Mandarin Chinese Resources

Just like I did for Latin a short while ago, I'd like to give an overview of what resources I've been using so far for my very early stages of Mandarin. However, I need to expand the list with some decent content which I have yet to find. My goal is mainly spoken Mandarin, so learning the characters will have to take a back seat. The disadvantage is that I'll need to convert everything to pinyin which isn't always reliable because sometimes the exact same character is pronounced in different ways and with different meanings (of course!). However, this is just something I'll have to deal with.

THE BIG ONE: Assimil's Chinese with Ease (vol. 1 & 2)

I'm using the edition from 2005 which is the latest I believe - check it out at Assimil's site. You might find them cheaper to order from here and here if you decide to get them. Although the book says it was printed in 2005, it feels a little dated, as though the content had just been revised and brought up to date rather than being completely rewritten in 2005. I could be wrong about that, of course. In any case, although from just looking at the book one might get the impression that the book is somehow of a lower quality, that would be wrong. I've enjoyed the lessons so far, the audio quality is excellent and consistent (unlike the Latin edition!) and I feel like the pace is quite good. I can imagine being able to get through it at a pace of one lesson per day if I had just a little more time and focus. I see no reason why it was split into 2 volumes, except to either make more money or keep the book size more manageable like they used to. I got a good deal on them both when I bought them about 3 years ago, so I can't complain. I do appreciate the older style books precisely because they are smaller I can pop them into my pocket more easily and they have the built-in red cloth bookmark which I think is great. Of course, once I start doing the active phase (if I do it the way you're supposed to) it means I'll need to carry around both books with me all the time anyway!

There are some negatives with the audio, some of which were shared with Le Latin actually - no one seems to have bothered to tell the producer or the voice actors who is supposed to say what lines so if someone in a dialogue gets two numbered lines in a row, things can go haywire. I just did lesson 44 in this book which is a dialogue between a butcher and a shopper. It's all going smoothly until the butcher is supposed to say 2 numbered sentences in a row but the voice actors inexplicably swap on the second line and for the rest of the dialogue the shopper becomes the butcher and vice versa. Bizarre! I believe there's some of this somewhere in Le Latin, although it's hard to tell because sometimes it feels as though no matter what all of the voice actors are crammed into every dialogue. It's great to have a variety of speakers (well, four in both cases), but all in every dialogue? It overloads my primitive foreign language speech recognition circuitry!

Another comment that applies to both is that they are lacking in humour. However, the "humour" that was in New German with Ease was often so wide of the mark as to be utterly perplexing and certainly not funny, so I can live without out it in these books and don't count it as a criticism.

As for the text of the book, it doesn't aim to teach you the characters but it does show them with pinyin underneath throughout the whole book which has been allowing me to learn a few without trying too hard, which is great as learning the characters is currently not a goal for me. One review I read did comment that the Chinese text contains a lot of exclamation marks for no apparent reason, which I hadn't noticed so much before but now I can't help but notice. It's not really a big deal, though it'd be good to remove from a future edition. The typesetting and editing are both very good. I've only noticed the occasional error on a tone mark, etc. This is in stark contrast to New German with Ease which was riddled with type-setting errors and the inclusion of random bits of the original French version of the text splattered throughout the English version. Lucky the course itself was so good!

I'm almost halfway through the two books now, and although I haven't made the big effort I should be to talk (although I have had a few short chats), I feel like it is starting to sink in a bit, at least to recognise words that I know, which is an important attribute!

Verdict (based on only being half done and not having done any official test): RECOMMENDED!

Web Dictionaries

I haven't checked out heaps, but http://www.nciku.com has been good so far and has a nice interface. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Call in the next 20 seconds and you get a free set of steak-knives! No, wait, that's not true, but if you are looking at a Chinese character somewhere away from your computer (let's call it "the real world") and you want to know the meaning, you can scrawl an approximation of the character into the box on Nciku's homepage and it will show you a list of possible characters that match your scrawl. It's been really good whenever I've needed to use it (which hasn't been very often so far) and my drawings were terrible, so it's very robust! I've also used ChineseTools.eu for measure words, although Nciku gives you these too. There are usually a few and I don't know enough to pick the best ones always so this is still a confusing aspect for me, but I try not to worry about it too much for now.

