Tales of the Waxed Cat: Learning Chinese on the Web

[prusik]

What do you do when you realize your story is full of unmitigated stupid? Why you check out two tools for learning Chinese on the Web that you haven't tried before, of course. (Yes, I now also have some ideas for making my story full of merely mitigated stupid instead. Baby steps.)

For lots of people my opinion will not be useful. I didn't bother registering for Chinese 101 in college because they obviously would not have let me take it. I would have been at near parity with everyone else when it came to reading and writing and way beyond them in speech and listening comprehension. What I really needed in college was "Chinese for the Functionally Illiterate" that would mainstream me into the 2nd year classes. Some colleges actually have this now, but they call the students "Advanced Beginners." (And to be fair, not all advanced beginners are functionally illiterate.)

I've worked on shoring up my weaknesses and becoming more generally fluent with ChinesePod for over a year now. Funnily enough, having a Chinese dialogue and a transcript show up in my pod feed every weekday means that I will study, whereas my attempts to make it through textbooks have not been nearly so successful. (Well, for a while, I was oddly capable of discussing China's rapidly changing economic situation and oppressive government, but little else.) However, I don't think ChinesePod is intended to make people better readers, and probably not better writers.

(One of the interesting quirks of Chinese is that your listening vocabulary, your speaking vocabulary, your reading vocabulary, and your writing vocabulary may not match. Just because you can recognize a character on the page, doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write it when you're not looking at it. Just because you understand it when you hear it doesn't mean you'll recognize it on the page.)

One tool I tried out yesterday helps with the writing, Skritter, and it is made of awesome. (Ok, it's made of Flash, which is not awesome. You know what I mean.) In concept, it's pretty simple. The website gives you a word written in pinyin along with a definition, you write the word in Chinese inside a box. However, it corrects your stroke order and stroke style. It keeps track of your progress. (i.e., if you fail, the word will come back later.) It has vocabulary lists already built for the most common textbooks. Yes, this is flash cards for the 21st century.

If you have a graphics tablet, a tablet PC or some other internet capable device that runs Flash and has a touch screen, it is even more awesome. You can write the character as you actually would with a pen (rather than mousing it). It may even be pressure sensitive (not that it really matter here since this isn't calligraphy). Moreover, their user interface is set up such that you never need to use a keyboard.

I naturally draw some strokes backwards because I'm left handed. This really confuses certain handwriting recognition engines, like the iPhone one. Skritter recognizes that I've drawn the stroke backwards and calls me on it. This is good.

They're free for now because they're in beta, but I would totally pay for this. OK, within reason. They're not doing anything I can't do by myself. However, the immediate feedback and the bookkeeping are worth money.

The second tool I tried was merely fine, Popup Chinese. On first listen, they sound like a ChinesePod clone. However, ChinesePod, based in Shanghai, is determined to make you sound like a neutral accented newsreader and Popup Chinese, based in Beijing, is content to do everything in a Beijing accent. (There's probably a North vs. South thing going on there.) ChinesePod takes an immersive approach to language acquisition. Popup Chinese takes a textbook approach. ChinesePod intends to push you towards conversational fluency. Popup Chinese prepares you for standardized texts of Chinese language skill.

(Keep in mind that I'm not convinced that either website, by itself, can actually make you fluent. If you pay ChinesePod a lot of money, their teachers will call you up for personalized tutoring. That, I'm sure would do it. However, a lot of money, and conversational fluency is not my biggest worry.)

I'm not really comparing fairly because I've been a basic member of ChinesePod for over a year whereas I spent yesterday listening to a month of Popup Chinese podcasts. I've tried the premium features of ChinesePod via their free trial and decided that I only wanted the glossed PDF transcripts. I haven't started my Popup Chinese free trial yet. (It's a one week trial and this coming week is not the week for free trials of anything.)

I didn't actually learn anything in the month of podcasts I listened to yesterday. The non-advanced podcasts were too easy for me (except possibly for some vocabulary). The advanced podcasts are a crap shoot. Either I understand them just fine, or I'm just not going to get it without access to the for pay section. I love that they podcast short stories, but I'm never going to understand them fully without seeing them written out. (I believe they provide annotation via popups. Hence their name.) Also, some of the podcasts explicitly depend on access to the for pay section. (e.g., there is an audio portion and a written portion to the lesson.)

(Note: In fairness, ChinesePod no longer makes all of their lessons available for free, only the Newbie ones. I think this is in part because none of their lessons assumed access to their website. They don't make money if no one uses their website. I understand the business decision, but in a way, it's too bad. I would have never become a member if all I could have accessed for free were the Newbie lessons.)

In any case, I will activate the Popup Chinese free trial some time to see what's inside. In my situation, there's no point to listening to their podcast without access to the for pay section. (I don't know if that holds true for everyone.) However, the premium features may be worth the money, especially if they can help my reading fluency.

Either way, I will continue to be a paying member of ChinesePod. In the past weeks, the words "cyborg", "zombie", and "vampire" have been on their vocabulary list. How can you not love that?

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

One of the interesting quirks of Chinese is that your listening vocabulary, your speaking vocabulary, your reading vocabulary, and your writing vocabulary may not match. Just because you can recognize a character on the page, doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write it when you're not looking at it. Just because you understand it when you hear it doesn't mean you'll recognize it on the page.

