The Emeselles

2012-01-06T19:26:00.003+08:00

Numbers are so hard. They are probably hardest part in a language.
Chinese numbers are really logical and easy to learn, but it's not easy to recognize them when listening to a speech, especially "5" and "10".
To overcome numbers really needs persistence and practice.

2011-11-23T14:01:00.001+08:00

Study brings us so much joy when we are totally absorbed in it, when we are forgetting all other things that are not related to it, when we are laughing happily at our progress.

But this happy paradise can also turn into hell when we are totally absorbed in it, when we are forgetting all other things that are not related to it, when we are laughing happily at our progress, because, in the gloomy distance, we know we have enlist us to be a slave of its mercy.

2011-09-02T10:20:00.002+08:00

The easiest way to kill a passion of learning Chinese is to do it too much and for too long. Our brain is just not wired this way. If a student goes to Chinese class for 4 hours every day and for three months consecutively , that probably translates into eight hours study every day and a very tired and unproductive student at the end of the third month. Still, people consider that is brave, hard working and with stamina. There is definitely something wrong.

2011-06-12T22:54:00.000+08:00

My recent observation about class notes is that they are to the point of totally useless. I like to take notes during the class. And then I seldom, if ever, go back and check them. Most of the time, I give myself console of being a good student because I take notes quite diligently. The biggest function of my class notes is that they are there. For a lot of people who are learning Chinese, it is quite true that they never review their notes. They may have vocabulary cards they go back often, but practically nothing else.

Recently I made an effort of reviewing my old notes. Then the real reason dawned on me. Notes are boring. It's in a fragmented and chaotic manner. Therefore it really is fine not to take them too seriously. However, I am not so sure if I can ever dispense this habit. Probably I really should.

2010-10-09T21:39:00.000+08:00

Listener's forum. If you follow my podcast, this definitely helps.

http://zaiyici.blogspot.com/

april

2010-08-25T14:43:00.001+08:00

Can you forget everything you have learned in five weeks? Maybe not everything, but one student showed she nearly did.

The good news is that things came back to her quickly once she got back to her studying routine.

In case like this we understand a studying routine is so important.

april
www.mslmaster.com

2010-08-04T12:54:00.000+08:00

I learned a few phrases Hindi and I found them so useful in India. I suppose the few phrases I uttered now and then brought out the best qualities of common Indian people.

And it is also true that if you repeat something for many times, it became natural for you.

april
www.mslmaster.com

2010-07-08T14:28:00.002+08:00

Babies are often observed of having amazing linguistic ability. It's sheer because of their repetition ability. Russell wrote about his daughter: At the age of eighteen months, when supposed to be sleeping, she was overhead saying to herself: "Last year I used to dive off the diving-board, I did."

Obviously, the whole sentence doesn't mean anything to her.

When we are learning as an adult, we still need this stage. The more important is the next stage: put known words and structures into a sentence which carries the meaning you intend it to. That requires a lot of power and manipulation.

Online Dictionary

2010-06-25T18:56:00.001+08:00

Online dictionaries are wonderful things. I find I am using them more and more. They made self study a lot easier.

So far I find that online dictionaries are very good for word to word. The only short coming is that they don't provide a lot of examples like traditional dictionaries do. But that probably will change in the near future. For sentence to sentence translation, they are not very useful. Neither are the traditional ones in that aspect. Human brains are the best for that job.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Grammar

2010-06-08T20:40:00.000+08:00

Grammar is important, but it doesn't exist without language. The best way to practice grammar is to write essays and to have conversations.

I have seen people who are so absolved into grammar books, and forget that to study grammar is to make writing beautiful and speech clear.

april
www.mslmaster.com

The Weakest Link in Communication

2010-05-17T09:52:00.002+08:00

There are so many forms of mis-communication. I think the worse one is that people don't listen. When it comes to using a second language to communicate, a terrible mistake is that people pretend they understand.

Listen and understand, which in Chinese is only one word 听懂, hold as the weakest link. And it is so easy to break.

april
www.mslmaster.com

How To Improve Reading Chinese

2010-02-06T19:56:00.000+08:00

There is a secret in improving your reading skills quickly. And that is to copy some texts constantly, over and over again.

You can fee you are getting better in a very short time, let's say, four weeks. You can tell by reading the subtitles on TV or movies, or reading the next article, etc.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Children Stories

2009-12-13T22:55:00.000+08:00

Are children stories good for beginners? I think they are good only if the beginners are children!

There many people who are frustrated because it's hard for them to find any suitable reading materials in Chinese. Often the books which includes pinyin are children story books. However, I find that what qualifies a story as a children story is only the content, not the grammar. It is actually quite hard for a beginner student (who is a grown up) to read a children story.

An alternative way, perhaps, is to read all different kind of textbooks as extra reading materials.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Accents

2009-11-20T13:58:00.000+08:00

In linguistics, accent refers only to pronunciation, while dialect refers to grammar and vocabulary as well.

Nowadays, accents are quite standardized. It is impossible to speak without an accent. In most languages, the majority of accents are reginonal. And people's first language characteristics will have an impact on their second language. In the end, people carry all different kinds of accents.

I believe that all accents are equal. So, for me and for all the people who are learning Chinese, it doesn't matter whether you carry a Taiwan accent or Bejing accent. There should not be too much fuss about how you pronounce a certain word, or whether you have that 'r' sound or not.

