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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4695 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 9 of 26 20 April 2012 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've thought about this too, having not made as much of high school French as I would now have liked to. My conclusion was that high schoolers are probably just too self-centered! Mastering a second language is not required to thrive socially or academically at that age - which is all most kids care about then - so perhaps it isn't until we've left those awkward years that it becomes easier to step outside of ourselves and acquire a more global outlook. Anyway, I'm mostly writing to encourage you to keep on keepin' on. I enjoy reading your log and look forward to seeing what you accomplish with Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4658 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 10 of 26 24 April 2012 at 9:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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On a more positive note, the Qianziwen can be fun to delve into with a good dictionary or annotations, it contains references to difference pieces of lore, like the story of the great beauty Xishi. If you want to memorize some classical poetry, you might try the Sanzijing primer. Not so long ago, many Westerners who wanted to do research on Chinese culture started their classical studies by committing it to memory. I think I once memorized the first section (out of six). Or better, there’s a lot of great Tang-dynasty poetry worth learning. It doesn’t rhyme, instead the metrics are based on tone, usually an alternation of “clear” and “muddy” or something like that. Since Mandarin tones don’t align completely with the tone categories in existence then, it’s a bit hit or miss to read Tang poetry with Mandarin pronunciation. However the beauty still shines through and might be inspiring enough to memorize.
Edited by viedums on 24 April 2012 at 1:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Maux Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4617 days ago 37 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 26 24 April 2012 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
Viedums and Hekje, many thanks for the feedback and support!
I've asked some native speakers, and they all mentioned the sanzijing and the Tang poems as well (having memorized large parts of them when they were young), while most didn't know about the qianziwen. I recently bought a beautiful book containing the sanzijing, the baijiaxing (book of family names) and the qianziwen, so I'll start working on the sanzijing from that, skipping the other two for now. A Chinese colleague said she'd buy me a copy of the 300 Tang poems when she'd go back to China, so I can continue with those afterwards. Many thanks! Out of (slightly obsessive) interest, I've dug a little deeper, and found several other more modern books that 'summarize' the characters they teach by a number of communicatively useful sentences containing them, the idea apparently being to commit them to memory. There's "Rapid Literacy in Chinese", which teaches 750 characters by this method, and "a modern book of a thousand characters", which teaches slightly over 1200. I haven't actually read them myself though, so this is based on other people's reviews and the book's descriptions. As a final remark, I found a very interesting copy of the qianziwen from my university's library. It's from 1902, and was printed in Shanghai. It contains a list of radicals, and provides for each character in the poem an English approximation of its meaning. Strangely enough, however, it doesn't attempt a translation of the whole poem. Just the individual characters. EDIT: I just found out that the rapid literacy book and the modern book of a thousand characters were written by the same author (Zhang Pengpeng, 张朋朋), the former apparently being a condensed version of the latter. I've ordered the larger one of the two from Amazon, but since regular shipping was the only option, it will take between 1 and 2 months to arrive. Edited by Maux on 25 April 2012 at 7:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 26 27 April 2012 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi, against my own best judgement (as I already have to many languages on my plate) I find myself drawn to Mandarin. Can you tell me which me resources you used at the very beginning to learn the characters? I am in the market for something super easy and fun which gives the story of the different characters- do you know of something like that?
