I never considered taking a class to learn Chinese. Too boring, too time-consuming. I’ve tried hiring tutors and going through a textbook. Better but too close to taking a class. That didn’t last.
For maybe half a year I’ve used Anki (a flashcard program) to learn characters. This is better — at least it’s lasted half a year — but I don’t study it often enough.
A friend suggested labeling things in my apartment — put a card with the character for chair on a chair, for example. Another friend pointed out that there are children’s books with big characters (one per page). That suggested my latest idea: Put these pages on the walls of my apartment. So whenever I look at the wall it will be a kind of test. If I don’t remember the character, I can look on the underside of the card for the answer.
I’m excited about this: it might actually work, I now think. It doesn’t require being still, which I think reduces learning. It spaces learning (you learn in little bits throughout the day), which is surely better than massing it. It allows great amounts of repetition. And it takes advantage of natural curiosity (whenever I see Chinese — in a sign, for example — I wonder what it means) rather than requiring discipline. As far as I can tell it requires no discipline at all. If it doesn’t work I’ll learn something about education.
This is only tangentially related, but there’s a language game called “Where are your Keys?” with the goal of gaining fluency in a fun/quick way. Where are your keys? website. The people behind it are focused on helping to revive endangered languages, but it seems to be adaptable towards a lot of different things (they’ve done a workshop or two about agile programming, for example).
I hope it works for you. Taking a year-long class worked extremely well for me.
Aaron, that’s good to know.
Matt, I tried the where are your keys? ideas. They didn’t work. It was too hard to learn the hand signs, for one thing. Maybe it works better in a group than when you are trying to learn with a tutor. It surely works better with experienced instructors.
Man, I tried to learn out of a book-CD but it was torture. I enjoyed parroting phrases; I found the tonality an absolute hoot, but once I got into vocab it was like eating a crate of crackers.
Have you already covered speaking and speech comprehension? That would be easier surrounded by Chinese people. I don’t see how I can accomplish this at home by myself.
I read the previous article you linked to – the one on thinking while walking. I’ve always been a pacer and like you I want to get up a lot during TV programmes, even movies – I’ll pause them and go on some invented errand like making a cup of tea even if I like the movie.
An intersting exception is video-games. I don’t know if you’re a gamer at all but I’ve noticed that I will sit quite still until some natural break in the action; in fact, I may only think to move when I get stiff and sore. So simulated movement does as well?
I think I would tend to learn the meaning by the location of the card on the wall, rather than by the character shown on the card.
Have you tried the Rosetta Stone software? I’ve been impressed with it for other languages (I’ve never tried Chinese but it uses the same approach for all languages).
I’ve also been interested in what you said about exercising while learning. There’s a game-like aspect to Rosetta Stone. I’d like to try a tablet computer + Rosetta Stone + walking on a treadmill someday.
David
I’ve been studying Chinese for a number of years. Your idea MIGHT work for passive recognition, but you aren’t going to learn how to write the characters this way.
One recommendation I would make would be to find a subject that REALLY interests you, find a simple text on the subject (in this case, in Chinese) then read short passages from it, learning the characters. I am not sure if you already know Chinese and know pinyin.
Another way to learn is to take a book that you really know extremely well and read the same book in Chinese. It used to be that people who had read the Bible all their life and knew it by heart would assist their language learning by reading the Bible in their target language. I believe Thomas Jefferson was a big proponent of this method. I am not suggesting the Bible in your case. I have a friend who speaks 10 languages well (I speak 4 by the way). He is a big fan of the Indian spiritual teacher Yogananda and know some of this latter’s writings almost by heart. Whenever he studies a language, he reads a Yogananda book he knows by heart in the target language.
