Understanding a Foreign Language

I sometimes get asked what it's like to understand a foreign language.

It just occurred to me that the process is something like listening to familiar music on better and better quality headphones- progressively you hear things that you didn't even know were there before. And then you finally understand the lyrics, and can't quite imagine the time when you didn't understand them.

That's the best way I can describe it.

Lust and Caution

When I was taking formal classes of Chinese as a second language, the approach to a new text of any sort was usually one of caution. It seems to me that it's because the use of 'strategies' in the classroom. It invariably involved a person by person recitation of the text, and since it's often hard (especially as a beginner) to get the reading right of a new Sinograph, there was a tense atmosphere during the process. Who was going to be the unlucky person who got dealt a new character that they didn't have the time to find out how to pronounce? Conversely, you felt lucky when you could recite a paragraph which consisted of no unknown words, or at least unknown pronounciations.

There's two big problems that result out of this pedagogy. Firstly, unfamiliar Sinographs become associated with tension and embarrasment. Some might argue that this will encourage people to 'know their shit' in order to avoid getting caught out, just like doing your homework well might have saved you from the cane. I disagree. In my own experience, when I had that mindset it meant that I'd avoid doing extra reading where possible, because the more I read the more foolish I felt. This of course meant that my reading didn't get much better, and so I felt even worse about it. (-This is a period from when I started learning Chinese in mid 2004 to some time towards the end of 2007 when I changed the way I thought about literacy-)

The second problem is that since the focus is purely on pronouncing properly, it is likely that people will pay less attention to what the actual meaning is of the text, and become more concerned with having the proper pinyin annotation. This arises in a false sense of what understanding really is, thinking that so long as all the characters are individually pronouncable then the flowers of imagery that grow out of comprehension will shoot-up with no further nurturing. What is more likely is that people will fail to see where the various words and phrases are seperate, and what they are really describing, since the concentration is consumed with not screwing up, rather than appreciating whatever is being read.

As a slight digression, I think this is why foreign learners of English often overestimate their reading level- they can pronounce all the words, and conflate ability to pronounce a word with understanding its meaning (apologies in advance to my Dad, who hates the word conflate). This was made clear to me recently reading Anthony Burgess' autobiography: I had no trouble mouthing any of the words, but often I found myself at a loss to specific meaning, and so had to consult a dictionary about once per page (Burgess writes with an archaic, though mellifluous, vocabulary).

My thinking changed, as is often the case, outside the classroom, when I was thinking more about film than about Chinese. In particular, I was reading the few English interviews with a personal hero of mine, Christopher Doyle. Out of curiosity I entered his Chinese name 杜可風 into Google (I believe this was the first Chinese web search that I ever did). Up came many, many more interviews and articles than existed in English. I clicked on the first. My reading ability was really bad at that stage, but using an online dictionary I persisted through the whole interview. In fact, persist isn't quite the right word. The dictionary was more like a spoon I was using to get honey out of a jar. You don't persist your way through a jar of honey. I wanted to know everything that was being said. If there was a phrase that I didn't know, and Christopher Doyle was saying it in Chinese, then I wasn't intimidated. I had to know it. Just like how I will finish off every last molecule of a creme-brule, I was interested in absorbing every single word or turn of phrase in that interview.

It's no surprise that the first topic I was ever able to speak articulately about in Chinese was the lustful cinematography of Wong Kar-Wai's films. If we are, to use David Hawkes' felicitous expression, interested in more than just 'speaking to people on trains', then literacy is vital. And the best way to get there is through lust, not caution.

Awesome

I went to use Adsotrans recently and was surprised to find something entirely new, something entirely awesome.

Popup Chinese.

That post I wrote about Adsotrans is still valid- the website has that sweet web 2.0 dictionary. But they're also now producing podcasts. These podcasts have a real personality to them and they're totally Beijing-centric. They have a brilliant, eclectic range of content up so far, ranging from KTV to literature. I don't really listen to language-podcasts for Chinese much anymore, I've been sticking to the Chinese news podcasts from the ABC and BBC recently. But this is definitely the most impressive podcast I've ever heard. It's often really hard to strike a balance between practical and fun. These guys have found it.

Cantonese and the Three Kingdoms

So I finally have a concrete example of a way in which Cantonese is more 'old school' than Mandarin. On my couple of trips to Hong Kong, I'd sort of figured out that shi (to be) in Cantonese was hai. I'd assumed it was their way of pronouncing the word written 是.

But it's not! They actually use the really old word 系 xi, which you can still find in old texts (like the Three Kingdoms). Can mean the same as shi in certain contexts. Like the phrase I just read:

融曰：“我系李相通家。” Rong said "I'm a relative of Minister Li"

This piece of the puzzle just clicked now when I found the Cantonese word in the Wenlin definition. So that's why it popped up all the time in those HK gangsters films I've been watching.