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| Maux Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4617 days ago 37 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 26 27 April 2012 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think you'll want to look into Fun with Chinese characters by Tan Huay Peng. There's 3 volumes in total, but there's also a bundle pack on Amazon (and probably elsewhere as well). You can search the title with Google images to see some sample pages. Unfortunately, I also have to mention that you might first want to consider whether to study traditional or simplified character forms. The former are mainly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, whereas the latter are used in mainland China and Singapore. If you don't have any travel plans, I'd suggest you simply start with simplified. I'm under the impression that most teaching materials these days target the simplified script, although (like the book mentioned above) they do also often mention the traditional forms. Besides that, as long as you stick with one long enough, the other variant won't be very difficult to acquire. (To make things even more complicated, or more interesting depending on how you look at it, Japan has its own simplification, which seems a little closer to traditional script.) For something a little more advanced (perhaps as a second book), try "Reading and writing Chinese" by McNaughton. It covers a little over 2000 characters, and mentions etymology as well (but not for all). You can preview it on Amazon, and it comes in both simplified and traditional editions. Finally, there's the more controversial methods based on mnemonics, popularized by Heisig. Rather than telling the story behind a character, they invent a story of their own that is supposed to be more suitable to memorization. I don't think this very much matches your description of what you were looking for, and I'm not an adherent myself either, but since its kind of the underdog in western Hanzi education, I thought I'd mention it. These are the main works available: Tuttle learning Chinese characters, by Matthews (simplified); Chinese characters, by Hoenig (simplified); and finally, remembering simplified (/traditional) Hanzi, by Heisig and Richardson. There's samples to be found online for both Hoenig's and Heisig and Richardson's books. Once you've settled on a book to use, try studying a little every day. Even if you learn only 2 or 3 characters a day, with occasional reviews, over time you'll build quite the repertoire. Also, the more you know, the easier it becomes to learn others. In that regard, the difficulty of learning the Chinese script is much exaggerated, I think. On the other hand, the further you get, the more exposure you need in order to keep your knowledge intact. One thing I recommend is to actually write down the characters you learn, paying special attention to the stroke order. There's rules for how a character is to be written, and knowing these will make it easier to learn new ones, and to look up an unknown character in a dictionary. Save for Hoenig's, I think all of the books mentioned above show the stroke order diagrams. Also, you don't have to copy a new character ten times or anything, just until you feel comfortable writing it (preferably from memory). As a final remark, you have to consider whether or not you also want to learn the Mandarin pronunciations, most commonly transliterated these days in a romanization system called Pinyin. I think that, at this stage, you can certainly stick with learning only the writing and English approximations to the character's meanings, postponing pronunciation until you encounter them in context when starting to learn Mandarin proper. Nonetheless, if you do already want to learn each character's pronunciation(s) straight away, you may first want to invest in a good phonetic guide to the Mandarin dialect, including a CD to practice with. I don't know any good English books in this regard, but I'm sure that a quick search in an online bookstore will return several plausible candidates. Hope this helps, and feel free to ask if you have any questions. Good luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 26 27 April 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you, that was very helpful indeed! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4816 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 15 of 26 27 April 2012 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You can use memrise.com as it features both pronunciation and various informations on the characters. I also keep
a list of all the characters I've learned, but only their English meaning (and the pinyin because I also learn that) and it becomes very useful when I want to review from memory, wherever I am (it's just a piece of paper so...). I just go through my list by order or not and draw the appropriate character a few times and so on. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Maux Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4617 days ago 37 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 16 of 26 03 May 2012 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Today, Zhang Pengpeng's "A modern book of a thousand characters" arrived in the mail. It teaches 1234 common
characters through 50 short sentences in modern Mandarin, all containing seemingly useful vocabulary, judging by their English translations. The impression I got from the introduction is that the student is encouraged to actually learn these sentences by heart. Recently, I've been too preoccupied with studying for the HSK to do any standard textbook work, and instead have been doing some independent character study through memorization of the san zi jing in small bits every day. Learning a sentence from Zhang's book every now and then doesn't seem like it would significantly increase my workload, although I will have to make "every now and then" a little more specific. A Chinese colleague informed me of a similar work to the san zi jing, the di zi gui (standards for being a good student and child), also being organized into phrases of three characters long. Seems like an interesting text, so I'll keep it on my to do list for after I finish the san zi jing. Finally, I found an interesting German manuscript inside the library archives of my university: "Die Bilderschrift von China und Japan als internationale Weltschrift und ihre schnelle Erlernung nach der Mebiwegal-Methode." from Friedrich Gilbert, published in 1924. (While I can't speak German, being Dutch, I have little trouble reading it with the occasional reference to a dictionary.) The method it describes relies heavily on mnemonics and is very reminiscent of Heisig's, though predates it by some fifty years. Like Heisig, Gilbert advocates assigning unique names from one's mother tongue to the character components, ignoring their Sino-Japanese pronunciations. In addition, he provides rhymes for memorizing said components. While the current work provides more of a broad outline of his approach, its actual realization was detailed in two separate works, one of which has been translated to English: A pocket-dictionary of Chinese characters on mnemonic principles. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to find nowadays. Edited by Maux on 03 May 2012 at 8:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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