A lexical focus concerns words, and word combinations (or chunks), rather than grammar. Let’s go a little deeper into this and look at two characteristics of ‘chunking’ (in the form of phrases, collocations, etc). After that I want to say something about grammar.
- Most of the expressions we use on a daily basis are ‘fixed’. In English, we could say, “a tall boy“, and we could talk about “a tall building“, or a “high building“. However, we would never say “a high boy“. (By contrast, we use the same adjective in Mandarin ‘gau’ to denote anything tall - the conventions are different, but still fixed.) Nor do many fixed expressions work in reverse: we could use the term “deep trouble“, but we would not say its opposite, “shallow trouble”. Again, if someone were to talk about ‘weapons of massive destruction” in otherwise perfect English, for example, we’d know he was not a native English speaker. (Even the tiniest of mistakes gives the game away, but it is the lexis, not the grammar that does this.)
- Most expressions are not rule governed. All the common lexical combinations are arbitrary, that is, they are not governed by grammar rules. Take the expression “in broad daylight“. There are many possible ways we could express this, such as ‘in full daylight’, or, ‘in bright daylight’, etc, but we don’t. We say ‘broad daylight’ because that is the convention. Another example: “A heavy smoker.” Why don’t we say ‘big smoker’, or ’strong smoker‘? Actually, I don’t know why. ‘Heavy’ simply collocates with ’smoker’. It just does. And in English, we “commit a crime“. In many other languages they just “do” a crime’, or ‘make a crime’, but those are just their own conventions. Grammar cannot explain why these items behave as they do.
Such things can make difficult to learn fluency in a second language. There are, however, solutions, and we’ve already been using them on CPod. From the beginning, we wanted to offer lots of patterns (rich in ‘lexical density’) without making the reasons explicit. Now I ‘d like to explore it a bit more explicitly with those of you who may be interested.
The issue, for me, is not the science at the bottom of all of this. (I don’t have the brains for that.) Instead, it is the question of how to enable the most efficient ways of acquiring these items for our learners. I’ll go into this a bit more over the coming days. Our aim here, is and remains, to get you speaking Mandarin in the most natural and fluent way possible.
I\’ve noticed that almost all of Chinese t.v. has been sub-titled (In Chinese). I wish someone could do a huge capture, parse out the frequency of individual words, word-pairs, word phrases and then list it out for us. Maybe some of your Chinese staff could find this on the internet, transcripts of \’dialogue\’ t.v. shows, load that into a database and run some reports. Hmm…that\’s not so hard actually, maybe I\’ll try this myself! But I\’ll have to pull news/articles of the net, hmm..maybe I can lift some text of Chinese blogs.?… Hey, you have a bank of all the text of your shows right? btw Ken, you are such a tease. 不要逗大家！快点说出来！ Reveal all to us now!!!
Well put! After a couple years of study - I’ve found this to be the most challenging aspect of learning new vocabulary and improving my speaking skills. My Chinese teacher often asks me if Chinese grammer is “hard” - and I tell her “Not really, it’s the different usage of words that is hard.” For example, in Chinese you “開” (kai1) a car, a light, and a door. In English, we “drive” a car, “turn on” a light, and “open” a door. When we learn a new noun in Chinese, learning how to describe it is important - if we want to say “he has a lot of experience” do we say 經驗很大 (jing1yan4 hen3 da4), 很多 (hen3 duo1), 很高 (hen3 gao1), or 很胖 (hen3 pang4)? Unless the text we’re studying has relevant and exhaustive examples (never the case) - we’re left guessing..
I’m excited to hear CPod is going to address this issue.
P.S. The advanced lesson was great, and I think it’s been said before (and you guys are probably way ahead on this), but my one suggestion would be to have various levels of advanced - similar to how you have low/high intermediate lessons - the low advanced picking up where high intermediate leaves off all the way to political speeches, newspaper articles, etc.
I wonder if after having been exposed to the words in your casts, hence making them meaningful, if I could then drop each sentence into an iPod shuffle, and just have them shuffling and me listening, would it tune my mind? Like an artificial mom babbling to me all day building up my lexis. (This is in contrast to me just listening to t.v. all day b/c so much of it is ‘unmeaningful’ to me at this stage)
I really wish your Flash/audio examples in the Dialogue Transcript was somehow downloadable. Would you be open to making a collection of the audio examples in a supplemental mp3 available on that tab? I like the review of the hanzi online, but being portable would sure help me get away from this pc a little more. And it would help me retain the vocab for listening and speaking. And an mp3 file there might entice a lot of poddies over to the learnnning center!
