioned ‘level’. I’m sure if you can find some engine/tool out there to do this it will open up a whole lot of if not helpful, at least fun info.
[A Natural Lexis]
This afternoon I was thinking that maybe I am not trying to learn ‘language’ in the traditional sense of the word. In English, learning languages is often associated with things like tough, long hours, repetition, vocabulary, grammar, accent, etc. Maybe I’ve taken the long road thru all this blogging and comments to realize that I’m trying to build up my own little ‘kernal’ [in computer ling], and/or my own little ‘natural conversational lexis’. I just need it to work ‘naturally’ enough to generate relatively correct grammar, syntax and rhythm so that in the years that follow, I can ‘pick-up’ new words/literature/etc. The little-lexis just needs to be rich enough with it’s collocation, parsing, and retrieval for me to express myself in most situations. The lexis just needs to get buried deep enough in my head that it won’t just get forgotten.
[A little lexical Top 500 List]
I’m on a little self-inflicted initiative to gear up my writing a little. Does anyone know of an online list of 500 of the most common SPOKEN Chinese words? I would expect at the top of the list words like 啊，吧，我，干，个。 This is in contrast to other lists that derive from newspapers, writings, etc. And different from HSK lists or elementary school lists. A list of Top 500 Adult Spoken-Chinese Words.
How many unique words have been introduced in the Cpod levels so far anyway? How many words unique to each level? How many words overlap? How many unique verbs? A little data-mining project, seems like a nice task for an intern!
[A little lexical Top 500 List]
I’ve found the list!
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese.....p?Which=MO
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese.....index.html
http://www.yellowbridge.com/ge.....computing/
http://www.yellowbridge.com/la.....cards.html
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/c.....=flashcard
I’ve found the list! Actually it was partly by chance after Andreas gave me a link to a sort of character dictionary. It’s wonderful how this Cpod community can really be ’stronger together than apart’. In my efforts to get to a point where I can enjoy reading Chinese newspapers, magazines, etc., my various approaches have been lukewarm successful. I’ve tried reading kids materials, just scanning, trying to read papers online, reading with popups, reading books, comics, etc. It’s been working in the sense I have absorbed ’some’ words, but lately it’s plateaued.
I find that although I am giving myself plenty of exposure, things weren’t necessarily sticking. I think because my various ‘lists’ were in some ways random. From a learners text, from Cpod, from HSK, etc. So there wasn’t necessarily a lot of chance that that word would ‘pop’ up again in my exposure and get integrated into my lexis. I’m hoping the discovery of this frequency list will really tackle that.
I just wrote down the 25 of the most common word-pairs, I know 15 of them already, 10 seem familiar or I didn’t know. But I am studying them together hoping the familiar helps with the unfamiliar. And it’s quite exciting b/c I already know some of the words I will see again–but because I wasn’t personally that interested in the words, I hadn’t formally in the past tried to remember. Now I will! The words were like developent, economy, government, construct. Words I just know I will ’see’ in the paper tommorrow!
Ken, I agree that this is a very important part of language learning. I don’t think the solution is necessarily a lexical approach to teaching, though. Based on my own experiences teaching EFL, the problem is that most students don’t get enough comprehensible input. The most effective method of addressing this that I’ve come across is extensive reading. I’ve had excellent results using the Oxford Bookworms series, among others.
My students typically read a full ten books at the lowest level of the Bookworms series (the 400 headword level) before progressing to the next (700 headwords). After reading literally hundreds of pages, they’ve encountered the level one headwords so many times and in so many contexts that their understanding is very robust compared to other students at a similar level who haven’t been doing ER.
I realize ER doesn’t necessarily fit into Cpod’s business model, but many of the same principles could be adapted to podcasts. Someday, I hope you can start putting entire stories in podcasts. At the beginning, it would involve collecting or even writing simplified stories that start with a core vocabulary and gradually increase the number of words and complexity of language used. It would provide students with sufficient input to develop a good understanding of which words are used together. A service like that would be a great thing for Chinese students. I don’t think there’s a short-cut to improving students’ lexical abilities. It takes more input- a lot more input.
P.S. I assume you are familiar with Krashen’s work on this subject, but you may find these studies regarding students of Japanese at U. Hawaii more relevant to Chinese learners.
Mark,
I am a long time Krashen fanatic - since the late 80s. In some ways it was his ideas that inspired me to stay in the language training industry. His ‘comprehensible input’ theory is one of the most powerful things I know in TEFL and almost certainly has a basis in reality.
I also agree that ER is absolutely a good thing. I would heartily encourage any language learner to read as much as possible. However, I think we have to look at this in context. I’m not sure that our average (ouch!) CPod user has the time or inclination to do this. Reading Chinese simply is more challenging for an elementary or intermediate learner than English is for a Chinese. (An alphabet would help!) I will, however, take up your suggestion, at least by referencing some reading texts for people who are keen to read - do you have any recommendations?
