LESSONS ON SEMILOQUENCY
On acceptance
Dec 11, 02:10 pm
It’s been 3+ months studying Mandarin in university for me and conclusions are already forming themselves. There’s a bunch of things to say about group size, teaching (and learning) methods, progress speed etc, but there is one single biggest thing that sticks out. I’ve been following not only my own but also my fellow students’ progress and I’ve been observing the things they most have trouble with.
There are things you have to work hard for, for example pronunciation, tones, recognising characters and other such things that do not come overnight. These things need to be trained and it takes time. There are also things that require not as much training and effort, but concious attention, for example the habit of carrying over sentence structures from another language. You still think in your native tongue and merely translate the sentences instead of rephrasing them in your target language and while you might get the point across, it sounds weird. Getting rid of that is by no means easy task, but it will eventually come.
And then there are things that hinder our progress but which do not require drilling to get rid of but which instead depend on your attitude and disposition. One of those things is constant questioning. We’re all familiar with that, I suppose. We’ve all been doing that in the beggining. To learn another language is to learn to think differently. SVO vs SOV. Genders. Definite/indefinite articles. Dual in addition to singular and plural. Suddenly there are so many things you have to care for that you did not need to before. Naturally the first reaction is to question everything. Why is it this way? Why can’t it be otherwise? This doesn’t make any sense! How can you understand Arabic texts without vowels? What do you mean you can omit personal pronouns in Japanese, how do I know who is doing what to whom?
There are two types of such questioning. I’ve been guilty of both, therefore I know. First one is sincere wondering. You’re asking how can language work when it misses such and such things but at the same time requires you to use needless things such as this or that. This sort of questioning wants to reveal the logic behind language features. Okay, If I have to omit that, how do I get my point across? Are there additional means to that? We all want new language to make sense so that we could organise it better in our little brains. If old logic doesn’t do much good, which is the new logic?
Second type if questioning grows from the first, but slyly turns into refusal to accept strange features of your target language. You question not out of curiosity but out of resistance to change your way of thinking. It often becomes the way to express your frustration with things that are foreign to you. It ceases to be curiosity or the quest for logic, it becomes an act of rebellion. Chinese has no pluaral except in some rare cases? But I want my plurals everyhwere, I have them in English!
Stop it. Stop it now. It’s of no use. You can’t bend foreign language to suit your needs. You can’t change the shape or size of the door you want to enter. You have to change your size or shape to enter.
I see this over and over again. But why Mandarin has measure words? It’s stupid and unnecessary! It might be stupid and unnecessary, but it’s the way it is. Just accept it and carry on. Why is this road uneven and riddled with potholes? It really doesn’t matter, dear, it’s just the way it is. You want to stand there bemoaning or you want to get to your destination before dark? Then get moving!
This is no small thing. I’ve felt it myself and I see it clearly on some of our fellow students. They sort of get tangled in the web of their own dissatisfactions and mental nonacceptances and while they’re actively trying to find an answer, the rest of the program moves on and they miss important parts.
Do not question, just move along. When there are millions of people using that language as their primary language you can bet on it that it will all work out in the end. Logical internal structures will reveal themselves and sense will appear where there previously was none.
Just accept and move on.
Being tone deaf
Sep 27, 07:50 pm
Apparently I’m tone deaf. At least it feels that way. I’m seemingly unable to distinguish between 2nd and 4th tone in Mandarin. 3rd tone, which seemingly puzzles many Mandarin learners I have generally no problem with, but 2nd and 4th really sound the same for me. Looks like as soon as my ear catches the high tone — be it going up or coming down — it hurries to pass “ready!” signal to my brain and shuts itself off. All I can hear is that there’s a high point in the syllable but whether it is going up or down, I fail to register. That is infuriating. So far I have no problems with actual undestanding but as soon as it comes doing listening drills and circling the right tone in workbook I’m all helpless and doing guesswork. Again, so far I’m able to learn the word and it’s pronunciation, but when I have to write pinyin for it, I just can’t. For any given sentence I’d rather write hanzi ten times over than pinyin once.
Today I discussed it with our teacher and she advised to take some phrases or names for which I do know how 2nd and 4th tones sound like and compare them to the words I hear. When it is difficult to hear tones in isolated words it may help to establish certain tone reference phrases which could serve as a meter of some sort. I’ll give it a try, we’ll see how it turns out.
