Yesterday I was reading about the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, saying that in five years Chinese will dominate internet content. Then it turns out that today is the 40th anniversary of the internet and that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, will soon allow domain names to be written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet. So that means instead of writing Google.cn we will get to write www.谷歌.cn (or will it be www.谷歌.中国?), and let’s not forget about Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean, Thai, and all the other written languages that make human civilization awesome. I’m so pumped for this. It’s going to be that much more incentive for American kids to learn a foreign language, especially if most of the internet will be written in 汉字 anyway.
Learning Chinese
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Who needs the Latin alphabet anyways?
Friday, October 30th, 2009How do you say gourmand in Chinese?
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Monsieur, qu’est-ce que tu veux manger?
I despise the term foodie. You may have heard it before, it’s that of-the-moment word used to describe everyone from four star chefs and food bloggers (even those explaining how to make stir-fried tofu) to people that like to cook at home and watch Top Chef. Back in the ’90s we didn’t seem to have such an insipid term, of course we didn’t have as much of a love of everything food related then, either. At the house of my childhood, with it’s wonderfully overflowing bookcases of classic cookbooks (think: The Joy of Cooking, The Moosewood Cookbook, The Silver Palette Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, etc.), the word gourmet was the only term I ever learned for those people that truly love to cook and eat. And, lets be honest, gourmet never seemed to be the proper term for a thirteen year old boy trying (and failing) to make puff pastry by hand in July. The word still fits me like an oversize suit tailored for a French aristocrat, perhaps one made for the the likes of Curnonsky.
Before I get to the Chinese language bit I must confess my absolute love of restaurant reviews, which is how I got started writing this post in the first place. There was a time, about the time of that puff pastry debacle, when I loved to eat out. There’s a spectacle to eating out at a nice restaurant, much like going to see a great play on opening night. There’s an excitement to it, people look good, the table is clean and bright, everyone is nice to you, and you don’t really know how everything will turn out until the end of the show. I just loved it. I’m still reminded of those days when I read this blog.
Since my days as a teenager dining snob and wannabe French chef (I was way too messy to even be trying to achieve such a status), my thoughts have changed. College taught me, in no uncertain terms, how expensive it can be to dine out when your parents aren’t paying and I also discovered that when you come home after months spent far away you really don’t want a break from your mother’s cooking, you want it night after night. Living in a dorm, then in off-campus housing, and finally in Chinese apartments my idea of what makes for a good home cooked meal also changed from my younger days, now all I want is something flavorful and easy that uses cheap ingredients in smart ways. Even though these days I really don’t eat out much, unless it’s a special meal, I still love to read restaurant reviews. I love to read about food, it’s anendlessly enjoyable pastime. Unfortunately, this habit has often put in in contact with the dreaded f-word I just mentioned.
With the rise of the internet I am no longer limited to the New York Times dining section when I look for reviews to read. I can read and even listen (podcasts!) to restaurant reviews all the time now, and I do. My Google Reader list of food blogs and the like is over 30 deep right now and will no doubt only grow. For the record (and in my opinion), the best restaurant reviews are: the New Yorker’s Tables for Two (you can pop them like candy), Jonathan Gold’s spoken reviews on the Good Eats podcast (he does great written reviews for the LA Weekly as well), and anything coming out of the New York Times. A quick note about the Times. While Frank Bruni, the eponymous example of what a restaurant critic should be, may be no longer writing reviews (check out this great dinner conversation with him on Eater) I know that the paper will continue its tradition of great food writing. By the way, this is only the top of my list, but I didn’t write this post to recommend places to read restaurant reviews so let’s move on.
The other day, while I was wasting time at work by reading reviews of restaurants that I will never get to visit, I came upon the term foodie in a review. As I said earlier, I really dislike this term (this book bothers me to no end) and as it turns out I’m not alone in my feelings. Sitting at my desk I began to think about the other offerings there are in the English language for a person that loves to cook and eat: gourmand, gastronome, gourmet, epicurean, epicure, cook, etc. But then it hit me that I don’t live in an English speaking country. I had never bothered to figure out what terms Chinese people use to describe folks like me and the gourmands and chefs I look up to. So I quickly opened up my Chinese dictionary and clicked over to some online dictionaries to see what I could dig up that would do the job without sounding so damn cutesy. As is often the case with Chinese food related vocabulary, the offerings were far more extensive than what you would find in any European language, even French.
