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Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques?
NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know any good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."
Flashcards are great for learning Chinese or Japanese characters. There are also many characters, or parts thereof, that have a mnemonic relationship to the idea that they are used to impart. I can't think of any decent books offhand, but they're out there.
Still, flashcards are awesome in this regard.
I'm no expert on this, but I don't see a relation between sound and shape of our letters either. So the answer is to study as hard as you can and also: repetition!
I'm learning Chinese right now too and I use http://www.nciku.com and put in all my vocabulary from each lesson and just continuously test myself every day on the vocab I'm learning and have learned to always keep it fresh in my mind. I think you're really at a loss here to do anything other than just practice, practice, practice as, like you said, there's no correlation between characters and sounds.
Date a native speaker.
{{.sig}}
There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.
There are lives at stake here!
Wouldn't this be something you could get best from their teachers? Not that there's anything wrong with asking Google or Slashdot, but the first place I would go is to their teachers. One would think - or at least hope - that they would have additional tools they could give you to help your kids study.
Any anecdotes out there regarding the helpfulness (or lack thereof) in changing your computer's default language?
I taught English to kids in Africa, and found very few natural connections between English sounds and letters. One of the few techniques that worked decently was to pick some words that could be formed into the letter. For example, the letter "k" can be drawn as a key. It's not great, but it makes a connection that otherwise wouldn't exist. If your kids are picking up words well enough, this might be useful. Good luck.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Flashcards. I would have never gotten through grade school math without them. I have terrible ( self-diagnosed ) ADD, procrastination, and aversion to doing anything difficult and repetitive. Math was beyond me. I would have flunked out of grade school if my mom hadn't sat me down with the flash cards every night.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.
-- Conserve binary trees; recycle your email. --
As others have said, there's no way around the need for repetition and a lot of practice.
Also, diligence is extremely important. If you're not using them, then you forget the characters very quickly. If you're not careful you might actually find that you're forgetting characters as quickly as you're learning new ones.
When learning kanji, I found that mnemonics were far and away the easiest way to remember all of those otherwise arbitrary Chinese characters. If you make flash cards similar to what you find at http://kanjidamage.com/howto and go through them every day, you'll plow through them at a steady pace. The mnemonic in that example incorporates the English meaning, pronunciation, and component radicals all in one sentence. If you can remember that sentence and recognize at least one of those components, it becomes easy to figure out the rest.
there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.
Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.
Flash cards work well. Some computer programs work well too. "Rosetta Stone" works really well, but it is expensive.
There is really no relationship between latin characters and sound either, at least until you've learned them. Korean Hangul is the only character set that I know of in which a conscious effort was made to have the parts of the glyphs relate to the structure of the mouth when they are pronounced.
That being said, it is not entirely true that there is no relationship between sound and character in Chinese. Once you have learned the hundred or so base characters, these are re-used over and over as 'radicals' (parts) in the more complex characters. The main radical often gives a hint to the meaning of the character (for example, 'water' may mean that you are talking about some liquid or water-related thing) and other parts of the character often give a hint to how the characters should be pronounced.
In my experience, this is true for both Chinese and Japanese, but in very different ways. (In fact, the differences in the languages that originally shared a common writing system explains a lot of the divergence in their use of the characters.) Simplified Chinese (used for mainland Mandarin) has changed the shape of many characters without maintaining the hints that were previously embedded within the word.
My suggestion would be to learn the simple first-and-second-year hanzi for whichever dialect your children are learning... probably no more than a hundred characters or so. You can probably do so much faster than they can. But at some point the pace of their classes will increase dramatically. You may be able to keep up as they learn additional characters, but ultimately the only way to learn them is to use them: practice practice practice. It takes time.
I had to learn Kanji (albeit much fewer than you'll have to for Chinese) when I took Japanese in college, and the easiest way I found to learn the characters is to memorize what the simplest characters look like first. That way, the more complicated ones are just combinations of things you already recognize. Plus, their meanings are usually related in some way. Beyond that, a program named Anki helped me a great deal with learning the Kanji since I didn't have to spend a ton of time for characters that were easy to learn.
I started using the express version for free. Then went ahead and bought the deluxe version which included 150 lists. The vocabulary words in it already have sounds attached. It's some pretty slick software and they went out of their way to make it user friendly for managing/editing cards and lists of cards. For instance, I can make a list then do all the sounds at once if I want. Press record, speak my word/phrase, press record again to stop, check it with playback, press next for the next card in the list.
It has a variety of modes, from simply viewing the cards to self-checking recognition to actually typing the answer. I'm currently doing Japanese with these cards and I was very impressed with how well it handles the input methods. I can type in English one second and when it asks for a response in Japanese it switches to a Japanese input method automatically.
It also has a couple activities that you might find useful. I like the multiple choice activity.
