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Lorinth’s log - 劳伦的博客 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 273 of 408 06 March 2014 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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@Cruch and Ninibo, another way to dive into the wuxia genre would be to start with simplified versions of well-known novels. One of the articles on Hacking Chinese says that a simplified version of 寶劍金釵 is available. I have two simplified versions of 水浒传 sitting on my shelf (technically not 武侠, I know, but it could be considered as the grandad of the genre) but last time I tried, even that was too hard for me. So wuxia will have to wait a bit more - how about a wuxia challenge for Mandarin learners in 2015? :-)
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| Ninibo Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 3814 days ago 88 posts - 116 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 274 of 408 06 March 2014 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd so participate in a Wuxia challenge! Great idea!
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5663 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 275 of 408 07 March 2014 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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I would definitely participate, too! I saw a mention of the "abridged" version, is that what you're talking about? (It's just a little confusing since "simplified version" is a bit ambiguous in reference to Chinese ;) )
This year almost all my effort is going into learning new characters and increasing my vocabulary, so 2015 sounds like a perfect time to start. I should hopefully have a few books under my belt by then, too. Here's to 武侠2015! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 276 of 408 07 March 2014 at 9:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I was taken off guard again. As I was looking for some material for extensive (read: lazy) reading, I got the idea from chinese-forums.com to order teaching material for third and four graders. I was a bit worried, thinking that would be *too* easy, to the point of being boring. After all, I've read several (admittedly easy) novels in Chinese already, including 活着, 许三观卖血记, 猫城记, 圈子圈套 I, 哈利•波特 I, 鬼吹灯, countless short stories, etc. It turns out that, after three very short pages, amounting to 1 real page, I'd say, I've already highlighted a dozen unknown our doubtful words, no less. So I'll have to change my plans: 3rd grade material is for *intensive* reading, for analyzing structures and learning new words, while literature is for extensive/pleasure reading.
Then I headed to jandan.net and read an article about NASA's 新的木卫二研究方案 (new research project for Europa). Link And I also read three articles concerning the situation in Ukraine: Link (this one was difficult) Link (this one about the EU summit was shorter and easier) And also this one about the decision made by the Parliament of Crimea: Link And I've started working on a new ChinesePod podcast about the fascinating subject of 热水器.
Yes I meant abridged of course. I hope we'll all still be around when it's time to start the challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 277 of 408 10 March 2014 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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On the "Mandarin Companion" blog, I've found a comment about something I've noticed again and again while looking for extensive reading material: children books are not necessary easy. There's an analysis of a book I happen to know well (I read it countless times to all my kids) that demonstrates this point: in such a short text, there are words belonging to HSK6 or even not included in the HSK.
Link On Jandan, I read a gross article about peeing in the swimming pool. BTW you may have noticed that Jandan has rapidly become one of my favorite sources for light reading because articles are short, varied and often interesting. Another advantage is that many articles are adapted (rather than translated) from English originals. Links are provided, so you can check your comprehension. Link I've read a bunch of stories in my reader for 3rd graders. The stories are a bit childish but quite interesting and well written. Of course, all of this is only normal for a 3rd grade textbook. I've listened to/read part of a ChineseBreeze reader, level 2 (出事以后). The pace of reading is significantly faster than I remembered. Probably the agonizingly slow reading was for level 1 books. I've also worked on a ChinesePod podcast about a kid who wants to become a 运动员, much to the dismay of mummy. I haven't worked on the March team challenge yet. Time to start. Edited by lorinth on 10 March 2014 at 1:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4964 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 278 of 408 10 March 2014 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're right about Jandan, the articles are short, and on a quick glance I could
recognize at least half the characters, which would make it suitable to read with tools such as Perapera. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 279 of 408 11 March 2014 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Finished L/R-ing 出事以后.
On Jandan, I read a short, silly article about some guy who 因为寻找掉入下水道的20美元，不幸 丢落 进管 (who fell in a sewer while trying to get back a 20 dollar bill he had lost) and stayed in there for two days. Link And, while I was at it, I read another one about a 奇怪的中国文物, a bizarre Chinese cultural artifact, i.e. a silk coat (丝绸外套) for the emperor's dog. Fido led a rather comfy life in the forbidden city, living in marble pavilions (住在铺着大理石地板的楼阁中) and sleeping on silk mats (睡在丝绸垫子上). Worth reading also for the brief description of the end of the Qing dynasty. Link During weekends, I have no time to use Skritter, so part of the following week is usually spent catching up on my backlog of reviews. Last week, I finally purged the queue after 5 days, i.e. on Friday. This week, I was able to clear it up on Tuesday. Hooray. Edited by lorinth on 11 March 2014 at 7:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 280 of 408 13 March 2014 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||
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So it's time for me to start working on the March team challenge. I have committed to read 100 lines of the 三字经. This short book was written in the 13th century and has been used, in imperial China, as a text book to teach Confucian values to children. As I've never studied classical Chinese, this will be my first step into the vast ocean of classical Chinese literature.
Wikipedia There are many online versions. For my first contact, I chose a text with a simplified character version (I definitely want to teach myself traditional characters - just not now). The text Compared with what I announced on the TAC thread, I reduced my ambition to 100 lines, i.e. just 300 characters. That's not much, but I believe it's more than enough taking account of my other Chinese and non-Chinese related tasks. As a first exercise, I wanted to read the text "cold", without translation, and check how many characters and how much of the text I could understand. So I took the text without translation and transcribed it in pinyin in order to check my knowledge of the characters. I verified afterwards with a popup dictionary. Result: on the 300 characters, I had made 41 mistakes (13.6% - some of that are repeated mistakes for the same characters), which can be analysed as follows: - A handful of characters were totally unknown to me, i.e. I'm pretty sure I've never seen them : 杼, 窦, 惰, 紊, 菽，稷, 匏… I've looked them up in Patrick Zein's very convenient list of the 3000 more frequent characters. None of them were included, so I won't bother learning them for now. Zein's frequency list - Quite a lot of characters were "forgotten", i.e. I've studied them, sometimes much more than once (alas!), but I've forgotten their meaning and/or their pronunciation, e.g. 俱, 君, 臣, etc. - In a dozen cases, I was fairly certain I knew the meaning but the pronunciation was off (wrong tone in 8 cases, wrong initial in 4 cases). As for the meaning of the text, my first impression is that many parts are understandable "as is" (or is it an impression?), once you accept that Classical Chinese is fully monosyllabic and even more compact than putonghua (e.g. there are no classifiers). Now, it is true that I read some classical Chinese texts in translation before so, in a way, I knew what to expect and that may have helped. Syntactically, the importance of parallelism is obvious, probably because that's a sort of mnemonic tool, but maybe also to provide some sort of syntactic clues. That's one the favourite devices of classical Chinese. Finally, certain parts are simply thematic enumerations of words belonging to a certain semantic category (e.g. numbers, food, elements, etc.), so that, at least, should not be too complicated to understand. The next stage for me will probably involve reading a paper edition that's sitting on my shelf. It has the full text plus comments in modern Chinese. That way, I can check my understanding (where I think I understand), and clarify those parts I did not get or that are nebulous. Edited by lorinth on 13 March 2014 at 2:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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