Understanding Radicals

Until a few days ago I still had my anki list for mandarin set to "recognise" as well as produce. This really, really slowed down my anki reviews. Since learning to recognise the characters is not part of my initial plan, I have dropped this for now. However, while I was trying to do this I decided that I needed to breakdown the characters into their components to improve my chances of remembering them. To do this, I used the excellent tool at Hanzicraft. See an example here. You can enter the component parts separately and see if that helps you make sense of the characters any better. There are some books on this topic and other resources which I'll look into in more detail whenever (if ever?) I get round to focusing more on the characters.

Online Radio and Podcasts

I don't have anything here yet. Something the equivalent quality of, and with equally interesting material, as DRadio, SWR2 or even DeutscheWelle, would be greatly appreciated if anyone wants to let me know in the comments below! I'm still in the early stages so I'll worry more about this later.

Past and Present Workmates

Mandarin speakers are really out and about in the world these days, and especially so in Sydney. In fact, as I've mentioned before, especially so in my current team which has two native Mandarin speakers out of five people (including me!) and one of the others understands it a little (he's a native Cantonese speaker). I also made good friends with a Mandarin speaker while I worked in Germany and I plan on practising on him a bit. I just recently sent him a short email which had 2 simple sentences in Mandarin. Sure, one of them was based heavily on the dialogue from Chinese with Ease which I had been reading most recently, but what better way to practise what you know! My two Mandarin workmates are most helpful - teaching me new words, correcting my tones, providing me with Chinese movies with English subtitles and not laughing at me too much. I tried out my first "original" sentence just two days ago on one of them, via instant message:

请来吧

I thought it just said "please come", which it does, but he laughed at me and said "I suppose you mean you want me to come and help you". Nice :-) He suggested instead:

有空来一下吗?

which means something like "have you got a moment?". It's literally more like "are [you] free to come a little?". When I told my other Mandarin colleague this story, she said that what I said originally makes sense and that she thought the second would be too long to remember. So, she's just being nice I guess.

I think as I learn more and more words and phrases, conversations with my colleagues will start to form more and more part of how I learn. They're very keen to teach their language and share their culture, which is awesome.

That's all for now. I'll post more (useful) resources as I find them. I'll also try to come up with a more testable goal than just finishing the Assimil course, but I haven't figured out for now just what that will be. Any suggestions will be welcome. My next post will probably be on a topic in German, just to mix things up.

Update: 25/03/2013

Hey readers!

There are a few things I've been looking to post recently but time has conspired against me getting any of them out yet. However, I don't want to go too long without a progress update so here it is.

Mandarin

I finished lesson 42 in Chinese with Ease a few days ago. I haven't done more since because I wanted to bring my latin studies up to par with my Chinese ones and also because I don't do as much on the weekends normally because I don't spend as much time in the car, and when I do, it's with my family, so listening intently is right out. I find some lessons much much harder than others. I think this is a combination of just certain features causing me problems and the way I approach particular lessons. My "ideal" day in the early stages of German when using "German with Ease" was to listen several times to my new lesson in the morning while making breakfast, then reading the dialogue a couple of times so that I had some idea of all the new words and to then spend the rest of the day re-listening and trying to shadow, and reading more where necessary. However, these days I make my breakfast the night before work to speed up my departure in the morning and eat it at my desk at work, which takes away that opportunity. I try to do as much reading as I can before leaving for work and the rest I do while stuck in traffic, but still, it's not as "ideal".

Anyway, I managed to get the last few words from the first 14 lessons into my Anki list (this process is a long way behind for both Latin and Chinese because it is SOOOO slow) and have reviewed them a bit. In general, since it's become harder to do Anki reviews on my phone thanks to the new version not working well on my phone's browser anymore.

As for conversations, I've started trying to say a few sentences in the morning to one of my co-workers. We had a short one recently where I learnt how to say that I hadn't slept enough, or that I had slept well, or at all. Pretty useful! Obviously, I need to work on tones and vocab to make these conversations stretch out 

somehow beyond a few seconds!

By the way, I still don't have any good sources for chinese podcasts for either various levels of stuff or the news, so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!

Latin

I just today finished lesson 42 of Assimil's "Le Latin". Lesson 41 was actually a reasonably close quote from a work by Cicero. Pretty exciting day! It's going OK, although I don't have all the tenses clear in my head. The forms as well as the actual usages. I need to work on this more. I am at least getting to know the noun declensions a little "by assimilation", so that's a good start. Although I've only done 42 lessons in each language, I just worked out that today is the 84th day of the year which means that I've managed to average one lesson per day across the two languages which is an effort I'm pretty pleased with. I'm starting to give them both better focus when I do them which is helping. The year started out pretty horribly for me in other ways, so I like to think that at least I'm making some progress in some sort of goal this year. I also listened to a recent news podcast from Radio Bremen. I didn't really understand any of it except for the name of the previous pope, so it was a bit of a waste of time, but I enjoyed it anyway.