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James W. Heisig, a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, has released an excellent set of books for memorizing Japanese Kanji, traditional Chinese Hanzi, and simplified Chinese Hanzi:
Remembering the Kanji:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Vol-Complete-Characters/dp/0824831659/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269118367&sr=8-1
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_5
Remembering the Simplified Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
While this technique focuses on memorizing the meaning of the characters (and how to write them yourself) and not so much on the readings of them, I've found it an absolutely invaluable technique for doing the former. I have an abysmal memory to the point that it's shocking, and yet using his techniques, I was able to easily memorize the meaning of about 400 characters and how to write them in a couple of weeks with only a couple of hours of dedication a day, which I was very impressed with. His technique is based on building up from simple radicals and employing visual memory to make everything stick in place, which basically means concocting an elaborate and often ridiculous story for each character to tie the correct radicals into their correct places. The story is usually so silly that it cannot be forgotten, which is, IMO, in where the trick lies. As your skill in recall develops, you can let go of the stories and move to natural recall.
Also, the use of timed memorization software is essential when we're talking about this amount of information. Here are two great free software packages for this that were largely based specifically at learning Japanese (and thus are quite suitable for other languages, especially Chinese):
Anki:
http://ichi2.net/anki
Mnemosyne:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
(Personally, I prefer Mnemosyne a bit more, even though Anki has many more features, but this is because I'm making a set of cards to memorize all of Heisig's Kanji, traditional Hanzi, and simplified Hanzi, and I'm using HTML tables to store all the information. Mnemosyne preserves my HTML exactly, whereas Anki futzes with it and ruins the formatting.)
> My kids are learning Chinese in school.
Quite the forward thinker, huh?
> While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
You're doing it wrong, as far as I understand. Sound is very much important for anglophones; not so in other languages. Even in my own related Portuguese, the written form is fundamental to recognize etimology. I've found there's another mindset when dealing with some oriental languages. This is a problem in itself, because a few people seems to have a hard time at talking... from the usage of the word "dumb", it seems not being able to talk is not highly regarded among you.
Such is the importance of sound to you... Hence confusions about "their" and "there", "you're" and "your", "its" and "it's" etc.
Other cultures view refraining from speaking in a better light. "Uneventful is noble", a Japanese saying... or so I've read.
> I would like to know if there good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amount of information, especially Chinese characters.
From what I've been shown regarding Kanji and Chinese ideograms, you can divide an ideogram in subparts, each with its meaning and then recall what their reunion would mean.
I can even give a simple example. Mind you, I can't speak neither Japanese nor Chinese. (Li, if you ever reads this, thanks... I hope you're well)
Up:
Down:
Stop: (i.e., cannot go up nor down)
> Most of the stuff I googled only helps on learning speaking.
I'd suggest it's a good starting point, as spoken Chinese may be orders of magnitude easier than written... After you get the basics of speaking and hearing, maybe writing could be easier... after all, this is how children start.
I started studying Chinese in September too and I'm trying a lot of techniques to memorize it quickly and efficiently.
As others have already mentioned, Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) is the way to go for memorizing vocabulary, as it uses a psychological algorithm that helps you repeating things as often as you need to. If you then install the pinyin toolkit plugin for learning chinese it's the best thing to learn chinese vocabulary as it imports all your translations, pinyin and even sounds automatically when you just enter the Hanzi.
This pinyin toolkit also uses a nice colour system for the tones. Basically, every character is displayed in a color depending on its tone: red = first tone orange = second tone green = third tone blue = fourth tone black = no tone
You can go even further and WRITE the characters in those colors when practicing. The tones of each character will stay in your memory WAY better!
Another tip when trying to memorize chinese characters: try to grasp the meaning of their components and learning to read and write them will be way more easy. You can use sites like nciku.com or archchinese.com where characters are split up in their components. However, you won't find everything there. There's also an extremely good book called "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) - it teaches you the 800 most common chinese characters by telling you everything about their components and even giving you stories to remember the components of each character. It's by far the best book I've found for learning how to write chinese.
Hi, i'm 18, and I can speak and write in 5 languages.
I tried to memorize 5-8 words every day, make sentences using those words, etc. I imagine the most difficult part is learning 5000+ symbols, well, when I learned the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets I memorized each letter by writing it and, at the same time, pronouncing it. It doesn't seem serious, but it helps a lot.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.
"I am Dr. Freud, but you may call me.siggy."