Japanese vs Mandarin
Jun 19, 08:33 pm
I’ve been silent for past months for several reasons, one of them being that I took up Mandarin. Not wanting to post anything before I’ve had time to play with for some time I’ve restrained from posting anything related to it. It’s been exactly two months when I started with Mandarin and I’ve had time to reflect on my first impressions and experiences. I’m probably not able to summarize it all here today but I do have several observations that stand out the most.
Hanzi/kanji needs time
I admit that so far I’m utter and complete failure when it comes to Japanese. I’ve been tinkering with it on and off for several years but I still literally can’t make heads or tails of a children books. I’m sure this is a feeling not entirely unfamiliar to many Japanese learners, to many more than those willing to admit it. However, all this glorious multi-year failing has not been totally without its benefits, as I’ve discovered.
Apparently, even if I myself haven’t given it much thought, I’ve soaked up enough familiarity with kanji that I now find recognizing hanzi much easier than I thought I could. By no means am I particularily good with it, but compared to my fellow students who have had no previous experience with hanzi or kanji I find myself to be clearly on next level. It didn’t feel that way at all when I was struggling with Japanese but I’m somewhat surprised about the difference compared to those who have no previous knowledge at all. My reproduction rate even with unfamiliar hanzi is so much better, no doubt thanks to having learned to recognize radicals and their combinations.
Looking my fellow students struggling to remember and to reproduce hanzi line by line instead of by radicals I only now really appreciate the time that one has to put into familiarizing oneself with hanzi/kanji. I’ve never thought much of it, I held it as another obvious truth that gets stated over and over agin without particular reason. I can appreciate it now, having witnessed it at work in my own learning process. Some things need certain amount of time. Nine wives can’t give birth in one month. Without me myself noticing I managed to suffer through my hanzi pregnancy during the time spent with Japanese. Good.
Grammar
As much as it pains me to say it, apparently I’m not particularily gifted when it comes to languages. Japanese grammar is supposed to be simple, but for some reason it still confuses the heck out of me. Word order is random and/or completely illogical. Particle system is not simple as it’s made to be. Direction of action is confusing. くれる, あげる, who did what to whom? I don’t think I ever got to the point when I understood the nuances of こと or という. Not that Mandarin is walk in the park but at least low level grammar makes so much sense compared to Japanese that it’s not even funny. They say that the further you advance the more difficult Mandarin grammar becomes and it very well may be so, but I can’t shake the feeling that entry threshold is lower with Mandarin than it is with Japanese.
Reading Japanese is much like reading German. I have to read the sentence all the way to the end before I can start translating it because verb is at the end and.
Each language has it’s own gotchas, and I’m guessing Mandarin just has them further down the road. I remember when starting with Spanish I spent massive amounts of brain power to make sense of words which had pronouns attached to them. El ladrón está robandoselo. or ¡Cómpremelas! just didn’t make sense and I had trouble extracting the words to look up in dictionary. After a while I got used to it.
Maybe it’s just the way my brain is wired, but Mandarin sentences make much more sense to me than Japanese.
Sentence parsing
This is another one of those things that I didn’t really think of before, but which is plain obvious now that I compare it with Japanese. The horrors of parsing Japanese sentences… I mean, just to extract the words takes ungodly amount of time. And the fact that a word can be written with kana or kanji or a combination of both doesn’t really help. Just parsing the sentence to find word boundaries is hard for beginner. For some reason I find reading Mandarin sentences much easier, though it’d seem counterintuitive at first. After all, kana breaks the endless forest of kanji into more manageable pieces, right? Well, no. Kana becomes a stumbling block on its own. There is 友達 and there is 友だち and, whaddayaknow, there’s also a ともだち! And then there’s 茶飲み友達 with み in the middle of two kanji, but, really not being in the middle but belongin to one of them. This is crazy. Little parsing engine in my brain screeches to a halt every time I encounter some of that.
In Mandarin at least I can stay within one coherent system throughout. Although Mandarin phonetic representation of foreign names is a hack at best and katakana actually makes sense for what it’s used. Which brings me to last point.
Readings
おんよみ and くんよみ, Chinese and Japanese readings are confusing to say the least. Encountering familiar kanji within unfamiliar word does not allow me to spell it out unless I know which way it’s supposed to be read. In Mandarin I can make educated guess how a compound word might sound but not so in Japanese, unless I have much experience under my belt. Which I unfortunately do not yet have. This is probably the most frustrating thing in Japanese for me, not being able to speak even if I know the kanji.