German

No real formal study, but I have found a tiny bit more time to read "Das Todeskreuz" and am now up to page 195. Also, without really trying, I managed to pretty much memorise Hitler's rant from that famous scene in Der Untergang. I think it might come in handy as a party trick some day. I did feel a lot more relaxed and flowing in my last Stammtisch which might have been a result of listening to the above rant and the spilt coffee scene from Mädchen Mädchen 2. Or I might have just felt relaxed that day and tomorrow I'll go backwards again. Who knows! If anyone else has an experience of using the above mentioned parallel translations, let us know in the comments.

Bininj Kunwok

No, I haven't officially added this one to my learning list for the year, but it keeps calling me all the same. I'm talking to the guy running the site for learning it that I mentioned before and hoping that I can help out in some way because I really believe in it, and I actually hope that I can help spread the word and make it used beyond its original target audience of people working in the areas of the northern territory where the language groups are spoken. WHY AREN'T AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLKIDS LEARNING SOME ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE? I just don't get it. I love european languages and I'm learning Mandarin myself, but we could really do with learning some more about our homeland's cultural heritage and making its original inhabitants feel that what they have is valued more widely. But like I said, I haven't added this language for now. I did however learn their word for goodbye: bobo. It's often been pointed out that Australians have at least a very basic knowledge of a variety of european languages but can't even say hello or goodbye in a single Aboriginal one. Let's change that now, hey?

bobo.

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

[UPDATE: I noticed a couple of small errors in the transcription which I've now fixed. Both of them came from the original subtitle file I used.]

Today I have another parallel translation of a short scene from a well-known German movie. This is a pretty big change in genre - from high-brow history drama to Mädchen Mädchen 2 (title for English release: "Girls on Top 2"), a fairly low brow comedy about three young female university students trying to find an apartment they can afford in Munich. Despite the location, it seems like largely standard German, though also reasonably colloquial. And instead of being a fairly clearly spoken monologue, this is a quickfire dialogue. Although some of the sounds are run together/lost in such fast speech (see below), it is simple language discussing a simple topic so you can focus on just getting used to German at top speed :-)

Here's the scene - let's hope the link still works!

My advice is to save the audio from the scene so that after you've watched it a couple of times you can then listen to it to your heart's content to get used to the sounds and speed more. As I mentioned in a previous post you can use the free version of RealPlayer to do this. If you hover your mouse over a video in YouTube it will provide you with the option to download it. If this doesn't work for you (it's stopped working for me recently for some reason) then you can open RealPlayer, click File->Open and paste the URL (the text from your browser's address bar) in there. RealPlayer will open the video and definitely give you the option to download it. After you've downloaded it, the Download Manager will have an option to convert to MP3. Click this and you're done :-)

OK, enough foreplay, here's the parallel translation of the scene:

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

I've tried to keep my notes and in-line commentary to a bare minimum - there's a lot more I could have said! I started with a subtitle file I found on the internet but, just as with Der Untergang, there were several discrepancies. I don't know how these arise. Either the subtitles are based on the script and the actors change that a little here and there, or the people doing the transcription just don't have enough time to spend on it (if you look at how much they get paid, you'll see why!). In any case, it gives me some initial work to do before I can do the translation. Where I clearly disagreed with the subtitles, I have just changed the text above. Where I also wasn't sure, I kept the original text from the subtitles. I also tried to stay more phonetically faithful to the original, trying to keep all the nervous stammering at the start, etc. In addition, I try to keep my translations as close to the German as possible to help maintain the mental links better.