This MMO was the subject of a previous /. story, and since others have commented on other useful techniques, I'll leave you with this:
Zon (http://www.massively.com/2008/06/04/zon-the-mmo-that-teaches-you-to-speak-chinese/)
I've also seen it said (in a comment on here perhaps?) that it is preferable not to use pinyin romanisation as that doesn't help as much with making the correct sounds. Whatever it was pointed at GR as an alternative. Don't take that as gospel though as I may have no idea what I'm talking about!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I've been picking up some Japanese recently, via podcasts, torrented mp3s and the like but learning Kanji above Grade 1 isn't going too well. This is largely because I never get to use it in real life. My suggestion to pick up Kanki/Chinese Characters is to associate the symbol with the actual object. For instance, to learn the Kanji for "shoe" write the Kanji on a sticker and put it in your shoe, or all your shoes. That way, every time you put your shoe on, you will be reminded of the Kanji. Do this for everything around the house and pretty soon you will build up a healthy knowledge of Kanji for everyday objects. Once you can write the Kanji from memory, you can remove it from it's associated object.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The complicated-looking characters are actually built out of smaller, standardized parts. If your kids want to be able to look up characters in a dictionary, they're going to have to learn to recognize the more common Kangxi radicals anyway. The 7 most common radicals are used in about 10,000 characters. Most characters are formed by combining a semantic part with a phonetic part. Once you learn a bunch of these, it makes it much easier to remember words made out of them. Lots of words are actually compounds of characters, e.g., "computer" is "electric brain." Once you know "electric" and "brain," it's not particularly hard to remember the two-character compound.
It sounds like in the short term your kids are having an easier time with the spoken language than with the writing system. My experience in terms of long-term recall is exactly the opposite. I took a Chinese class 13 years ago, and have forgotten the vast majority of what I learned. Of the part I do remember, the easiest to remember is characters. The part I really can't remember at all anymore is what tones the words are. E.g., I can remember that "red" is "hua," but I can't remember which tone that "hua" is. Because of that, I have no chance at all of being able to speak and be understood.
Find free books.
Import Chinese comic books.
The language is simplified. They're designed for kids and they're designed to entertain, though you'll be missing many of the cultural references.
There is absolutely no point trying to memorize something if you don't use it. It's like trying to hold water in your hands, it'll dribble away in weeks if not months.
Trying to learn any language without being immersed in the culture is extremely difficult. I reckon current language teaching methods are bizarre; defining grammar, memorizing words. No native speaker learns language that way. Learn by example and your brain will build the grammar and vocabulary as it goes. TV/Radio, newspapers, web sites all help and can be downloaded usually. Better, move to China.
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one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.
tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.
the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.
daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.
tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.
so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.
so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:
1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)
2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.
by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.
it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.
all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia
The non-radical part is often pronounced the same in multiple characters it appears, particularly for newer words or characters. This happened in older times, too. But pronunciations diverged with time, particularly after the Mongols mangled the northern dialect. I can often guess the pronunciation of character I havent seen.
Unfortunately, I dont know if there a way to teach this. You just observe the sound patterns as you learn characters.
Someone above recommended Remembering The Kanji (and it's Chinese version, Remembering the Hanzi), so I'm going to leave that alone.
ReadTheKanji.com is a -great- site for learning to read Japanese words. It is the single best thing to help me read Japanese that I've found, and I've spent a lot of time looking. I even thought about writing my own version, but other than some fairly minor features that I'm not ready for yet, I can't improve on it.
I don't think anything like it exists for Chinese, but if it did, that would be my recommendation.
This is more of a long-term thing, though... If you expect them to learn particular characters -right now- instead of learning them more naturally over time, then a flashcard program like Anki is probably the way to go.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
And not just the radical (dictionary lookup) part. I wish all my teachers had named the parts from the start. But you gradually learn their names. Then you sort of remember character X is made up of the water and water and po-sounding part and so on.
After a while you dont think of parts, but the "gestalt" or entirety. Same thing happens in English reading. You see the whole word, its length, the ascending and descending parts, the first and final letters. Theres a trick text going around where the interior letters in English words are scrambled and its fairly easy to learn because you see the whole word instead of each letter after a few years of reading.
Having studied eight foreign languages (French, Spanish, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Japanese, and Finnish) in my life, and after talking this theory over with friends who have attained fluency in some really different languages (e.g. Spanish and Bahasa Melayu), I feel safe in stating this here in pretty strong terms:
The only way to learn a language is to use it.
The only sort of "classroom" language class that works worth a damn is an immersion class, in which during the class period you do not speak any language other than the one you're studying. Even classroom instructions ("Open your book to page 23") are in the language, once you've learned numerals.
The worst language classes I've taken have been ones in which the foreign language being studied is treated as a matter of abstract grammar and vocabulary to be memorized, not used ... and in which the teacher spends most of their time telling anecdotes in English about their experiences in the culture in question. I took two years of Russian in high school and a year of it in college -- and forgot more Russian than I learned in that last year, since the teacher spent the class time telling stories (in English!) about run-ins with the KGB, instead of helping us practice speaking and reading Russian.
As regards Chinese: I've never studied Chinese, but I have studied Japanese including kanji, albeit only to the extent of a couple hundred kanji. The above applies fully to kanji, and I expect it applies to hanzi (Chinese characters) as well -- in order to learn them, you have to use them. Write them. Come up with silly sentences and write those. Don't just use flash cards and memorization; come up with things that you want to say in Chinese (even if just to be silly) and say those things with hanzi.