But this is true of all languages to a degree. I can speak French but can't read at anything close to the level I speak it. I can babble in Spanish but have no idea how those words are spelled.

I think ChinesePod sounds great. I don't listen to podcasts at all, but a language podcast might change my mind.

[prusik.livejournal.com]

Ha! I knew someone was going to say that. I'm not disputing that this is true to some degree for all languages. What I'm saying (and others who've studied the Chinese have said (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)) is that Chinese exhibits this to such an extraordinary degree that it falls in another category.

I think a good analogy is ADD. Everyone exhibits ADD-like symptoms these days. We're in a multi-tasking, short attention span society. That doesn't mean there is no such thing as ADD or that it's not worth pointing. The people who actually have ADD are those who exhibit those symptoms to a profound degree. I'm not saying that Chinese is unique in those vocabularies not matching. I'm saying that Chinese exhibits the phenomenon to a profound degree.

And, BTW, I'm not talking about comprehension as you seem to be. I'm talking about basic identification of symbols.

Unlike French or Spanish, Chinese has no set pronunciation rules that allow you to look at a character and work out how to pronounce it. You have to memorize every one. (Yes, sometimes you get a hint, but not always, you still have to recognize the hint and sometimes the hint will lead you to a rhyming word instead, or how it had been pronounced centuries ago.) In French or Spanish, if you see a word on a page, you can make a guess as to how to pronounce a word and be right comparatively essentially all the time. This is how I get through foreign languages in choir. My French and German diction are fine for choral work. I can pronounce the words on the page accurately, even though I don't speak a word of either language. This isn't about understanding what I'm reading. This is about finding the right sound that goes with each symbol.

I realize that the French are justly proud of their spelling. However, French has an alphabet. There is a contained number of symbols with which you can create words. Chinese has potentially an infinite number. Yes, people are still creating new characters, most of them are names. Looking up characters in a Chinese dictionary is like filing your taxes (and you have to do it for every character you don't recognize).

Likewise, Chinese has no set rules that allow you to hear a character and work out how to write it. Part of it is that the language has an insane number of homophones. Part of it is that the writing system is completely divorced from the spoken language. In French and Spanish, there are rules that map various sounds back to letters of the alphabet. No, those languages are not entirely phonetic, but you can establish a correlation and get close.

In both those languages, you can leverage your skills in one area to improve in another. The strategies people use to achieve literacy in other languages don't work for Chinese. e.g., you can't "sound out" Chinese text to use your listening comprehension to improve your reading comprehension.

I'm not saying that learning languages that not Chinese is easy, of course. Learning any language is hard. However, learning Chinese poses challenges that you don't run into when learning languages that have alphabets.

(BTW, wrt to Chinese, I have it easier than a lot of other people. I grew up with listening to tonal distinctions and speaking using them. I grew up listening to the syntax and grammar. Most of my issues with Chinese have to do with sheer memorization of vocabulary, and writing characters in the correct stroke order and style.)

As for ChinesePod, I like it a lot. I don't know that anyone ever becomes fluent listening to it though.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I am always happy to be Captain Obvious!

I had realized Chinese was in a whole different category of hard to learn, but I had not realized there was no way to pronounce something without knowing how to pronounce it, or reverse engineer anything! Very cool, very interesting.

I am not going to learn Chinese of any variety, but I still want to improve my German and I have a yearning to learn Swedish. So maybe podcasts will be a good delivery vehicle for me. Cassette tapes and DVDs never were.

[prusik.livejournal.com]

I think podcasts are a terrific vehicle for learning languages. A small chunk shows in your podcatcher every day. For some reason, that makes it much easier for me to stick with it. (I'm all about using technology to compensate for my shortcomings. It's the same reason why I do on-line bill pay.)

German and Swedish sound like they'd be lots of fun. There must be podcasts that teach them out there.

[bmlg.livejournal.com]

Skritter does sound like double-dyed yard-and-a-half-wide awesome.

What I found with European languages is that I'd be a better receiver than transmitter. I could read and hear with pretty good understanding, but speaking and writing were slow and clumsy. One doesn't get to make those intuitive leaps when _constructing_ a sentence.
Then with Chinese and Japanese, I had a division between reading and hearing, and a different division between writing and reading. Eventually I pretty much gave up on ever being a semi-proficient speaker, but held hopes that I could be understood with writing in Chinese. Long ago, that was.

[prusik.livejournal.com]

I think the joke is: Learning Chinese is a five year lesson in humility. After five years, you won't have learned any Chinese, but you will have learned humility.

My Chinese is definitely better now than when I started. However, I started way more than five years ago. I still can't reliably read a newspaper article and my handwriting looks like that of a third grader. (To be fair, my English handwriting looks like that of a third grader too.)

The great boon of modern technology for Chinese though is that Chinese electronic dictionaries are so much easier to use than Chinese dead tree dictionaries. If nothing else, when you stop to look up a character, you won't have completely lost your train of thought by the time you find it.

[bmlg.livejournal.com]

There's an uncomfortable amount of truth in that. I do still love the written language (with a sneaking fondness for the older characters) but it's an unrequited love.
And now I wish we'd had electronic dictionaries back when. Darn kids, you get all the cool stuff.