I'm still getting used to this very high-speed and more colloquial German myself, so I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvement from you guys. Especially for the line that starts ""Ja, ich hab' nur gehört". I think I can just detect a faint trace of an "er" after "dass" and a "wird" squeezed in between "angegraben" and "die gerade", but that might be my imagination because I want to hear it to make the sentence nice and grammatical. It's altogether possible that this is just a standard kind of error in fast, everyday German. The more I do this sort of work, the more I should be able to explain here on the blog :-)

Finally, my "checkpoint" stuff: Chinese with Ease: currently trying to shadow the audio for lesson 38. The rest of it is done, but the audio seems hard at the moment and it contains a lot of new words. I'm sure it will come together soon if I give it proper attention. In Le Latin I've finished lesson 35 and I'm up to page 168 in "Das Todeskreuz", by which you can tell that I don't read it very often. There's a lot to cram in to a day - I got up at 6 this morning so I could enjoy the beautiful warm water at Bondi Beach before heading to work, but I did manage to read a few pages of "Das Todeskreuz" whilst stuck at traffic lights!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this scene and get some use out of the translation I've provided. Please leave any feedback in the comments below.

Jung in Europa

I just found something on Australian TV which might be of help to locals learning German, depending on their level. It's a short series called "Jung in Europa". I was obviously targeted at high school students of German, but I don't see why anyone couldn't get use out of it :-) It's obviously not an Australian production, but I haven't been able to find the episodes out there on the general "intarwebs". If anyone knows where it can be found online other than through the Australian ABC then let us know in the comments.

Anyway, here's a link for those interested:

http://www.abc.net.au/schoolstv/series/JUNGINEUROPA.htm

Look it up on ABC's iView to see past episodes.

Also, for French, Chinese or Italian learners, the ABC's "Schools TV" has some other similar programs for other languages so check them out if you're interested!

Tips to improve German listening skills (Hörverstehen)

How to improve on your listening skills is obviously going to depend on where you started. So far I can only really give solid tips on how to get to B2, although I am fairly confident that the same sort of idea can help push you beyond B2. I'm currently testing that hypothesis I guess, and you'll see a few more parallel translations posted on the blog as a result.

I've previously posted a bunch of parallel translations during my studies in German so far, the Hitler rant from Downfall being just being the latest in a long line :-) I actually started producing basic translations of the news with much help from Google Translate right back in the early days, so apart from using the material I have already provided, you can make some of your own for whatever material you enjoy. Just get the audio and transcript and match up your translation roughly on a line-by-line basis.

One important thing to do is to find a regular language partner. For the B2 exam, obviously doing all the preparatory listening exercises from an appropriate level of sample exam. Visit the Goethe website, select your appropriate level and look at the "Übungs- und Infomaterial" link. Doing progressively harder exercises until you can handle your target exam's hörverstehen, is a vital exercise. I have some tips on this spread throughout my blog - see here and here, for example.

Here are some pointers from my blog (in addition to this post's content, of course!):
Great website for German learners!
DW Slowly Spoken News 1-Dec-2010
Entenvolk!
DW News 15-01-2011
Desertec - Strom aus der Wüste
Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise

For some of the above you will need to find the audio on the relevant website. The audio links are usually contained in the parallel translation pdf itself. I don't know how far back the archives for DW's slowly-spoken news go, but hopefully they're all still available.

Don't get discouraged! When I first listened to the "slow" news I was totally shocked and couldn't imagine ever understanding it, let alone the full-speed news, but now I find the slow version just way too slow. It won't take long of this sort of parallel text work to pay off and have you understanding more and more of what you're listening to.

Also, if your language partners would let you, you could probably record your conversations and pick a sample which is mainly of them speaking. You would then write up a transcript (perhaps with their help) and work out a translation however you can. This might be useful, depending on circumstances. However, personally, I'm going to focus on snippets from movies for now :-)

My checkpoint update is: Chinese with Ease: just finished lesson 37, Le Latin: about to start lesson 34 and "Das Todeskreuz": page 164. I tried to sort of start a conversation in Mandarin with a work colleague today but it didn't work. She understood what I said and then just said that it was very good because she could understand it. Not quite the desired result!

Anyone with their own tips, feel free to post them in the comments.

Learning an Australian Aboriginal Language - some tips

I've mentioned earlier that I considered learning an Aboriginal  language (take it as read from now on that I'm referring to an indigenous Australian language when I say "Aboriginal"). I have made a good start for the year on Latin and Chinese so I don't want to divert my attention too much just yet, but I have recently found a very good site for learning a group of related dialects which I would like to share with you.

The site is called "Bininj Gunwok". The name is an umbrella term for a collection of mutually intelligible dialects in western Arnhem Land. Some preliminary description of the language group can be found on wikipedia.

I'm really attracted to the idea of learning a native Australian language; a language that was born in my home country! However, the available material is often very old, and native speakers are hard to come by, living as I do in Sydney which, as the sight of first white colonisation in Australia, has seen pretty much the complete destruction of all its native languages. There's really not even much recorded in them, which is a real shame.

