All of us sad sack Mandarin learners get desperate now and again for some instruction, especially when we’ve just begun the language acquisition journey. With that in mind, I hope that some of you Stage 2 or better hànyǔ speakers can reflect on what you’ve gone through to provide some advice to the Stage 1ers.
To spark discussion, here is a countdown of
the top five places not to get started
Although I’m sympathetic to the idea that the following might be useful resources at some point, after you’ve gotten beyond the basics, in the meantime it’s better to allow my experience to serve as a stern admonition for fellow language learners to avoid the primrose path.
5 — Spouse, significant other
Oh, I know, it sounds like a great idea at first. A built-in tutor! And I’ll admit it probably works for a couple of dates. After all, there’s nothing but singing violins when your new love exclaims: “Wà! Nǐ shuōde zhēnhǎo.”
But spare a minute to consider the third lesson before you go down this path.
By this time the spouse (yes, you’re married already — romance doesn’t allow much time for language lessons) is probably sneaking in email while you recite your māmámǎmà. When you ask: “Why not just say bí for “nose” when the dictionary says both bí and bízi are OK — why the zi? You get something like “oh, that’s just the way we say it.” If you grit your teeth and soldier on, the final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.
4 — Babysitter
What could be better?! You’ve found a Mandarin-speaking āyí 阿姨 for your two-year-old daughter. You’re having a hard time understanding her, sure, but that’s OK — you just smile and nod like you always do. And what a great chance to work on your skills!
Hypothetical scenario:
- Mrs. Beijing Sounds [hanging up phone after talking to āyí]: So she says you told her you’d come early on Friday to help her husband with their income taxes.
- Me [puzzled]: Well I remember her saying something about Friday, and I was trying to say I’d come pick up our daughter a little early…
3 — Mandarin teacher
Yeah, holster those flamethrowers. I know there are some really great Mandarin instructors out there, and I salute them. But I’m talking about the memorize-fifty-characters-a-week-including-traditional-and-simplified-before-you-know-how-to-find-the-bathroom-in-a-Chinese-restaurant types.
I know’em. I’ve dropped out of several of their classes. In the US, they’re as prevalent in Chinese departments as traditional laps-till-you-drop swim coaches are in high schools. And in the same way, you imagine they’re helping you get ahead — I mean, they say they are, and surely all this suffering is paying off, right? — when actually the pain of memorizing boatloads of characters before having any grasp of the language only serves to discourage people from studying what is, in fact, a reasonably learnable language.
It’s a masochistic pedagogy that is truly incomprehensible. Just because Mandarin-as-a-foreign-language instruction has been this way since the dawn of time doesn’t mean it’s effective. Although I’ve resigned myself to having to learn characters now, the learning is infinitely easier (which is to say: possible) because I have a spoken language base. Thus the mantra: Characters aren’t the language, the language is the language.
2 — Online forum
The theory sounds great. Actually, come to think of it, the theory sounds awful. Why would you submit a question to a group of people who, by definition, probably don’t know what the answer is?! Of course you hope the learner’s forum is also frequented by some wise old hands — and often it is. The trouble is, it’s also frequented by people who just make shit up or repeat the tripe they hear from self-styled experts. To paraphrase the adage: you know half is right and half is wrong — you just don’t know which half. Save the forums for later learning, when you’ve got enough of a base to tell the difference.
1 — This video
Here’s the audio preview:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
You’ll probably have to listen to the woman yourself to believe this is intended as Mandarin instruction rather than a public service announcement stuck on auto-rewind.
Stumbling across this clip was the catalyst for today’s post. I couldn’t stop chortling. A drunk party cadre with 10 years in the propaganda department couldn’t come up with a duller format — or worse sound quality. The backdrop, the out-of-sync sound/video issues… all leading up to the heart of the first lesson: Tone 1 as foghorn. Priceless. But it also brought back bitter memories of struggling, in vain, to find instruction materials at the right level of simplicity, the days when the attitude was use any simple materials I could find, listen to anything, no matter how bad.
Please check out the youtube video if you suspect I might be taking something out of context or doing it an injustice. And then let me know if you don’t at least get a stitch in your side. Furthermore, if you can swear that you watched the whole thing end-to-end without turning down the volume, I’ll promise you a complimentary copy when the first Beijing Sounds Zhonglish-speaking greeting cards begin rolling off the production line (estimated ship date TBD until my COO gets around to hiring a new director of operations).
[UPDATE: Changed the botched html table into plain text]
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Comments 14
Tone 1 as foghorn.. LOL! BUUUOOOOO… BUUUOOOOO… Gotta make that my new ringtone.
Posted 10 Feb 2008 at 3:34 pm ¶Wow, you weren’t kidding about that video. Horrible stuff. I couldn’t watch more than about a minute, so I never got to see the foghorn.
Yeah, 阿姨 can be rough on newbies, but they’re great conversation practice once you get to the right level. My friend’s 阿姨 talks to him in some incomprehensible dialect/language from some far-off province. It amazes me that he understands her at all (he’s not Chinese).
Posted 11 Feb 2008 at 11:28 am ¶Hey I was just wondering if you use a special IME to input pinyin with the tone marks, and if so, which one?
Posted 11 Feb 2008 at 8:37 pm ¶Chinesepod.com is the best I’ve found, as a beginner who has little time to work on Chinese systematically. Highly recommended. (Not connected to them in any way, just in case someone is wondering.)