Hi Pat,
Yah I can still remember my friend chuckling at me, we can in Chinese ‘drive’ a car “开车” at some point my mind figured it was okay to also ‘drive’ a bike “开自行车“….at least she said I was ‘cute’ when I said it, now I know in English and Chinese we must all ‘RIDE’ a bike “骑自行车’。
Wow, this sounds really cool! I look forward to seeing how this lexical approach is explored in the Lessons. Studying the frequency between collocated words and phrases I think would be a great tool. Connect that to specific topics, events and discussions. This is something to be excited about, it coul help us become more natural speakers.
That\’s interesting Lantian. I was just reading those characters in Hanzibar and it says: 开 [kaī] /open/operate (vehicle)/start/ and 骑 [qí] /to ride (an animal or bike)/to sit astride/
BTW Lantian, it’s quite easy to record those audio example using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), you set it recording, switching to Chinesepod play sample in whatever order you like, and it records as you hear it. Then you save it as an mp3, job done.
Looking at these comments about the types of difficulties at the advanced stages — short boys, driven bicycles, broad darkness, and other linguistic crime-making — it would seem to me* that at your stage understanding spoken Chinese would be much easier than speaking it. If someone prattles on about driving/running/operating her bicycle, I have no doubt about her meaning, even the shade of meaning. If I heard it in Chinese and the word wasn’t the one I’d have picked, I’d still understand exactly. Choosing the right word myself would be monstrously more difficult, because of all that stuff that Ken has raised. Isn’t this what the lexical approach is telling us? Isn’t it what you are all strongly agreeing with?
If so, then some of you might want to reconsider your desire for difficult listening alone. Sure, if you think you need it then you must need it, but there is’ this other skill that’s lagging behind, isn’t it? And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do about it on your own.
It seems to me that much guided practice is required, with native feedback, to get around the difficulty of chunking the right words from the many you already have available, for a specific sentence and context. Of course, before you can do that practice, you need to learn the patterns along with their available contexts and scope of variation. Podcasts with commentary will be good for that preparation.
If you’re one of the many who’ve said they’re hanging out for practice listening to difficult everyday speech, it might help to realise that these tasks are (if ‘m correct) two quite different skills and probably need different learning strategies, if not total separation.
* This is merely the view of a pre-beginner, fascinated by the pedagogy and the advanced learners’ perceptions.
Hi Sue,
I’d consider myself a false-intermediate Chinese-language student. By this I think I have a very toddler like intutive grasp of the lexicon/grammer/lexis but this ‘intuition’ makes me sound much more fluent than a lot of ‘academic’ advanced students, however, my ‘academic’ vocab is quite small. As I’m in China I get the kind of exposure that the latest two podcasts give all the time, and to be honest I don’t think I learn very much that way in terms of a ratio to effort/time: retention/output. But it’s been very hard to argue this point. Seems to me you’re one of the few who would agree. So stick around!
Today, Jenny wrote in the Tea podcast comments: 谢谢大家的厚爱！/xie4 xie4 da4 jia1 de hou4 ai4!/Thank you for your ‘thick’ love!
“THICK” love. Hou4 as I first learned it, I use for a sentence like a ‘thick bag’, a thick shirt. But after seeing Jenny’s usuage I see that it also carries a lexical relation to the meanings of deep and profound. So although this sounds VERY funny and just joke target-rich in English, it must sound good to a Chinese ear. And since Jenny isn’t as sarcastic as the rest of us Cpod 迷 I’m assuming it sounds quite sincere and nice to Chinese. hou4 hou4 hou4 厚爱。
Hmmm interesting.
A strategy I used to learn Spanish and German sort of relied on a similar learning pattern to Chinesepod while also combining a some what brute force lexical approach is as follows.
1. Get hold of a whole TV series in the target language.
2. Get hold of the transcripts in the actual language spoken.
3. Watch the First Episode with no assistance for understanding what is being said.
4. Sit down with the transcript and go through it translating what you don’t know and “wordbanking” it.
5. Watch the TV show again with the transcript next to you.
6. if you fail to understand a word pause and look up the meaning and mark the fact that you didn’t understand it.