The larger aboriginal languages do have some material for learners (as opposed to linguists) available for them, although I don't know much about its quality. Languages like Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri spring to mind. However, when you look into what's available for free online, you don't see much. There aren't even many youtube videos in Aboriginal languages. What I have found several times over is websites which have been started and promise to produce a lot of material for learning some particular Aboriginal language, but then that's about it. I suspect that a lot of what happens is that an enthusiastic community elder or new teacher comes up with an idea, they get funding, things get started and then either the funding isn't renewed due to extremely frequent changes of government policy at all levels (Australian governments like to play political games with indigenous issues, much like renewable energy policy) and/or the enthusiastic outsider moves on.

In any case, the Bininj Gunwok seems different. It has been regularly updated since February last year and they seem to be still actively adding audio content with translations. They also respond quite quickly to comments, as I found out recently, so the site, like the associated language, is definitely not moribund!

Once upon a time, in a lifetime far, far away, I travelled to Kakadu National Park in Australia. I love the Australian bush, but I really fell in love with the unique landscape of the Northern Territory. One of the big highlights for me was the bush tucker tour with Animal Tracks. I really encourage any readers to check out their website and one day visit them if you can. At the end of the day the tour guide jokingly offered me a job with me, and I seriously wanted to accept. Unfortunately, despite my enthusiasm, it really was only a joke, so I went back to my "normal" life of sitting in an air-conditioned box staring at a screen all day, but I've always hoped that one day, somehow, I would be able to do something like those tours as a job, if only for a few months a year. Alas, with a growing family and a mortgage, my priorities have had to change, but perhaps I'll get a chance to go again with the whole family one day :-)

What's my point in all this nostalgia? Well, one of the main language groups still widely spoken in the Kakadu National Park area (and further east into Arnhem Land) is, you guessed it, Bininj Gunwok.

Then, after all these years, I found the Bininj Gunwok website, which appears to be just about the best resource you could find for free to get started in an Aboriginal language. If you've ever had an interest to learn one of the original Australian languages, what better time than now with this amazing website only getting better all the time!

Australians consider learning another language to be such a massive task that they should never start, but learning at least a little of the language of one of the groups of First Australians would go a long way to showing a genuine interest in bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Several years of an Aboriginal language should be compulsory for Australian schoolkids I think. There are already 1+ billion people speaking Mandarin - the world doesn't need more ;-)

To kick off your learning on the website, the site admin pointed me to the following links:

1) Start with the first blog post here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/ma-garri-wokdi-gundjeihmi/
2) Some introductory grammar explanations can be found here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/07/ with detailed related audio here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/audio/
3) Sign up to the email vocab lesson which sends out a new word and describes it about twice a week.
4) Read the rest of the blog! There's plenty of audio there to get you started.

There's also a free e-book available through scribd and embedded here. I've been unable to download it as a PDF due to not being a premium member of scribd, but I'm trying to find out now if I can get access to the book without this. The book apparently has accompanying cassette tapes, though I don't know if the audio's been digitized yet. It'd be good if it could be made available too, I imagine.

Of course, what would be really awesome would be if someone could produce an Assimil-style course from zero to B2 level, but I don't see that happening any time soon!

One final note on this topic, there's also seems to be some decent material available for the Yolngu languages, including a radio program and, of course, the movie "Ten Canoes", but I don't think there's the same level of introductory material for beginners available for free on the internet.

To finish with a topic change, my own quick update is that my listening practice on Hitler's rant scene from "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") has been going pretty well and I plan on finding another scene soon to stretch myself. Probably from another war movie at first, but then I'll find something new. I haven't read too much more of my current German novel "Das Todeskreuz" - I'm up to about page 160. I have made some OK progress with Chinese with Ease - I just finished lesson 35! - and Le Latin, while slower, is up to lesson 32. I really haven't been adding much from these to my Anki lists of late. In fact, I've been struggling just to keep up with Anki at all ever since the website stopped working so well (due to the big "upgrade" kind of downgrading many features). I can now only do these updates at a computer, which sucks :-) I have also recently watched a movie in Mandarin, but with subtitles of course, but I didn't get a lot out of it because I had to have the volume quite low due to not wanting to wake up my daughters in the next room! But it was fun. And no, no conversations in Mandarin yet. I'll see what I can do soon.

再见！
Vale!
Tschau!