Of course the best way to learn a language (though this lends itself better to verbal language than written) is to find a lover who is a native speaker. I have an entertaining anecdote in this regard. I knew a girl in college (let’s call her Jane) who liked to learn various languages. She learned them well. Jane’s secret was that she always had a boyfriend who was a native speaker of the language she was studying. One semester Jane announced that she was going to begin study of Italian. I knew then and there that her French boyfriend would soon be getting his “Pink Slip” from Jane. Sure enough, two weeks later, Olivier was out, soon to be replaced by Roberto, an Italian
I encountered some browser extension a couple weeks ago that you configure to replace certain types/frequency of words on the web sites you’re visiting with words in another language (colored, so you know, and mouse-over for translation.) I thought this was a brilliant way to at least slowly absorb new vocabulary. It was both fun and fascinating for a little while, but became a bit frustrating for me after a while (probably because I’m not trying to learn a new language right now
.) But the idea is cool. I’ve been thinking about how this might be paralleled ‘off the grid’ too, in everyday life, and your idea about the signs on the walls reminded me of it. Sounds like a good approach… just slowly surrounding yourself with these mini-tests that you can absorb. Good stuff…
I am an extremely obtuse language-learner. To learn a little bit requires a major – a huge – effort on my part, and my retention and understanding is minimal. I have friends who can learn languages and accents very quickly, and the difference between us is remarkable – i.e., this is not just me being ‘critical’ of myself. I’m interested in learning a language of course, but am daunted right at the beginning. So, I had a couple thoughts:
– Focus on accent first, not words or grammar. I had a friend (able to learn languages quickly), who could fake a German accent so well – not knowing a word of German – that her German friends would say “Slow down! We can’t understand you!” She would simply babble nonsense, and they thought she was speaking their language. My thought is that by learning some key elements of the accent (like, how the French ‘r’ is nothing like what Americans think it is), and practice *sounding* French (for example). Don’t worry about words or syntax – just get the lilt and pace and *feel* of the language. My theory is that, to a certain degree, ‘babbling’ in an accent IS the language… I think this would be invaluable in providing a ‘bucket’ in the brain for the rules and words to fall in to, like it does with babies.
– Speak in English but use the target languages syntax. In German the verbs are often at the end of the sentence. So practice stuff like “would you with me to the zoo and the animals feed go?” Practice the target sentence structure but ignore the vocabulary.
My ear makes it *very* difficult to ‘babble’ in anything but English, and I’ve had a difficult time finding useful syntax rules for other languages. But perhaps there might find something useful here…
when you say you want “to learn Chinese”, what exactly do you mean by that? Do you want to be able to talk? Read (and write)?
For the spoken language, the only hurdle is the tone, and you can use pinyin for your notes.
Reading (and writing)… do you really want to invest that much effort? Ask yourself how much you are ready to invest.
A quick and rough estimate of the things that have helped me learn Mandarin (and by ‘learn,’ I mean able to speak very well, read a little, and not really write at all, though I can type pretty well using pinyin input):
1. lived in Taiwan for a few years
2. married a native speaker (and actually speak Chinese at home)
3. took classes in Taiwan for a few months to get me started, then continued learning on my own. Like you I don’t like classes, but I found that they provided a boost at key moments.
4. studied full time for a year in Taiwan (about 1.5 years into learning Chinese). The classes were pretty lame, so maybe it was just the time investment? But I clearly made a big improvement from basic ability to something like advanced intermediate.
5. (I would rate this higher, but I was already speaking fluently by this time) Supermemo for palm. I now prefer Anki. Having it on a mobile device makes it much more enjoyable and likely that you’ll keep up. If you’re bored with learning characters, maybe try downloading the shared deck of HSK sentences. I read an article online somewhere about sentence mining, the idea being to read materials that are mostly within your grasp and enter the individual sentences in your spaced repetition software for practice. I don’t know how effective it is, but I do find it more enjoyable than most other methods of study for Chinese.
6. Reading children’s books, novels, studying textbooks on my own, etc. I also enjoyed Chinesepod when it was free, but stopped using it when they made it a subscription service.
Kurt, that is a brilliant idea. I once heard that a thirteen year old learns a dozen words per day. Not by looking them up, by context. Which is what that browser extension supplies. I think he’s referring to the Firefox extension ming-a-ling.
what do I want to learn? in this case, to read the Chinese I’m surrounded by. Signs, posters, and so on.