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 1:09 am ¶Shaan: I have an English version of MS Office with Asian language support which has an option identify Chinese characters and put pinyin above each. Not sure whether it offers a simple way to purely type pinyin.
For OSX there’s the Fool’s Workshop http://www.foolsworkshop.com/pfc.html which I did use at some point, but can’t remember quite how good it is.
Recently, I’ve been using the excellent input system on Wenlin http://www.wenlin.com/ , and simply pasting it wherever it’s required.
Hope that’s of some help, but syz should be able to tell you how he does it. A quick google suggests there are other IMEs out there for windows, will be interested to hear if you try any of them.
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 10:44 am ¶I’m using ChinesePod too and here is a link to the what seems to be the recommended pinyin IME from ChinesePod. It requires the Chinese IME to be set up in Windows.
http://www.chinese-forums.com/pinyinput-install.zip
and here are some instructions:
http://chinalinks.osu.edu/computing/pinyinput.pdf
and here is the link to the CPod thread on the subject:
http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/sballa/connect/Typing+Pinyin
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 12:30 pm ¶Daniel — glad you liked the foghorn. I know my amusement over the thing is excessive and unbecoming, but I have to suppress a guffaw every time I think about it (although I avoid actually listening to it, for obvious reasons).
John — forgot to mention the my 阿姨, too, was, as they say at least in Beijing, a wàidìrén. Came from 甘肃 gānsù and took care of my then two-year-old daughter in the US for about a year. You can imagine how that naturally influenced her speech. For at least a year after the gānsù āyí, Grandma-from-Beijing would continue to hoot over her granddaughter’s gānsù-Mandarin pronunciation and vocabulary.
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 8:16 pm ¶Shaan: The IME Phil is referring to is the one I use. Here’s the thread from Imron on Chinese Forums. I can’t rave wildly enough about it. My life before the pinyin IME was darkness and suffering: copy/paste, weird formats, so on and so forth. Out of natural sloth, in those days I would end up NOT putting tones on words just cuz it was a hassle. But now there’s no excuse. It’s almost fun. I keep meaning to send Imron a mash letter and maybe a large donation from my trust account.
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 8:16 pm ¶Huanying!Huanying!…..to your new site. I was all too tardy in discovering the old one and wish you loads of success here!
Posted 18 Feb 2008 at 7:08 am ¶Please let me take tis opportunity to express my appreciation for you for having launched a most welcome thrust in the ongoing battle to hold onto the sounds of old Beijing. There is at least latent recognition in official circles that the sound of two elderly Beijingers talking to each other IS a National Treasure. An added benefit is that they are are far less inclined to drop the localisms in our earshot than are many of those younger Beijingers,frequently teachers and language exchange persons.Too many of them are prone to drastically prune their language for the presumed benefit of those not born in Beijing.After a lifetime of close associations with Bostonians,Parisians,and Beijingers…….that is a gift horse into whose eyes I have too often looked!!! The regional accents,and distinctive usages of all these yield a delightfully unique flavor to their places of origin. They brighten the lives of those who live there,those who vistit—–sometimes just to hear them—-and fill the bank accounts of those locals who benefit from tourism…..and from those who benift from having their neighborhood known as a spot with local charm! Cordially, Ken Grey
Hahaha! Priceless. I failed the contest not to turn down my volume before I even read of its existence. “First Tone as Fog Horn.” I think that’s going to keep me laughing for a while.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 9:06 pm ¶That video is horrific! And the first thing about the significant other, while normally it’s a bad for your Chinese the person in my class with the best Chinese has a Chinese girlfriend and they never speak English together, only speak Chinese. I suppose it depends on how good their English is.
Re: mandarin teachers. I found when I started out learning Chinese properly in the UK, the teachers weren’t a problem it’s just that the books were really not very good. I don’t know if it’s just the book we did but the vocab was organised in a counter-intuitive way so we knew how to say 阿拉伯语(found in lesson 5) about 8 lessons before we learnt how to say my name is. We did have to learn about 50 words per week then(just simplified!) but compared to the 200 odd per week we’re doing now that seems like a breeze. The problem with the words even 15 weeks into the course is that they also weren’t grouped very well. When I learnt French and Italian we did a lot of grouped words like learning a lot of food together, animals, colours etc. which definitely makes it easier to remember rather than loads of isolated vocab. The problem I find with my books this year(apart from speaking book which I think is very useful Chinese) is that the texts are designed for a grammar point and not really in order of useful vocab.
In China apart from my 辅导 who is amazing there are a few teachers who use the method that you say. My teacher yesterday was telling us how to recite the text in unison ‘those who read slow read quicker, those who read quickly read slower’ as if reading in unison was the best possible thing. Like it’s possible in a foreign language site-reading something at a faster speed if you’re a slow reader, I’ve got enough of a problem site-reading in English!
Posted 08 Mar 2008 at 7:38 pm ¶Wow…I was laughing for a few minutes straight when I heard the foghorn.
Posted 06 Jul 2008 at 11:33 pm ¶Your audio excerpt is hilarious – thanks! However, I just lost 8 minutes of my life watching the full youtube video, and all positive emotion has been reversed
.. Hey, for anyone interested, also check out these: free Mandarin lessons. Very useful, but maybe not so entertaining.
Posted 18 Aug 2008 at 2:12 pm ¶fantastic video! and very helpful post. I have to agree wholeheartedly with point 5, from personal experience. My spouse uses the “foghorn method” when she tries to get me to say lü correctly. I’m in China and I now have a reason to thank the #GFW for blocking youtube.
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