The words I discovered basically fall into two categories: people who have discerning taste in food and gluttons. The words for glutton being far more interesting linguistically. One of the things that I find fascinating about the Chinese language is the way its words can be very practical and formulaic but can also be highly poetic and grounded in stories from China’s history. An example of the former category includes words such as the first on this list, 美食家, which as a math equation would read: beautiful + food + expert. That’s easy enough to understand. On the other end of the spectrum are words that are highly poetic, metaphorical and/or related to China’s past. One word I recently learned in this vein stands for solar eclipse, 日食, which comes out as “eating the sun.” While all this diversity can make one feel that learning the language is an insurmountable task, lets not even talk about the characters, it also means that there will always be a new and interesting part of the language for you to learn no matter how long you live. And that’s comforting knowledge my friends. So here it is, how to say gourmand in Chinese:
I love Anki, my SRS
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009What is a SRS? It is a spaced repetition system and it is one reason why I will someday be fluent in Chinese. I’ve been meaning to write a little something about it but it wasn’t until I discovered this fascinating article from Wired magazine about the man who first programmed this memorization tool, Piotr Wozniak, that I actually put in the time to do so. The article is really worth a read for anyone interested in language or memory. Go ahead and read it right now.
Some people say memorization isn’t that important anymore, I’ve had college professors tell me that. These professors have had many years of students come through their classrooms who just crammed narrow facts into their brains for exams only to forget them after a week, understandably the professors wanted to make sure we didn’t forget the big ideas, methods of argument, large trends, etc. This, they assured us, is the real value of a college education. If you forget a date you can always look it up but the ability to structure an argument, deduce an overarching theme, write an essay or form an experiment – that’s the important stuff. Yes, but in the real world memorization is still undeniably important. Nowhere has this been more apparent and more frustrating to me than in learning languages. If it was easy we’d all be picking up Italian by reading La Divina Comedia and no one would care about having a national language.
Anyway you look at it language is a massive amount of memorization. And it’s a good thing that we go the lengths to memorize tens of thousands of words and all the other stuff that comes with learning a language. Like learning the multiplication tables, having a crutch like a calculator or a dictionary will not save you, you still have to go through the difficult and time consuming work of memorization. The old method of writing out flashcards and studying them simply doesn’t work. Sure cramming flashcards the night before a test can help you do well the next day, but unless you do that everyday you’re going to forget the information. When learning a language you cannot study the more than 15,000 words you need to know to become fluent everyday. The problem of not knowing what you should be studying when you should be studying it is what screws us over. A SRS uses computers to tell us what to study when we need to study it, following well know facts on the human brain’s retention of information. It’s a tool you want to have on your side.
Because our ability to recall a piece of information we have learned is destined to decline over time we need to be reminded of the information to fully memorize it, not everyday after we learn it, but spaced out by intervals that utilize our time in the most efficient way possible so as to achieve the greatest rewards. Spaced repetition does this. This handy chart explains the SRS method of memorization for one piece of information over 60 days:
Living where the language you are learning is used is kind of like the SRS method. If you buy a cup of coffee everyday in Italian pretty soon you will have that Italian language knowledge for that occasion down pat. However living in a foreign country will not necessarily improve you language skills in all the ways it should be improving. Paul Child, the ever-loving husband of Julia Child, brings up a common language learning problem in Mrs. Child’s memoir:
“It’s easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don’t bring you oysters.”
This has been a constant issue with me while learning Chinese. Sure, if I was ordering a beer over the phone the person listening might mistake me for a native Chinese speaker, but that’s not fluency – not even close. The fact is that living in China, or any language immersion environment, is not the be all end all for language learning. If that was so then why can people live in a country for double-digit years and never learn the language? Learning Chinese takes a lot of work, wherever you are learning it. For me I started with traditional classes, which many question the use of though I have always found helpful to a degree, and now I’m studying completely on my own. Without an SRS (I use Anki, which is great for Macs) this would be very difficult and slow.
These days I live in Shanghai and work in an office almost entirely staffed by Chinese people and this environment provides me with many chances to practice all the aspects of Chinese (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Nevertheless, I’d probably be losing as much of my Chinese ability as I was gaining if I didn’t supplement my education by studying with Anki and other sources (reading Chinese books, watching Chinese movies, HSK test prep books, writing, etc.) Since I do all my office work on a computer using Anki everyday is relatively easy and there’s really no reason that anyone who routinely uses a computer couldn’t also use it to memorize almost anything. Whatever I decide to learn next, whether it’s law or the the Latin names of orchid species, I now have a tool that can make that possible. I gotta tell ya it’s comforting having a piece of software that can grant you knowledge like this.
Granted it’s not a dream come true, it still takes a fair amount of heavy and consistent effort to achieve results. This is a problem for any human being due to our lazy procrastinating nature. I try and make it enjoyable by using Anki in small chunks throughout the day. I usually do 3 ten minute sessions a day along with one big 20 minute session. If I forget a day I don’t sweat it and if I have the energy to power on for an hour of study I do that. Everyone uses a SRS differently and that’s as it should be. My secret is to set a tiny goal when I sit down to study my Anki, usually just a period of study time, and complete that goal without getting distracted. You do want to try and avoid SRS burnout. Adding Chinese words and sentences to my deck of things to study is now part of my learning method, and besides it’s always going to be easier to add flashcards than to actually study them.