The other half of the equation, of course, is to get someone who is fluent to respond to your crude childish attempts at speaking and writing. That's the point of a good language class: you get to make the sort of errors that a little kid makes, and they correct you. That method of language acquisition works for little kids, and it works for adults too if they're willing to be childish for a while.
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Rather, they consist of about 200 radicals that are combined 2, 3, and 4 at a time. Many characters consist of just two parts: a sound indicator and a meaning indicator. There are plenty of books explaining this and using these relationships to help make Chinese characters easier to learn (look on Amazon).
There is a great children's book, "The Chinese word for Horse and other stories" by John Lewis ( http://www.librarything.com/work/1564984 )which shows the structure of some (very few) Chinese characters. (Charles E. Tuttle co. published a small paperback that illustrated some basic Kanji in the same way, but I can't find my copy and I can't remember the name.) Look for a Chinese calligraphy guide that describes the meaning of the radicals as derived from pictures and you will be well on your way to binding the character with the meaning.
It can take as much as 15 years for something to go from short-term memory to long-term memory. (See "Brain Rules" by John Medina http://brainrules.net/ ) A program that helps bridge the gap between initial learning and structured recall is SuperMemo http://www.supermemo.com/ . Ignore the cruddy website and look at the idea behind it and the history.
Flashcards are good, too.
Major practice for writing Chinese is provided in "copy sheets" which can be found at Chinese shops that sell calligraphy supplies and school supplies. They have blocks with faint outlines of Chinese characters and you practice your calligraphy by tracing the character with your brush tip.
You might find "A practical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary" by Janey Chen http://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Chinese-Pronouncing-Dictionary-Language/dp/0804818770 . This book give an International Phonetics pronunciation (both Mandarin and Cantonese) next to the Chinese words. This is VERY important: One slight change in sound utterance and you've said something different from what you intended!
When learning Chinese, learn some patterns. I suggest "Chiang's Practical Chinese Language Patterns" http://www.amazon.com/Chiangs-Practical-Language-Patterns-Self-Learners/dp/9579727236 , "Practical Chinese Reader" (and the associated workbooks) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887271871/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=9579727236&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=14FXWRGNRW203JQ3QYZC , and an advanced monograph: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED280308&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED280308 .
Another resource, associating the sound with the character by typing it, can be found here: http://vpc-mandarin.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-and-why-to-write-chinese-by-typing.html
My ex-girlfriend and I used to watch a lot of Chinese movies together with the captioning on. The right channel would be Cantonese and the left channel would be Mandarin and the characters would change color as the actors pronounced them. You can find a switch to change the audio channel in most Chinese video stores. This is a good way to associate the sound visually with the language. Cartoons are great for kids and beginning adults because the language is syntactically correct but not too complicated. (Watch out though!; Jackie Chan has lousy Mandarin pronunciation and Zhang Ziyi has lousy Cantonese pronunciation.)
Side note: Japanese Kanji are derived from Chinese characters, b
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
so it's sort of like in English then?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Mnemosyne, Anki, and SuperMemo are great learning systems. Although they are frequently used for learning a language, they can be used to memorize almost anything. Mnemosyne is simple, free, and opensource. SuperMemo is complex. I have not used Anki.
My girlfriends first comment: Yeah right, that helped...
Almost 5 years together, and she still hardly speaks a word of German because I almost automatically switch over to English when talking to her... ...which may be good for my English, but certainly isn't for her German... :-/
I've studied Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, and now Dari. The thing that has helped me the most has been to read children's books. I start out with the ones intended for kindergartners, and work my way up. Once I get halfway decent, I start on newspapers. These days you can find online newpapers in just about any language.
I've also just found the International Children's Digital Library, which has digital children's books for many languages.
I feel like your post might be sarcastic, but I don't think it is. If it is you suck at sarcasm, sorry.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation. Handwritten and printed characters are presented with such stylistic variation that even the simplest aspect, optical recognition, is very difficult. Hell, even high-grade OCR software for roman character sets is still imperfect. And then there's translation. Some characters have both multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations, most of which is dependent upon context. Computers don't grok context well since it relies a lot on complex relationships concerning meaning.
So yeah, humans are actually really good at language and the memorization that goes with it, especially in the ways that the computer is not good at it. Nothing wrong with using a digital pocket dictionary or phone app that's a dictionary as an aid, but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
Someone sure is bitter.
You know how much more money you can make being bilingual, especially in languages from radically different parts of the world?
Most people who are smart don't do things to make other people think they're smart. They do them because they're fun, interesting, challenging, career-building, and/or personally fulfilling. They get the same joy out of it that you do fucking beautiful girls while stoned out of your mind.
The translating computer you have? Built by smart people who didn't waste their lives wasted and in bed.
This is for japanese characters, learn by playing and gaining EXP points like in a role play game!
slashwhat?
When I was in college a second language was still mandatory to graduate. Basically this meant at the time that you have to pass one full class in a non-English language. Today I don't believe a second language is mandatory any more, and 20 years before I was in school, it was four years of a second language or no diploma, sonny.