These are my first thoughts on comparison of Mandarin and Japanese from relative beginner’s standpoint. I’m sure with more experience in either language I might have different opinion but alas, I am where I am currently. I’ll go ahead with Mandarin and see where it takes me. Will report back when I reach a breakpoint of some sorts.
Japanese makes anything else look easy, even Mandarin.
On the importance of ascenders and descenders
May 29, 05:09 pm
Quite some time ago I wrote about the effort of switching. I’ve noticed that compared to latin alphabet it takes me a notch more effort to pick up reading speed in cyrillic. Each time I pick up cyrillic text my brain needs time to adjust. Yesterday I picked up last month’s copy of Russian version of GEO, mainly because it featured an article about China which seemed interesting. While I was browsing through the magazine I suddenly realized what exactly was it that gave my brain trouble for first 10 minutes or so.
Printed Russian has extremely few ascenders and descenders. Now, for those who are not familiar with those typographic terms I’ll borrow an example illustration from Wikipedia.
Ascenders are those parts of the letters that ascend above mean line and descenders are those parts that descend below baseline. Latin alphabet has fair share of letters which either ascend or descend. Cyrillic does not. Have a look at typical sample of latin text and typical sample of cyrillic text.
Ascenders and descenders are colored red. There are 25 ascenders and 8 descenders for that English sentence and total of 2 ascenders and 2 descenders (for all practical purposes smallish serifs on д and щ do not count) for Russian text. That’s a huge difference. Some theories of text recognition speculate that the unique shape of a word plays a part in quick word recognition. That may be the reason that CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF LONG PASSAGES OF ALL CAPS TEXT IS NOT EASIER TO READ, BUT RATHER THE OPPOSITE, THEY ARE HARDER AND SLOWER TO READ BECAUSE ALL WORDS LOOK LIKE SAME SHAPED BLOCKS INSTEAD OF EACH HAVING A UNIQUE SHAPE. Though there have been studies which show that it’s all just a matter of practice and that given sufficent practice we’d all be up to our normal reading speeds even with all uppercase texts.
Anyhoo, if we outline those two lines of text, the following pattern emerges.
I’m not a scientist and I can not back this up with credible research papers but I do feel that this plays an important role in my text acquisition. I’ve become used to having ascenders and descenders as markers and distinctive patterns within lines and I use those to jump back and forth in text along with line ending pattern and spacing pattern. With cyrillic text the patterns are different and my eyes need different markers. For example cyrillic й, ж and ф provide good visual clues. But those are different from what I’ve become accustomed to so no wonder my brains needs time to work out new strategy every time I read cyrillic. Perhaps I could shorten this preparatory time with reading often enough so that it stays active all the time? Perhaps I should.
Japanese learning tools for Android
Apr 4, 01:47 am
After I posted my thoughts on Ankidroid few days ago I figured I might as well write about the tools I use to meddle with and learn Japanese on my Android phone. Following apps may not be the best there are, but these are the ones I’ve decided on upon trying out several alternatives.
1. Input: OpenWnn plus
Japanese input on Android is pretty easy, there are several keyboards to choose from. Two one of the most popular seem to be OpenWnn plus and Simeji. I’ve tried both, but strongly prefer OpenWnn plus because of one small, but incredibly important detail. Have a look.
Now, place your finger on the あ on either keyboard. See what I mean?
Both give hanabi-style kana selection, but there is one thing that OpenWnn does better than Simeji and that is the placement of selection popup. Simeji gives the popup right under the finger on the keyboard which would seem logical and natural, only except the fact that when you do that your finger blocks some of the entries. When using my thumb, for example, it usually blocks the bottom syllable completely. It presents no problem when you have memorized all the positions, but when you have not, it is annoying. OpenWnn plus thoughtfully moves the selection up enough so that no entries are blocked by your hand.
2. Dictionary: Aedict, JED, ColorDict
I currently have three dictionary apps installed. Arguably the easiest to use is Aedict. As soon as I start the app, the cursor is placed in the search box and keyboard pops up. Just type away. Just the way it should be. For quick lookup it is perfect. It also has kanji lookup either by drawing recognition, SKIP or by radicals. Drawing recognition is good at least for my drawings and I find it to give more accurate results than Kanji recognition app. SKIP works as it is supposed to, but lookup by radicals is weak. Here’s the comparison with JED.
The problem becomes apparent immediately. Aedict radical lookup doesn’t gray out nonexistant combinations while JED does. JED version helps you to avoid mistakes narrowing the selection down with each radical. But just simple word lookup with JED is more cumbersome when you just want to look up odd word now and then. From the main screen you have to first choose the type of lookup (all, tags, expressions, kanji, etc) and then activate the search box and only then you can starty typing. With Aedict you’d have your first results already by then. Aedict has also neat possibility to keep its icon available in notification area, thus giving it faster access from any screen.
