Still Working Out Parameters for Study, Reading and Writing

Following up on last Thursday's article about studying in coffee shops as my retirement is now in its second week, I'm still looking for "The Place" to set up my studying.  Still, so far I've managed to cover my daily goals, mixing reading, studying foreign languages and, of course, writing for this blog.  I'm finding myself usually spreading it all out over the course of the day at home, although here my attention span isn't quite as strong and I'm more likely to be distracted as opposed to be sitting somewhere in a public place.  I've been diligent with the language study, continuing as I earlier stated with taking a few sentences from a specified article and writing each of them down, taking turns in Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese according to the Google translations.  Since unfamiliar Chinese characters can be problematic since their pronunciation isn't readily apparent, I have begun using ChapGPT to provide transliteration of my articles into the Pinyin Romanization writing system, which I print out and use.  Since I am at intermediate "Level B" stages in all four languages, I still have quite a task in front of me with thousands of words in each to internalize before I can more comfortably understand them...and with listening comprehension consistently lagging behind the reading (I also daily listen to radio/podcasts in each of the four).  But more than anything I enjoy the process of learning: it's fun!

Study Method Advocates Sometimes Discount Own Experiences

I find it disingenuous for somebody to get on a podcast or YouTube with listed accomplishments and talent skills in a specific area and then promote a regimen for you or me to also reach their level of attainment while discounting their early history of struggles that were instrumental to their breakthroughs.  Case in point: Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot who has reasonable proficiency in some twenty different languages, is someone I respect and who promotes the "comprehensible input" method of language learning.  Yet his linguistic career and narrative took off AFTER he joined his Canada's foreign service early in his adult years and took their intensive training courses in Mandarin Chinese.  I believe that Kaufmann's experiences back then taught him what to seek out during his subsequent language studies, while most of us don't possess that kind of background to know exactly what to prioritize as we follow his current system.  Still, I think his method is far and away superior to the "don't make mistakes if you want a good grade" nonsense I went through  during my high school and college years.  Still, even more pertinent to Kaufmann's experience is that learning the intricacies of Chinese writing with their thousands of different ideograph characters is a very, very steep mountain to climb unless you intentionally and intensively study them, and even then reading Chinese can be a bit of a slog...

Practicing Writing in Chinese

我刚才开始写汉字在我的电脑。这些句子都是我自己写的，也许有很多错误。 可是我希望在前途上流利的明白中国话， 或者是听话看书。虽然我是六十岁，我相信有够的时候。如果有机会跟别的中国人谈话，我要慢慢的增加能力。

New Strategy for Learning Chinese Characters

I have been studying how best to dramatically increase my learned Chinese character vocabulary and have come up with a plan that might just provide explosive growth.  The key is in breaking down a character into its component two parts: radical and phonetic.  The radical part of a character, besides placing it in its proper order in traditional Chinese dictionaries, also categorizes it according to its general meaning.  The phonetic part, on the other hand, only hints at the character's pronunciation. Take, for example, the chemical element for neon.  Neon, being a gas at room temperature, carries the radical 气 for that meaning (gas/vapor/air), while its pronunciation of nai (third tone) carries the phonetic 乃, which other characters of similar pronunciation but different meaning carry.  Together, they constitute the composite character 氖 for neon.  This is a character building principle that pervades Chinese.

My plan is to use an old Chinese-English dictionary that does a good job of breaking down each of the 5,000 characters it contains into radicals and phonetics.  Only instead of the systematically classified and numbered radicals that are usually ordered in dictionaries, I will categorize the characters according to their phonetics.  I believe this will make my memorization more enduring and will also aid me when I encounter an unfamiliar character in regular text.

About My Chinese Study and Reading of Late

I am currently adding about 2,500 Chinese characters to my personal vocabulary, doing this in a painstakingly methodical fashion. Much of this involves looking up words in dictionaries and adding them to a "grand notebook" that I have constructed, holding new words learned along with where I encountered them. I am also inserting Japanese transliterations of the characters that they have incorporated into their language.

All of this takes a lot of time, but it is interesting that, when I have free time, I do a lot of writing that involves little actual thinking. And when I am involved in something else, I can mentally multi-task and practice my newly-acquired vocabulary from memory. Hopefully, this all will lead to me being able to more fully enjoy exposure to Chinese (and eventually Japanese) by being able, as I currently already am with Spanish, to pick out, either from reading or listening, the gist of what is being expressed in that language.

One result of this increased emphasis on foreign language study has been to reduce my time in reading fiction. Usually I am working on one or two books, but lately that has slowed down. Now, at certain times I still pick up a book, concentrating now on getting through Stephenie Meyer's interesting Twilight saga. Yes, this series is primarily targeted at teenage girls, but I enjoy it, too! I am currently beginning Eclipse, the third book. By the way, I have carefully avoided the movies made from this series, preferring instead to give my own imagination a workout, thank you.

Learning New Chinese Characters

Lately I have been working to increase my knowledge of Chinese characters. While doing this I am also learning Japanese kanji, which are just Chinese characters adapted to the Japanese language.

Years ago, I once went through the extensive Defrancis Chinese textbook series published by Yale University Press. In doing so, I learned about 1,700 characters, which I memorized and still review on a weekly basis to this day. Later I picked up about 1,500 more new characters by reading various texts in Chinese, although these I have unfortunately allowed myself to forget for the large part over the years. Now I am adding them to the 1,700, along with Chinese characters used in Japanese kanji, for additional memorization.

My intent is to be able to fluently read Chinese (and eventually Japanese) without having to go through the arduous process of having to consult a character dictionary a couple of times or more for every sentence I stumble through. Even after increasing my vocabulary, I'll keep coming upon new unknown characters to look up. But at least that shouldn't distract too much from the flow of my reading.

My blog entries recently have been more sparse, largely due to the fact that I am spending much of the time I would have used to write my entries instead to study the additional Chinese/Japanese characters. But it sure is fun!

Pinyin vs. Radical-Based Chinese Dictionaries

There are basically two types of Chinese-English dictionaries out there. One is the traditional arrangement, by radicals. The other is by romanized transliteration, nowadays pretty much always using the pinyin system of transliteration. I have both kinds of dictionary. And a few thoughts to share.

Being a native English speaker, I grew up regarding language in primarily its spoken form, with the Latin script roughly (sometimes VERY roughly) reflecting pronunciation. Chinese is written using characters, each of which usually has a unique pronunciation (unlike with Japanese) and represents a concept or "idea" of sorts. Chinese makes tremendous use of compounding, usually with two characters combined, much in the same way that English forms "barnyard" or "sunshine". When I read Chinese and come across an unfamiliar character (quite a common occurrence), I don't know how it is pronounced, just from looking at it. Thus my dictionary arranged by pinyin order is useless, and I am left resorting to the radical-arranged dictionary. A radical is a character unto itself which comprises a part of other characters, albeit often in a distorted form. Which can make it a bit difficult at times looking up characters by radical. Within each radical category in the dictionary, characters are arranged in the order of number of strokes.

Also, the Internet Chinese keyboards I have seen so far rely on radicals. So with any character that I do know, I have to first know its radical and then browse down the list under that radical's heading to the character in order to type it. Pretty damned tedious! I would rather first browse through the character-in-question's pinyin spelling and then click on it. If there are any pinyin-based virtual keyboards like this, I haven't found them yet.

And of course, if I am just listening to someone speak Chinese and I want to look up a word in the dictionary, the pinyin dictionary is the must and the radical dictionary is useless.

What a bother!

Oh, on top of that, did I mention that Chinese is basically written with two different competing writing systems: the traditional and the simplified? No, I didn't.

Double bother!