Anyway, I took French like I had for four years in High School (we could also take German at our school, it was a bit easier to learn).
My buddy in College took Chinese. I asked him if he'd ever spoken it before ... not a word. Pure Rookie.
He would come to lunch and start doing these chinese characters for his assignment. Pretty much every class you had to write out some phrase in Chinese characters, and hand it in ... this was for class credit.
He had this book; look up something, write a stroke, look up some more, write another stroke, and so on. I asked if it was hard. Nope, but you pretty much have to look all this stuff up every time, he said. Too many to remember, although you eventually figure some of 'em out. Basically, you talked in class and wrote this assignment between classes. He said it was one of the easiest classes he ever took; everyone was getting 100% on the class assignments.
I asked about the prof ... doesn't he want you to do any closed-book exams (without the "little book" handy)? Nope, he said. The prof uses the little book too, all during the class.
Oh, I said.
So, you need to repetitively write the stuff down. Eventually you learn a few of them, but it's not expected that you learn them all. Apparently no-one does.
Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that can certainly help. Just don't think it will be easy.
With Chinese it's kind of hard to dive into new reading material. You either know a character already, or have no clue what it means or even how to pronounce it. That, and every character being unique, means reading/writing will be the limiting factor in your kids' language study and the most time-consuming to remedy. Below are some tips to break down the task.
First thing is to learn the radicals. There's a limited number of them, and at least one in every character. Learn how to draw them because they're used over and over again. Learn their meanings too, because a character's meaning is usually at least loosely tied to its radical. Learning to identify the radicals also helps greatly in looking up unfamiliar words, as Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged first by radical, then by number of strokes.
When you buy them a dictionary, get a beginner's dictionary so that they can have a larger font, usage examples and Pinyin pronunciation, all of which are sometimes missing in comprehensive dictionaries. A good choice that provides many example sentences and phrases would be The Starter Oxford Chinese Dictionary (sorry, Simplified version only). Get them a second dictionary later on if they can't find every word they need. For several reasons, I like Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. You can try out the online version of it at Zhongwen.com to see how it's organized. This is also the only dictionary that you can use by looking up any part of a character, not just the radical (which can sometimes be hard to identify).
Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the non-radical part hints at the sound of the word. They'll notice many more of these related character components at the intermediate level. However, given the ~4,000-year development of the written language, these links can often be tenuous. Thinking up elaborate stories trying to tie all the pieces of the character together can be quite useful. For instance, with the character for wrong () I remember it by thinking, "It would be wrong to bet money that sun sets underground." A little convoluted, but it was enough to jog my memory ever since. Useful as this strategy can be, it's just not always possible and you'll have to learn many words by rote memorization.
For this I recommend writing. A lot! Have your kids say the words aloud and think of the meaning as they write. After enough repetitions, hopefully it will become part of their "motor memory" and once started they will be able to finish a character almost by reflex. They'll need this level of ingrained familiarity if they hope to retain the knowledge for long.
It's essential then to review regularly and for them to brush up on what they forgot. Flashcards can be used as others suggested, but I'd recommend using a "3-sided" flashcard that shows the English translation, the character and the pronunciation all separately. You can do this by writing along the top and bottom of one side of the card and holding them so you don't see both at once. This way they won't depend on the Romanized pinyin to pronounce characters. To optimize learning, reorganize the cards based on how well they're known. This way time won't be wasted needlessly reviewing stuff that's already learned.
To help with this optimization, some people use computer programs to model their memory decay, bringing up the character flashcard only when it's likely to be on the verge of being forg
This can be generalized: Any technique that is usable for memorizing a vocabulary, are also good for memorizing Chinese characters. Since they are more words than letters.
Take the best ones, and you’re good.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Being a linguist, I have some suggestions, sorry if i come across as condescending, but there are some things to be addressed first. Orthography NEVER, EVER, EVAAAR correlates to genuine sound in natural language because there is no direct analog to represent sound via writing (yes, even the IPA [international phonemic alphabet] fails to do this.) The reason is simple - We use a different part of the brain to process written language (The Visual Word Formation Area being one of them -- Posterior occipito-temporal lobe.) Chinese characters do however have a logic behind them -- Most of the basic (i.e. first few THOUSAND) characters use radicals which imply the semantic relationship and topic of the character. for concrete objects, these often have radicals which were derived from their sources (much like the latin alphabet and runes were once ideographs that closer represented real world items.) Dog (gou3) for example has two main radicals - the left most being "claw" the right being a variation of 'mouth' (probably closer to jaws or maw semantically.) My advice is thus multi fold: 1) Have the students learn the radicals in tandem with the character 2) Also stress the semantic side of the characters - Use antonyms (semantically separate) for adjectives/adverbs/verbs, as well as homonyms and semantically grouped items (i.e. chair, couch, etc. for things you sit on) 3) Learn some chinese with them, and use it! Chinese uses a similar syntax (not identical mind you) to English, so you can learn basic nouns and verbs and use them when communicating with your children -- This will reinforce their aural/oral skills, but also help improve the rate at which the VWFA can process information as the pathways between brocas, weirnicke's, audio processing and VWFA are all intertwined. 4) Have them label EVERYTHING in the house with chinese -- The more they read a character, the easier it'll be... and since the characters are generally composed of one or more radicals, it will help them process more complex characters.