Third relevant dictionary app I have is ColorDict. Its not srtictly a Japanese dictionary, it’s a general front-end for many dictionaries, supporting for example StarDict dictionaries. It features very quick lookup and it gives matches from all installed dictionaries. For example, if I have Japanese, German and Spanish dictionaries installed then looking up the word “car” gives simulataneous matches from all my installed dictionaries, resulting in displaying 車, Wagen and coche all on the same page. Not very practical, because Japanese jmdict-ja-en doesn’t seem to give me any background or analysis on the words but it’s great fun at times.
3. Drawing recognition: Aedict, Kanji Recognizer
Aedict I already mentioned, but for cases it doesn’t just seem to get what I’m trying to draw I also keep disappointingly generically named Kanji Recognizer around. It has several different recognition models to choose from, some giving you more speed at the expense of accuracy, suited more for slower devices, others are slower, but more accurate. Aedict has the ability to show sample sentences which contain the kanji you just looked up, but Kanji Recognizer can provide you with JIS code, Unicode number, frequency rank and other possibly useful information
That’s what I currently use. If there are any better apps out there do let me know.
Choosing the right tools
Apr 2, 12:26 am
Right then. About two weeks ago I had a revelation about my own learning process. I’ve never understood what’s the big fuss over Anki. I’ve tried it before but neve really got into it for reasons I could never put my finger on. It just didn’t work and I didn’t stop to reflect why doesn’t it work. So I wrote it off as non-working solution for me. Flashcards are not for me, I thought.
Fast forward couple of years. I’m still struggling with my basic Japanese. Reading bilingual texts doesn’t work. Heisig doesn’t really work. Just learning Kanji doesn’t work. It’s frustating, because nothing seems to stick. And then, one day, just out of boredom I downloaded Anki for my Android phone, downloaded Core 2000 Japanese pack and decided to give it a try. Next day and the day after I repeated it, devoted about an hour of studying on my phone. And it worked. It actually worked! I was retaining new kanji with the method I’ve never thought would work for me.
Now, I’ve been thinking, what was it this time that made it work compared to other times when it didn’t and left me frustrated. Then I realised that it was not the method, it was the tool I was using. Though I love computers like any other geek out there, I find it uncomfortable and boring to sit still at my desk, flipping cards with mouse. I’ve even tried flashcards on my laptop before, slouching comfortably on my couch. Still wasn’t right. But to hold a phone and to lie down on bed in whichever position I choose and being able to flip through cards with the flick of the finger is something totally different. It takes the comfort to whole new level. This way I actually feel that I can concentrate on learning process instead of fiddling with gadgets.
Ankidroid on my phone makes the technology stand back and lets the process itself emerge to foreground. And that’s what counts. The same method that I used to despise started magically working when I chose the right tool for it. It hasn’t made me an expert overnight, but it at last started giving me the progress I was unable to achieve before.
Books over newspapers
Feb 24, 12:50 am
I’ve been working on my Spanish comprehension for a while now and I’ve made great strides, at least I myself feel that way. One thing that I’ve been recently thinking about how the text length affects the comprehension and learning rate.
One would certainly think that reading daily news would be much easier than reading longer topcical texts, but alas, it seems not to be the case. While I’m currently reading relatively effortlessly some 70% of daily newspaper texts, the remaining 30% still looks like greek to me. I constantly encounter words and constructs I’ve not seen before and since news articles are relatively short, there is no repetition or doubling in slightly differnet context. So when an 400 word article contains, say, 10 unknown words, these words tend to be precisely such words that occur only once in the article. In the next article which covers different topic there’s different set of unkown words and yet again they do not repeat. If those happen to be the key words, I might actually miss the point or at least some important nuances. I’m pretty good at guessing the meaning, provided I have the repetition. Average newspaper article does not provide that, leaving me to grab for the dictionary. It’s frustrating.
Longer texts, such as books, on the other hand, may seem initially overwhelming, but may actually provide greater rate of reptition. Unknown words may very well pop up again few pages later either hinting at the meaning by offering slightly different context or, when I’ve looked them up previously, just reinforce what I’ve learned.
This seems counter-intuitive, but the higher rate of unknown words is offset by their higher rate of repetition. I’ll certainly keep this in mind for my next language project.
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