I wrote this post because I want to spread the word. Like a Christian missionary in a foreign land I am following a system that has worked for me and I tell you because I think it will work for you too. Unlike a Christian missionary I love to worship false idols and engage in homosexual love, but that’s neither here nor there. In an odd way language learning is like religion, they’re both deeply individual activities (ehhh…). What works for me may not work for you, though in my experience SRS systems are one of the most universal methods for learning languages. We all forget things, right?
I first heard about using an SRS to learn a language from the inspiring language blog: All Japanese All the Time. Though if you look you’ll find people singing its praises all over the internet. Still, I hadn’t heard of it until this year and I’m not alone. Out of the 50 or so American teachers I worked with last year (all college graduates) none of those I talked to had heard of it before. I just wish I had use it during college, would have made life easier. Three blogs I’ve found that talk about using a SRS to learn Chinese, which may interest you, are: Sinosplice, Global Maverick, and Doubting to Shuo (who wrote a nice little review of Anki). These blogs (even the one about Japanese) are recommended for anyone wishing to read about learning Chinese.
As a final note I want to again heartily recommend Anki to anyone learning Chinese, Japanese, or….. anything! It’s pretty, works well, is entirely free, and has such a popular group of followers that it is constantly improving. Anki’s website has helpful demonstration videos as well that make getting started a cinch. There are other SRS programs out there but I’ve never tried them. Use the internet and find them if you’re interested, I’m happy with Anki so I don’t think I’ll bother. Now, I think I should go and do another Anki session. Peace.
Teach Your Children Mandarin
Monday, May 18th, 2009John over at the always enjoyable Sinosplice blog (a must for students of Chinese) just wrote a post about an interesting visual representation of the world’s language speakers. It was produced by IBM’s “Many Eyes” project.
You readers are, of course, intelligent attractive people so you no doubt already knew that learning Mandarin was the way to go. You’re never to old to start! Right now I’m revamping my Mandarin studies, as I stay in China longer it’s really becoming necessary knowledge. Plus, with my awesome new internship in Shanghai starting August 1st (in an all Chinese speaking office) I plain need to keep my Mandarin up. I’m trying to follow that classic Maoism pasted on classroom walls all over China: 好好学习 天天向上. Study hard and make progress everyday.
Positive Reinforcement
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
I have to tutor English in an hour to eight students, before then I still need to get dinner. Since I finished my regular classes this afternoon I’ve done little more than buy more minutes for my phone, clean my apartment, buy bananas, and watch a pirated movie. I am more than a little frustrated with myself for not spending more time studying Chinese. The excuses come my mind easily but I know deep down I need to be doing more. While it is true that living in China automatically improves your Chinese, I have certainly noticed this in the time I’ve been here, how much it improves depends on one’s resolve. One of my most important goals that I gave myself for this year in China was to bring my Chinese up to a new level. I was reminded of how important this is to a foreigner trying to make a life in China while reading the wonderful Chinese history blog: Jottings from the Granite Studio. One entry, Thoughts on learning Chinese, struck me as the perfect way to explain the need to study Chinese:
Fifty years ago, Fairbanks and his students moved the field of Chinese history forward with their insistence on fluency in Classical Chinese a prerequisite of study. His students and their students also demanded a fluency of a sort in modern Chinese sufficient to read and decipher the occasional Chinese journal article or monograph. It was IUP Chinese. Great for discussing 封建社会制度 (Feudal society) but not so much for buying toothpaste or hanging out after hours with your Chinese colleagues. Fluency in the spoken language, for the Western historian, was a parlor trick—useful for presentations but to aspire to native fluency was a low priority and some even considered such a devotion to pure language study a waste of time.
Now I can’t imagine a member of my generation of China researchers, whatever the field, who does not aspire to near native fluency in spoken and written Chinese. No longer a luxury, it is a necessity and the number of foreigners whose Chinese is near native level has increased exponentially in the past few years. It’s not just Da Shan (a famous Canadian on Chinese TV who has perfect Mandarin) anymore. A whole new generation of young China hands has realized that it’s not enough to simply jump off the plane in China and exclaim, “I come from the West. Behold me.” In this century, China and Chinese are starting to request that we, the Westerners, deal with them on their own terms and those terms are frequently written in hanzi. Whether in business or academia, the Westerner who proclaims his relative ignorance of the language as irrelevant to his endeavors is increasingly an anachronism.