I wonder what is the relationship between what "A" looks like and its sound?
The way to learn Chinese characters is through repetitive writing in addition to learning what each radical means. Each character learned/day needs to be written at least 100 times. There is also a standard way to write most characters, top-down then left-right. Prepare for sore hands and fingers. At least people outside China would probably write the characters in Latin order on a page--left-to-right then top down instead of top down, right-to-left. Writing in Latin order prevents the part of your hand that rests on the paper from getting ink/graphite smeared all over it.
The use of radicals probably don't apply if one were to use it to learn simplified characters.
There are a lot of different types of scripts, and most don't have a relationship between the shape of a character and its sound:
So out of those seven types, only featural scripts can be said to represent the pronunciation of the sounds--and this isn't as useful as you may think, because unless you know articulatory phonetics, you can't understand how featural scripts represent pronunciations.
Are you adequate?
I'm amazed no one has mentioned SuperMemo. It's based on an actual scientific theory of how to optimize the value of memorization effort. There's a Chinese character library for it already.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
I tried to post something illustrating a trick to learn the Chinese language (I learn the language that way) but when I post Chinese characters (double-byte Unicode) here everything messed up.
Slashdot doesn't support Unicode??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ok, I know what you meant, but "relation between sound and shape of the characters" suggests to me something along the lines of the following: "see, o and u have this rounded shape, so you should round your lips when you make the corresponding sound; b, d, t, d, and k all have these big straight lines sticking out of them like spears sticking out of dead bodies, which suggest the violence of a plosive consonant."
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation.
I believe that you mean that software is rather bad at translation, computers are good at memorization. Using computers to handle the memorization frees us to explore software and human intelligence to do translation without the burden of memorization.
I use a five-point scale for machine translation. Level one is individual words and kanji. Level two is phrases and sentences. Level three is paragraphs and paragraph clusters, like this message. Level four is newspaper level and films. Level five is literature and diplomacy. Each level would require (I assume) one to two orders of magnitude of computing power to attain from the previous level. Current machine language translation that is freely available (from web sources like Google and www.systranet.com) operates current between levels one and two. Good software could bring us to between levels four and five with existing microprocessors.
Language translation progress can be likened to Columbus' being halfway across the Atlantic. We know exactly what we're looking for, and we firmly believe that it is obtainable and profitable. We just don't know exactly where we are or how long it will take to get where we want to be.
Transferring memorization to machines would free human intelligence to make vast advances in linguistics. By analyzing translation loops (going from a primary language to a second language and then translating the results back to the primary language) we can find why some software algorithms work in some languages and others fail. Why would Chomsky-based software translate "out of sight, out of mind" to "invisible idiot" and Sapir-based algorithms return nonsense when looping from English to Mandarin but not when looping from Mardarin to Mayan?
This entire field is wide open. Linguistic software is the 'killer ap' of the 21st century in the way that 'office equipment' transformation (spreadsheets, word processors, etc...) were the great money maker of the first generation of computers. ..but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
No disrespect or sarcasm intended, but IMHO that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
Immerse yourself in the language. Write it and speak it every day. For some, this means living in the country; for others, date someone whose native language is the one you're trying to learn (and who doesn't have any other language in common with you; for example, my girlfriend speaks English, but my Chinese is much better than her English, so we always speak Chinese to each other, as it feels much more natural).
But yeah, do anything and everything that increases exposure. Flash cards are just one way. Set interfaces in Chinese, watch stuff with Chinese subtitles, etc. After spending a few summers in China, and spending much of my time with Chinese graduate students here (and having a Chinese girlfriend....), I often find myself thinking in Chinese, or mentally translating from Chinese into English, or pirating things with Chinese subtitles because it's faster for me to read Chinese subtitles.
I loved tokenshi's response :-)
My experience is fairly limited, but here are the things that helped me:
Practicing the strokes makes a huge difference in learning speed. My tutor provided me with a workbook that had pictures of the characters displaying the order and direction of the strokes, and I was asked to trace the characters at least 10 times each before copying them down. It seems monotonous at first, but pretty soon I built a frame of reference. The strokes became more familiar (even developing a sort of rhythm), which made the characters less intimidating.
Another thing that has really helped me is studying characters piece by piece. Once you know that the character for "rise"/"stand" combined with "sun"/"day" forms "sound", you can imagine how sound begins each day as the sun rises (birds singing, people waking, etc.) and use that to remember the character. Not all compound characters have such beautifully abstract logic behind their construction (some are a combination of theme and a phonetic, and some are just plain phonetic), but I find that most are adaptable to similar mnemonic devices.