7. Go back to the transcript focus on words that were marked as unlearnt.
8. Move on to the next episode.. Do this up until about 4 eps then go back to the first ep with your transcript hopefully you won’t be marking as many words as unlearnt.
This technique takes a lot of mental stamina as it is VERY hard to sit through even 10 minutes of a TV show you don’t understand.
The technique can also be adapted to any level beginner? Watch Kids shows, high intermediate watch soap operas or what ever. Advanced try watching a documentary or a political debate show (political debate transcripts are usually easy to get your hands on though you may have to reach over to Taiwan to actually find this content).
The way this relates back to the lexical approach is the way that you only learn words in a context for use. the way the “high boy” sort of mistake happens is from learning two words separate of context. Unfortunately many text books teach in this context less fashion. You learn the vocab words then learn to apply them.
Unfortunately i haven’t been able to put together the resources i need to follow this approach in Chinese. At my current level i need access to a TV show aimed at 10 year olds and the transcripts.
All this lexical learning is well and good, but I always find that it leaves something to be desired when it comes to creating your own sentences. I feel that the lexical learning style is exactly the cause of the “high boy” / “drive a bike” problem. We learn adj + noun or verb + obj, in the lexical style and try to venture out “on our own” and construct new phrases, which leave something to be desired. I think this is why I know people who still try to say “wo shi hen hao.” (我是很好) after two years of Chinese. They don’t understand that “hen” is acting like a copula, thus making shi unnecessary. Never did these students say “I never heard the phrase ‘wo hen hao’ repeated enough for me to know that it means ‘I’m fine.’”. What they do say is, “But I want to say ‘I am good.’ so I feel that I should say ‘wo shi hen hao’ in Chinese.”
I have never found enough challenging grammar to study in Chinese nor Japanese. But, challenges and explanations abound in my English linguistics class. We study the rules of why you can’t say “high boy” and “drive a bike” in English. Why is there no such analytical evidence of Chinese grammar presented to students who are studying as Chinese as a second language? Even some Japanese exchange students at my university campus comment on my linguistics class, “Oh yeah, we studied that in Japan.” Meaning, they
studied English linguistics at an American college level in Japan.
Here’s a simple example to demonstrate the complete lack of analytical Chinese grammar presented to the student who studies it as a second language:
“I don’t have time to sleep.”
“我没有时间睡觉”
In English I can easily diagram the sentence and know that I’m describing the noun time with a complimentary infinitive verb phrase of “to sleep.” And I can make corollary sentences; “I don’t have time to eat”, “I don’t have time to read”, etc… But in Chinese, we are presented with no rule that says, Hey, you’re actually modifying the noun, 时间, with a verb phrase 睡觉. Thus, we are left to guess as to what we are doing when we make the corollary phrases “time to eat” and “time to read”.
I want more analytic rules about grammar and syntax. I can listen and repeat what other people say with ease, but that doesn’t necessarily help my form new sentences, or even read new material that I haven’t encountered before. I feel that lexical learning styles can only help you learn introductory material. I would rather make a mistake that is the equivalent of “weapons of massive destruction” than “massive, destructive weapons” in a foreign language. I hope I expressed myself clearly, I’m not trying to rock the boat, just trying to present a minority view of people who feel like 4 years of a foreign language ends up being for years of memorizing a travel phrase book with blanks for the nouns.
Hi Mark,
I totally understand your thoughts on there being a lack of good materials on Chinese grammar. I have the BLCU texts, and at the intermediate levels they have almost no ‘grammar’ explanations anymore, it’s just how to use some set phrases or some particular particle, etc. I also agree that besides there being very little good work in this regard, even at the basic levels the grammar explanations are quite poor if even correct. There is one book however which I find does cover things quite comprehensively, the books by Yip Po-Ching. Have you seen them? In the latter parts of his book Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar he even delves into how positioning, rhythm and other factors can contribute to style and nuance in a sentence. I think it’s also maybe one of the only books that actually has proper, correct and sophisticated English that a native-English speaker can appreciate and learn from. Likely this is because he teamed up with another professor, Don Rimmington. I find that, in contrast, the English explanations in my BLCU texts are closer to being gibberish than helpful.