In the last few years, Krashen hasn’t added that much to the stuff he did betwen 1983-88. The weakness, I find, is that he lacks a systematic output theory. My view is that comprehensible input gets stored somewhere in the brain, more or less in the way he suggests. But it is only through ‘communicative output’ that the conscious mind retrieves that stored inforamtion. This happens where the stored knowledge is appropraiate to the conversation at hand, so lots of practice means lots of retrieval. The more you practice the more you open up those pathways (synapses) and the easier the retrieval becomes. Reading therefore adds to the store of latent knolwedge but only communicative output opens up the gates of fluency (sorry about mixing that metaphor).
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents worth. Practice, is to me, pretty essential and should be balanced with input.
Pssst…. Who’s Mrs Administrator this time? Was that your 2 cents, Ken?
Sorry, Aunty,
Yes it was me.
Ken
Ken, I don’t have any suggestions for extensive reading materials in Chinese. I’ve looked pretty hard and from what I understand, Chinese learners still have far less to work with than Japanese learners do. Especially at the lower levels, there doesn’t seem to be much available. I’ve seen some friends get great results with various kids books, but that’s still too hard for me and I would be considered “advanced” in CPod’s scheme.
My suggestion wasn’t to give extensive reading resources, though. My suggestion was to record short stories with very controlled vocabulary. Maybe the first level could be at 300-500 headwords. The same things that make extensive reading effective should also apply to listening, especially for podcast listeners who can listen more than once. They would have to be interesting though, and that might be the hardest part. I have no idea how commercially viable this idea is, but as a student, I’d find it really useful.
Mark,
I think this makes sense. Stories are a great way to learn a language, and get cultural input as well. Traditional stories with cultural or historical content. We could do this in the internediate or advanced levels. (Actually, I’ll have to convince the production team to write and format stories - I’ll give it a try.)
Drats, for a minute I thought we might have converted Hank into a Ken-alike.
How I would love to read a page of Chinese that I’ve never seen before! Just read it in, not sweat over it.
I said this at school when they gave us German, and they said no, you may only read stuff that’s hard, it’s good for you.
I said this at university Spanish class, and they said no, you need to push yourself, guess the parts you don’t understand and we’ll study them to death later.
For teaching, they were right. At school I learned that you have to be a happy masochist to progress at all, it’s about pride in what you sacrifice, not about what you gain. At uni I learned my beginner level Spanish well, and used every minute constructively because of pushing a little all the time. My teachers could be proud.
They also taught me something else, that reading is bitter medicine, what you do for a work-out. They never allowed me to get enjoyment from seeing writing and instantly knowing what it means. No free rides, you always have to pay by stumbling through some new words, then repent by following up with a grammar lesson. And I was mentally too busy, with all that pushing, to think about it and realise that the main reason for learning a language (in a place where it is not spoken) was forbidden, therefore the effort wasn’t justified… until the holidays, when I discussed with myself and decided to drop it.
(Fortunately I made a mistake on my enrolment and ended up doing another term which was completely different and enjoyable because it re-used what I already knew and let me have the experience of easy enjoyment with the language, but I almost didn’t hang around long enough to get that.)
Now I’m middle aged and I don’t have to answer to anyone’s ideas of what’s good for me, so I’m doing it my way and I’m going to enjoy every minute. I have been granted my own permission to enjoy it. Once I build up enough vocab etc by studying to be able to read a variety of sentences, I’ll be demanding stuff I can read WITHOUT studying, and meeting that demand myself somehow. Again, if I find I won’t ever “just read” I’ll throw it away, I’m not the captive recipient of bitter medicine any more, and at my age if it’s not nice you stop and do something that is nice.
I strongly agree with Ken on the need to communicate to get those neural pathways built, but I also agree with Ken that you need to spend some time taking it in before trying to own it and do anything with it, to listen a while before speaking, and later to read before writing.
Aunty,
There’s no problem whatseover with finding stuff for you to read. By all means, choose some yourself and upload it here if you like. I’d never discourage that. My point was theoretical (in a sense): I don’t see ER as a substutite for communicative output. It is indeed valuable, but if your objective is fluency, then only pradctice will help.
Feel free to make the posts long as you like. I like long posts. They show that someone cares about all of this!
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all meet up to discuss this over tea or beer or something?
Thanks Ken, it sounds like we’re all coming from the same place.
Re meeting up, yes it would be great but I won’t hold my breath. Here’s a more practical idea. You should start selling Ken dolls so we can sit them on top of the monitor and chat to them.
Ken
Its not to early to plan ( early Septemeber isn’t it?) for a 1st anniversary Cpod birthday and perhaps a one day verbal in each other’s face meeting in Shanghai. Maybe with some advance planning you might get people from who knows Pudong on Subway Line 2 or Jubei or USA or Europe or Australia or other places.
Mike in Jubei