Doesn't work when you want to date a Chinese girl and whisper sweet or nutty things in her ear.
Doesn't help. The kids complaining "Mother always wants us to sit and learn and it is no fun"
Of course I talk to the teachers. However teachers are few, often not tech-savvy and might not know all possibilities. Crowd sourcing widens options. Btw. I forwarded the URL to the teacher, so she is following.
You've missed the point, I think. In particular:
that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
If computers couldn't multiply at that point, it'd be a valid analogy. That statement about the "wonder of the human mind" wasn't about "mental satisfaction", it was about the fact that right now, the human mind can do translation much more accurately than computers are, and you wouldn't trust a computer to do that job.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No two languages can be more different than English and Lao. Mastering both is serious intellectual accomplishment.
But here in Beaverton Oregon it is the standard practice of companies that operate in the vast Southeast Asian community to pay employees fifty cents an hour more if they are fluent in both English and one or more Southeast Asian languages.
Yes, I do know how much more money you can make by being bilingual in radically different languages. You make 50 cents an hour more than the people who only know English.
I'm not bitter, I'm realistic about the value of spending 10000 hours mastering a difficult language.
The translating computer you have? Built by smart people who didn't waste their lives wasted and in bed.
Every great scientific advance is made by smart people who waste their lives getting high and fucking. Smarter people use these technological advances in order to live as well as 'the smart people' and enjoy getting high and fucking while the 'smart people' toil in the lab. Welcome to real world.
I'm a native German speaker, so this sentence will sound like caveman speak: Compared to other languages Chinese grammar *is* simple: Want to form a question? Just take the statement and add a "ma" at the end, no shuffling of words in the sentence required. No past, no future, no conjunctive, no declination, no conjugation. The only "special" are the counting words (you say one *of* something, where the word for *of* varies with the thing you count). Expressing finer points required word selection not grammar lifting.
There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.
If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Just tattoo the entire Chinese alphabet all over your arms. Then it's ready-to-use. Hide your lookups of hard-to-reach areas behind a cool Robot Dance.
Table-ized A.I.
People interested can check this project : http://code.google.com/p/laoshi/
It is a Chinese learning software that includes :
- Lessons viewer
- Flash card game
- A dictionary
- Characters viewer
- Tones recognition game
- Database of learned characters
I started the project a month ago and I am looking for interested people to contribute or give me feedback.
The code is in python using gtk for the interface, the dictionary database comes from the cc-cedict project : http://cc-cedict.org/.
So let's see:
Don't memorize anything.
Flawed in many ways.
First and foremost, you can't synthesize facts you don't know. As an example, someone recently hired me to sort through five thousand bounced emails and figure out how to turn them into a spreadsheet containing the actual failed email addresses.
In order to do this, I had him put it on an IMAP server (the last time he asked me to do this, it was already). I then connected to it with a Ruby script using an IMAP library, parsed the relevant messages (moving each message I successfully parsed to a different IMAP folder), refining my algorithm to parse the rest, and at each step, dumping the results to a CSV file (trivially easy to generate) which I knew he could open in Excel.
At the very least, I had to understand what IMAP is, and where it fits into the picture. Whenever someone gives me a similar problem, my first thought now is, "If I give you access to an IMAP server, you can click+drag all the email out of wherever it is and onto this common server that I can access from wherever I am. It's a stupidly simple and portable way for us to deal with whole folders worth of email."
Now, it's true that if I didn't know it was called IMAP, I could probably Google for something like "Email protocols", read up on Wikipedia, and figure out which one I was talking about. But what if I didn't remember such a thing existed? I might have been digging through whatever format Thunderbird uses for days -- I can't think of a reasonable way I would discover IMAP for this purpose, if I hadn't already been exposed to it in some other way.
There's also CSV. Again, without knowing about CSV, what would I Google? "How to get stuff into Excel"? At best, I might end up with some VBA crap, meaning I'd have to write a program either in VBA or somehow talking to VBA, which also understood the Thunderbird email format. Ugh. Instead, it was simple -- output CSV, attach it, email it.
Then I had to remember that CSV has that weird double-quotation-mark escaping rule. I also remembered that libraries exist -- which also saved me from dealing with IMAP. Oh, and I had to remember that a good way to get libraries for Ruby (my language of choice) is Rubygems. I suppose I could've avoided memorizing "sudo gem install __", but knowing it offhand saves a lot of time.
Had I not remembered about libraries, I might not even have considered IMAP, and I might've badly mangled the CSV.
I also had to remember both that regular expressions exist, and how to use them. Most of the messages were easy enough to read as a multipart message, pulling the "to" field off the envelope (two more concepts I had to be familiar with; the fact that messages with attachments are called "multipart" and how multipart email works...)
Oh, and it also helped to know other assorted things -- like remembering how to add a user to my IMAP server, and how to create a secure connection between that and his Thunderbird (ended up just re-opening the VPN I set up years earlier -- but I had to remember how to enable it...)