I approach my Chinese learning from various points, ie. grammar, or listening aka Chinesepod, holistic, etc. Pretty much anything to keep me engaged. Although I at times hope/am waiting for Cpod to raise their level in the grammar-based sections I also realize that they are likely struggling with, how shall I say this.., a poor-base in regards to people, academics, and materials for Chinese grammar as a discipline. On the other hand, if Ken sticks to his guns, his lexical-approach and podcasts can really break ground for learning via listening, context, and quality content.
It’s refreshing to see your remarks Mark. I do think also that Ken does have more in mind than just the ‘lexical’ approach being a way to memorize words or phrases. I think that the hope is that this approach also naturally builds an intuitive grammar. One that would not necessarily ‘tell’ a person that ’shi’ is not necessary, but one that would make one say, hey that sounds wrong. Much like my English internal grammar does. I couldn’t tell you what a past-participle was if you handed me $100.
Anyway, the reason I dropped back in one this thread is that lately I’ve taken to doing an ‘intensive’ on my vocab, trying to get myself out of a rut/plateau I’m in. Since my goal is to one day be able to be able to read Chinese materials with the same sort of cavelier attitude I do English, I took a re-look at the vocab I know and don’t know.
I’ve been using all the latest, greatest tools, pop-up pinyin, reading papers online (trying too), reading simple materials, etc. etc..but it hasn’t felt like I was making that much progress. By chance, although I probably was looking for it, another Cpodster mentioned a site which indirectly pointed me towards research which collated the most frequently used Chinese words and bigrams (word-pairs). I am finding this list extremely fascinating.
Here’s why. If the key to all this learning and a rich vocabulary is seeing words over time, and in a meaningful way, and with a frequency that allows retention, I realized that a lot of the words in my texts, do NOT necessarily readily show up in the real world and real-world materials around me. How do I know this? Well, because I’m here in China, and each time I go out, pick up a newpaper, watch t.v., I DON’T recognize words. I don’t think it’s me, usually if I study a word–I’ll notice it later. But if it doesn’t pop up, well after a while I forget it. No way around that, that’s just memory. Right?
So in this list I found that inbetween the words that I DO know, are all these words I don’t know! How can that be? Especially if it’s based on frequency. I mean I’ve been studying texts from beginner level and then progressively upwards, shouldn’t they have been words based on frequency?? Well they’re not! This list on the other hand, isn’t being generated from my BLCU texts, or even Cpod words for that matter. Now I’m sure the BLCU profs were well intentioned and tried to use the words they thought were most frequent or useful, but they’re really not. It’s probably a compiling based on the order that hanzi are presented in elementary school, or some other such listing.
In contrast, when I wrote down some words in the list at the point where I started to not fully recognize words, WELL that evening when I stepped out the door, I saw those words! Yeeeha! So I figured a nice random goal for me would be to try to learn 1000 of the most frequent words and word pairs. (Well, actually it’s not so random, this level should allow me to recognize greater than 85% of the words likely to appear in the newspaper) From about 1-400 I already now pretty well. Above that it get’s iffy. I’m actually now working backwards as I figure it should then get ‘easier’ as I go. Today I was shocked to see this order in the list:
934 睛
935 饭
936 额
What this tells me is that if I randomly picked up a newspaper today, I am more likely or just about as likely to see those two characters before and after fan/to eat. Problem is I haven’t learned those two words yet, but I thought ‘fan’ was such a beginner word?!!! Well to me beginner means most common/high-frequency. So this tells me my texts are sure failing me b/c there were a hecka lotta other words I could’ve learned besides ‘fan’. (well it’s ok, since I do go out to eat a lot). I think this is part of the ‘jump’ or ‘gap’ that makes transitioning to a ‘native-like’ level so hard, it’s the learning materials.
I wonder if there is a list of 1000 most commonly ’spoken’ words? Based on real sampling, ie. a researcher recording thousands of hours, transcribing and making the list.
PATTERNS AND BLOCKING - I just wrote a lot in the comments on copying, hey I was on a mental role …all downhill
http://www.chinesepod.com/podc.....ng-copies/
My main idea was that teaching needs to do more with patterns, and then examples that ‘block’ out the irregulars.
Anyone get what I’m saying?
Hey Henning, how’s the reading on “The Language Instinct”, you know Pinker has another one of “Words” …it’s got me thinking, I’ve been making my learning tougher than it needs to be!