I've just started dipping my toe into Cantonese properly by the amazingly awesome website designed for mainland Mandarin speakers learning Cantonese, 520hai. Something tells me it may not be entirely legitimate, as there are expensively produced videos up there entirely for free...but hey, their lessons are really useful. I'm still at the stage where I'm gaping at the fact that there's 9 tones, and trying to get my ears and eyes linking up to the new pinyin system.

Well, you know that saying, I think it's something like 千里之行， 始于一步 (the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step- let me know if I have that wrong). Or maybe something like 九声之语， 始于阴平 in this case. (a language of nine tones begins with the first tone- my classical Chinese sucks do please point out if that's wrong, anyone- Jeremiah? Sunny? Laurie?)

Anyway, I hope someone finds the 520hai link useful- I'm amazed such a site exists.

Kaufmen and Language Learning

My favourite Kaufman would have to be Charlie. Charlie Kaufman has penned what I consider some of the most entertaining and intelligent films made- Adaptation is one of my favourites. Particularly notable for me was the line "I can be that cool script writer guy who speaks Chinese".
His twin-brother Donald Kaufman was most charming, and we shall miss him dearly*.

Andy Kaufman too was a memorable wag- the Tony Clifton character of his particularly.

But theres a new Kaufman on the block. In fact he one-ups all previous contestants with the addition of an extra 'n'.

I came across Steve Kaufmann whilst checking out the entertaining series on YouTube "Westerners Speaking Cantonese". That series, by the way, is a total monkey-act, no doubt about it. But just like a Russian cat-show, it's worth the price of admission.

And so I stumbled across Kaufmann, having an interview partly in English, and partly in Mandarin. That's here. Hilarious, by the way, is the interviewer, with his unintentional comic timing. But what do you know? Kaufmann's Mandarin is very good. Not as good as Da Shan or Da Niu, to be sure (Kaufmann has a bit of an accent compared to them), but way better than mine, and Kaufmann apparently speaks 8 languages in addition. Very impressive.

Anyway, he offers his opinion on language-learning, and some of them I find quite agreeable.

In particular:

• It's probably a waste of time to ask why. As in, asking "Why do Chinese people say this?" This used to happen a lot in my Chinese classes, particularly in the introductory level. It hardly ever happens, though, in the advanced conversational classes, because by now we've just accepted the obvious and unchangeable. And most of those who asked 'why' all the time dropped Chinese out of frustration. It probably only rears its head again at the linguistic level, and that's cool then. But if your goal is to learn the language (as opposed to learning about the language), all that effort is probably better spent remembering what they say rather than why they say it, at least while you're still learning.
  
• Reading and listening are really important yet often overlooked. In particular, reading something that you find interesting, and something that isn't too hard. For me, I love to read interviews with Christopher Doyle. His Chinese is very, very good, but not so native-like as Da Shan whereby he speaks only in obscure idioms and such. And most importantly, I'm really interested in what Doyle has to say.
  
• Consistency seems to be more effective than pure volume. Take me as an example: This semester most of my time spent on Russian was on a Tuesday and a Wednesday. Tuesday was getting all the homework done at the last minute, and Wednesday was 4 hours of class. Other than that, I didn't do much. And I tanked Russian last semester! Yet my Chinese workload was spread out so that I was doing a bit each day, and I've been quite a spot more successful with it.
• Learn contextually, and don't get anxious. If you're worried about getting the sentence right, you won't. And since you're prone to get it wrong anyway, why worry about it? Just relax, speak, and the native speaker will tell you what you're doing wrong. This is also much more memorable (for me at least) than reading the line out of a textbook. Most of the words that I have in my long-term memory I learned contextually, either from watching a film, reading an interview, or chatting with a friend. Not from studying a word list.

Kaufmann writes a blog, too.

So some qualifying statements. I don't want to downplay the importance of linguistics. For an excellent example of applied linguistics which is useful to a language learner, look no further than John Pasden's excellent article on pronouncing Chinese. Linguistics is also a fascinating area, and I'd be lying if I said I don't admire socio-linguists for the insights they give to a language, which as an added extra can also aid greatly in memorizing Chinese characters, for example. But, in the earlier stages, I'm not convinced one needs to know a whole lot about it.

Also, I don't want to downplay the importance of textbooks and grammar patterns. There are times when you just need to know how a word functions. Good textbooks provide patterns which are easy to follow, and things progress in a logical fashion. And at a translation level, I would think that you do need to know exactly what a word implies and what the closest thing to an equivalent is.