And so on.
And this was a tiny, tiny project. Got it done in less than four hours, and that's dealing with a ton of weird permutations of possible emails, and a weird issue with his IMAP server.
Now imagine what it's like working on an actual full-blown software product.
Let the computer do the translating.
Do not want. All your base are belong to us.
You claim translation will eventually be good. Fine, but right now, it sucks, and it's going to continue to suck long after the original poster has learned whatever language they needed -- and there's still nuances of culture that you actually have to experience.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm surprised no one has even mentioned this one.
Amongst the key features:
The basic useful features are free. Didn't see a need to sign up as a paying member, although I might break down and buy a one-time sub just to show my support.
Requires EVIL proprietary binary blob urrh hurrh hurrh Flash urrh binary hurrh hurhh EVIL urrh -- Fuck that, it's a fantastic resource. DO check it out!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I actually started learning the Hanzi using "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) and bought Heisig's book to compare them, but even if they are based on the same principles, the first one is way better.
Matthews & Matthews book not only teaches you the meaning, but also includes mnemonics for the pronounciation and the tone of each character. Maybe it's not that important for Japanese, but Chinese characters give you a lot of clues about their pronounciation using phonetical components, so learning their pronounciation at the same time actually saves you a lot of time. Why memorize "man + lord" = "to live somewhere" if you actually know that "lord" and "live" are both pronounced "zhu" and thus can easily memorize that "live" is something that has to do with "men" and is pronounced like "lord"?
Also, the book comes with drawings to help you remember the basic building blocks AND has awesome crosslinks between the entries everywhere and a very good index that enable you to find what you are looking for so much faster. Of course, it only teaches you the first 800 ones (+ their components) while Heisig already takes on 1500 in his first and 1500 in his second book, but I hope there will be another Matthews & Matthews book for HSK B soon.
Hey everybody,
thank you very much for your contributions. I really appreciate the time you spend to discuss that question.
Some clarification:
So we are beyond the stage of the first 500 chars -- and it is still a chore. Therefor I was asking.
Summing up responses so far (in no particular order):
Again, thx a lot! (and sorry for the caveman English -- don't get it? Read the comments)
Quoted at length from Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. If you like this, go read the whole thing.
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
http://www.skritter.com/
Just draw the characters with a mouse and it'll remember your progress, returning to characters in short, medium and long periods that help reinforce long term memory.
Exactly this. There is no practical computing device right now that can translate for shit. Simonetta is making lots of assumptions about what the computing power of today can actually do for us. The truth is, most software is wholly incapable of properly tapping that power, and I'm not certain we're anywhere close to devising translation software to truly be able to perform comparably to the human mind on language-related tasks. Again, the human mind is very well suited to language processing, and computers are just general purpose calculating machines. Perhaps when translation software is MUCH more robust (don't expect it within another decade at least) and capable of operating on discrete, portable devices (not just your desktop PC at home - think smart phones) this issue will be worth revisiting. But for now and the immediate, foreseeable future, we should not assume foreign languages are going to just translate themselves.
50 cents an hour more... what is the base wage these people are making?
Besides, learning that second language isn't about getting more pay for the same job. It's about opening doors into better paying, different jobs. In my field, knowledge of German, Russian, Mandarin, or Japanese opens up opportunities for positions that, depending on current position, may pay $20-30k more.
I think if you're measuring wages in hourly increments, you're probably not getting on as well as you think.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The open source Mnemosyne flash card system is excellent:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
It uses a spaced repetition algorithm and has some features such as not introducing more than a few new cards into the pool at a time (so that you are never overwhelmed).
Also - ChinesePod is an excellent source for spoken language lessons... some free.
Living in Sichuan, I have had good luck with the book "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews & Matthews, Tuttle press. [http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269201386&sr=8-1] It provides graphical illustrations and stories that combine to relate hanzi with meaning and pronounciation. Tuttle also publishes flashcards. See related books at the above site. I only which I had more time to learn. Good luck!
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Titled "Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters", by Alan Hoenig, and yes, I use memorization software both SuperMemo and Anki, yet I still recommend this wonderful book. It gets you on the right track by offering the characters in the order of increasing graphical complexity, in a way that nearly each following character can be constructed from the preceding characters as its building blocks,... and it does so by providing sufficiently short yet effective mnemonics.
I've found Skritter to be a wonderful service for refreshing my Chinese character knowledge. It has a very slick UI that has you draw the character, so you don't forget the stroke order.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
There are quite a few more Chinese characters than that. The Kangxi dictionary, published in the early 18th century, lists 47 thousand (albeit many of them are not used commonly any more).
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
That is definitely true for traditional Chinese characters, but it breaks down with the simplified characters. Some simplified characters remove or change radicals, or the whole character changes dramatically, so the phonetic portion may no longer be there or is not apparent.
Ironically, the traditional characters are easier to learn to read and understand (maybe not to write) than the simplified ones.