Jonny学中文 (Jonny Learns Chinese)

Jonny Reads Chinese

My wife has told me that my recent blog posts make it sound like I'm not very motivated to learn Chinese so I've decided I'm not going to blog about Chinese class any more.

The class has actually been better in the last few weeks as it feels like we've picked up the pace a little, though I'm still only really learning a few bits of vocabulary in each lesson.

In the last few weeks I've finished the Michel Thomas course, which I would very highly recommend (and I'll write another blog post on it soon) and I've started Assimil Chinese with Ease which I'm moving through very quickly because a lot of the early stuff I already know. I'll write a full post about Assimil soon too.

On Sunday I was on a train without internet access so I tried my hand at writing a blog post in Chinese. My wife has looked at it and pointed out a number of problems but I'll post the full thing as I originally wrote it and post her corrected version separately, it'll be interesting to look back on it in the future.

This week we spent most of the time practicing what we learned last week, learned titles (先生/Mr and 太太/Mrs), and learned how to talk about occupations (e.g. 医生/Doctor, 经理/Manager, 老师/Teacher).

The occupation names are new to me but really I've been learning a lot more this week following the Michel Thomas audiobook and the Chinese Pod podcasts (which I'll write more about soon).

This week we learned basic introductions. E.g.

你姓什么？

你叫什么名字？

我叫Jonny

我姓Scott

你贵姓？

We also learned to use 呢 (e.g. 你呢 = and you?), 也 (e.g. 我也很好 = I'm also good), learned the words for mam (妈妈) and dad (爸爸), and learned some common Chinese surnames (李, 王, etc.)

This week we spent most of the class reviewing the things we learned last week (numbers and tones).

At one point, we split the class into two teams and each team had someone stand at the front. Every other member of the team had to shout out two numbers in Chinese between 1 and 999 (e.g. 二百六十八). The person at the front then had to write the number on the board in arabic numerals.

I stood at the front for my team, and it was difficult. A lot more difficult than I thought it'd be actually. Some of it was down to pronunciation difficulties (a common one I heard was 九 pronounced like 句) and some of it down to my brain not working fast enough in Chinese yet. I do think I got a lot from it though and I'm quicker at recalling numbers in Chinese now.

At the end of the class we moved on to the Chinese writing system and stroke order, etc. I learned this previously from the Heisig books so there wasn't much new here. I'm not really interested in knowing how to hand write Chinese characters because practicing it would add a lot to my study time and I don't think it'll be a skill I'll use very often.

In the second lesson we focussed on tones.

We also covered numbers up to 999, and a very small amount of vocabulary. In all, the vocabulary covered this week was:

零 (0), 一 (1), 二 (2), 三 (3), 四 (4), 五 (5), 六 (6), 七 (7), 八 (8), 九 (9), 十 (10), 白 (100), 再见 (Bye), 不客气 (You're welcome)

Of these, I knew all of them already except for 零.

Sogou pinyin input (搜狗拼音输入法) for mac requires the "High Perf GPU" at all times. This is a gigantic waste of energy considering it's running all the time and not doing a lot. When I just checked it was the only application running on my computer except for VLC that required it.

I'm only around two hours into this so far but it's the single method I would most recommend for someone new to Chinese.

It's very light on vocabulary, using just enough to be able to get across the point they are trying to make. So far it's spent time introducing tones (along with colour-coding the tones and giving them hand signals to help remember them, introduced 是 (to be), 我 (me), 你 (you), 中 (middle), 国 (country), and 人 (person) and showed how these are used together (e.g. 你是中国人 you are Chinese), introduced plurals using 们, questions with 吗 and 为是么, negation using 不, the use of 很 to make things "sound right" (e.g. using "我很好 I'm very good" instead of just "我好 I'm good")

The vocabulary they use is just used to introduce the way sentences are constructed in Chinese. As an example of the speed in which you learn with this method: by just over two hours in, students can be asked to construct the sentence "Why can we not see your teacher now?" and successfully put together "为什么我们现在不能见你的老师？". Comparing that to two hours of conventional study (where, in my evening class at least, I could say about five isolated words) really shows how well this method works.

I'm not yet half way through this course so can't comment on the rest of it. I'll write another post reviewing the rest of it after I've completed the course. So far though, I'm very impressed and looking forward to the rest.

I had my first Chinese lesson on October 7th, after about 5 months of learning by myself. We're using the Chinese in Steps textbook.

This week we just covered an introduction to Chinese (中文), and Mandarin (普通话) with a brief overview of the features of the language, different dialects, etc. Nothing particularly exciting.

We also went over the Chinese initials (b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r) and single finals (a, e, i, o, u) and practiced pronunciation of these. We covered compound finals towards the end of the lesson but didn't have a great deal of time to practice so we'll do this at home I guess.

We covered a little vocabulary, just to give everyone the chance to speak some Chinese in the first two hour lesson. The vocabulary we used was:

》你好 (Hello)

你好 (Hello)

》 你好吗？(How are you?)

 我很好。你好吗？(I'm good. How are you?)

》我很好。谢谢。(I'm good. Thank you)

The practice for this obviously went very quickly because there's only so many times you can repeat the same short conversation.

In all, this lesson didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know - but it gave me a chance to practice my pronunciation (which, as I'm self taught so far, is my big weak spot). I was glad to see that many of my classmates struggled with some of the sounds, which does make me feel better when I'm not so good at some of them!

I used this book when I first started learning Chinese and at the time thought it was brilliant. Using mnemonics along with the order the characters are introduced really works well to nail the meaning and appearance in your head.

For example, in the first few sections of the book, 月 (moon) and 古 (ancient) are introduced. Later, 胡 (recklessly) is introduced along with the story:

Everyone knows what a new moon is: the first phase when the moon is illuminated 0%. So, presumably, an ancient moon, like the one in this character, is lit up to 100% wattage. And we all know what that means: people tend to get a little "loony" and start acting recklessly.

Now, I bet you won't soon forget what 胡 is. However you also don't know how to pronounce it (hú) and even if you did, you don't know how to use it.

Heisig argues that it's best to learn the characters in isolation first and then when you learn the pronunciation, word order, grammar, etc. you can relate them back to something you already know. This sounds reasonable on the surface but when you know 300 characters and are still unable to say "My name is Jonny" you can lose motivation quickly.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Heisig's books for beginner Chinese learners, and I'm not sure they offer anything for more advanced learners that they couldn't get from the HSK lists. I have seen plenty of people recommend these books though so your mileage may vary.

I've been learning Chinese for about six months now. So far my method has been quite scattershot - I've used Skritter, Chinese Pod, The Michel Thomas Method, Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi book, Livemocha, Memrise, Lang8, and just this week I started formal lessons at the University of Southampton. I'm now going to add "Blogging about the process" to my collection of learning methods.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to blog about my experiences with each one of them until I'm caught up, and then I'm going to try to continue blogging about my experiences learning Chinese.

As my Chinese improves I hope to write more of the blog in Chinese (with English translations) but for now I will have to make do with just translating the title as my vocabulary is too small.

I have three months until my first visit to China and I hope to be able to get by with some basic conversation by that time.