So far there is just one point of contention I might have with Kaufmann, when he states that vocabulary is far more important than grammar. I suppose that depends upon what he means by grammar. If he means those big, nasty books of pure grammar, then I wholeheartedly agree. But there's a difference between that, and knowing the basic cogs of a language. Like knowing the order involved in basic sentence construction. Or knowing what a verb is, what an adjective is, and so on. And I don't see a lot of use in knowing a whole bunch of words in say, Russian, and having no idea of how to conjugate them. You just won't be understood.

But regardless, his point is a pertinent one- spend lots of time working on your vocabulary!

Finally, a question I think is worth asking. Would you rather speak two or (if you're lucky) three languages with native fluency, or 9 languages pretty damn fluently? I don't have the proper answer to that, except to say that I'm focusing on Chinese for the foreseeable future, and any Russian I can come to terms with along the way is a bonus.



*Yes, I'm kidding about Donald.

Loss of Face and Job

不会写

This would be pretty humiliating, I think.

It does also highlight something else which irks me.

That trend amongst really wealthy American families to compete in the language stakes of the child. Like 'guru'* Jim Rogers bragging about his daughter:

He is so confident that China will be the world’s next great nation that he employed a Chinese nanny for his daughter shortly after she was born. “She is 3 years old and already fluent in Mandarin,” he says.

I don't think I was fluent in English at the age of 3. Anyway, I'm probably totally mistaken here, but I don't think the painless 'teach them when they're young' method will work as well as these billionaires think. Ethnic-Chinese still struggle to pass Chinese language tests. The difficulty, I'd say, is not the spoken aspect, but the written. Plenty of savvy people are making lots of cash getting people to speak Mandarin, and they'll claim that speaking is what's important.

Ms Bai, a student in bilingual education at the Teachers College of Columbia University, explained that teachers of Chinese "still focus on grammar, on reading, and don't speak much. Chinese students focus mostly on getting good grades, so writing is more important for them. But in a job interview, you need to speak the language. In the United States, the focus is more on speaking."

Right. I'm unaware of this alleged crowd of people who are literate in Chinese yet struggle to speak. Their silence is deafening. But who needs that pesky grammar and reading?

Quick Mandarin's Zhang said: "It's hard to find good Chinese teachers, because teachers coming from China are very strict in their methods of teaching. Americans have a different way of learning - they like to actively learn through searching answers. But in China, it's different. The teacher will talk and then just give a lot of homework."

To which, I reply with a quote from the Straits Times article at the top:

Mr Richard Ong, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia, did not write Chinese well enough to take a mandatory test for senior managers, say bankers.

And so he didn't get to be a Goldman-Sachs CEO- probably the very job that Rogers has targeted for his kid. I wonder which test it was. But in any case, regardless of what the second hand language salesmen try to tell you, reading and writing is important, and there's no painless way to learn those 3500 characters required to be considered literate. In fact there is a Chinese professor I know who says writing is the most important aspect of learning Chinese.

*Guru. I hate the word, particularly since nowadays it is almost always applied to investment authors.

Man of Mystery

My brother has been watching a lot of Derren Brown, lately, and I've been watching a bit of it myself. It's quite entertaining really, and some of it is really impressive. His card handling skills, for example, really are brilliant.

Some of the other feats, however, I'm still skeptical of. Regardless of how good one's skill with persuasion or suggestion is, the mere fact that this is television should be an alarm bell for any rational person. And yet...It's certainly nice to believe that with the right application of behavioral science, one could affect such stunning results. There's also no question that in addition to being an excellent showman, he's an extremely intelligent guy. So it's thought provoking entertainment at worst, and I think that's better than most of the crap that passes by these days.

And, to his credit, attempts to dig up any dirt or proper criticism about him will turn up nothing.
Thus far, at least.

So, for now, enjoy.

An Analogy on Accents

So, you might ask, are there really different accents of Mandarin, and what are they like?

Well, hearing a standard-Mandarin speaker (say, a CCTV news reader) and then a north-easterner speak is kind of analogous to hearing a BBC news reader and then hearing The Wee Man.

The First Chain Message I Liked

An interesting snippet of a lecture by Professor Paul Krugman, worth watching by itself.

But then, note, the comment by Bernard Ogus.

Tomorrow will be the happiest day of your life. Your new toaster is up and running, your new haircut widely praised. And just when you think things can't get any better, an email from a stranger arrives, offering to enlarge your Johnson.

Unfortunately, if you don't post this comment to 5 videos, a box of Krugman books will fall from a building and smiteth your head, and everyone you love will be hit by a bus driven insane by the teachings of Sir William Rees-Mogg, whoever he may be.

Finally, a chain message worth passing on.