Moreover, there are the newscasters of national TV. And they have traditionally been regarded as carrying "official" accent, that is, the accent that is considered to be standard and neutral. And that will make our accents fluid and ever changing.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Connections

2009-11-07T15:27:00.000+08:00

It's always useful to find connections among words, and that also helps to remember them. For example: 酒 jiu,

we can have 酒店, 酒吧, 喝酒, 啤酒, 葡萄酒, and later on can extend to 喝醉了, 睡觉, 喜欢, 不喜欢, 生日, etc. Memorizing all these words in a theme makes it easier.

Then try to make a sentence with each word in your list. The last step would be use your sentences in your conversations with your teacher or friends.

april
www.mslmaster.com

If you want to walk well, maybe you should start to run!

2009-10-22T11:01:00.000+08:00

Many things are required a step further, like walking. It seems simple enough. But I observed that who can walk well, also runs. The strong legs which give a light, easy walking steps are actually built through running.

The same thing goes to language learning, probably especially true with Chinese characters.

If you want to read well, you should practice writing. I have met so many people who only want to recognize the characters, and think they can develop a reading ability. This is really as far fetched as you can get. If you don't write, you can't read.

Make a habit of writing for one or two hours every day!

april
www.mslmaster.com

What lies behinde a language

2009-10-16T20:54:00.000+08:00

Why do people learn a new language when they can speak one perfectly well? The answer may carry some very practical causes, such as doing business, or pleasing your spouse. But fundamentally I think learning a new language is to unlock a closed mind.

We can be so used to one language. We listen to, we read and we communicate everything in one language. And that language creates something we feel familiar with, like food, certain type of TV programs, etc. And we don't even realize that people who speak other languages can be very different and can represent a whole set of new ideas.

So when we are learning a new language, we become receptive towards a different kind of food, different kind of music, different kind of books and customs. And therefore help us to open up and take a took at the world at large. That's probably the most beneficial thing one can get by learning a new language.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Quick Fix

2009-09-29T08:23:00.003+08:00

"I want it, and I want it now!"
I always get this impression from all aspects of life. And the media always gives re-enforcement through all kinds of channels.

For example, I see things like these every day:

- Loose 10 pounds in two weeks!
- Improve your memory in 2 hours!
- With these pills, you can get stronger bones and joints in 1 week!
And of course,
- Speak fluent Chinese in 15 minutes a day!

I have come to realization that, most of the time, quick fixes are seriously flawed, short lived, and most seriously, often carry some terrible consequences. The real result and satisfaction often come from slowness and persistence.

april
www.mslmaster.com

The Meaning of "International"

2009-09-11T20:32:00.001+08:00

I was told by a friend who recently went to China and had a nightmare. One of them was a language problem.

She went to Kun Ming and at the service counter of Kun Ming's international airport, she couldn't find anyone spoke English. And thus the conclusion is: how can this be international airport???

I guess if a Chinese person goes to a major city in US or UK or Australia, he wouldn't demand anybody at the service counter there, however cosmopolitan or international that city can be, to speak Chinese.

The real meaning of "international" is English.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Setbacks

2009-08-29T19:51:00.001+08:00

Last Sunday I was told a classical story on why a person can fail in learning a language.

This gentle man tried to learn Cantonese for about two to three months. And one day he went to a shop and tried to use his Cantonese to get things he wanted. But it appeared that the shop assistant didn't understand him at all. Similar things happened a couple of more times and he was totally discouraged. And he stopped learning. Now he only remembers a couple of words and never take the initiative again.

I don't think anybody can avoid this kind of situation, especially at the early stage. The sad thing is that this situation can put people to a stop.

The best thing to do is: be aware of this type of setback and be prepared, and know that if you continue you will pass this stage very soon.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Three Self Study Tips

2009-08-05T21:22:00.003+08:00

It's nice to be around a teacher, but not all the time. It's vital important that you find time to do self study. It's during these hours that you consolidate, you refresh, you memorize and you learn!

1. Listen without reading all the text in your textbook. Check your understanding.
2. Do exercises in your workbook.
3. Read aloud what you have learned.

If you have one hour lesson with your teacher, you probably need two hours to consolidate and be able to claim what you have learned are really yours.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Deliberate Training

2009-07-22T21:06:00.003+08:00

When learning Mandarin, there are so many things to cover, grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, writing, characters, comprehension, culture background, etc.

For many people, one thing is on top of the list and that is communication with Chinese people. Communication involves two ways. One is to listen and one is to speak. And there is no short cut to build your listening and speaking skills. Only deliberate training on listening and speaking can help.

You can not and will not speak fluently if you study grammar books and do grammar exercises all day. You can not understand when people talk to you even if you have memorized all the vocabularies one by one. It's not like grammar and vocabulary are not important. They are very important. But only studying them will not help you listen effortlessly and speak fluently. It's like that you exercise your arms a lot with the hope of getting strong legs. You have to, must, train your legs.

You need to train your ears to the sound and train your mouth to the words deliberately!

april
www.mslmaster.com

Audio Flash Cards

2009-07-07T12:42:00.003+08:00

Many people like to make flash cards when learning a new language. They are quite useful and handy. The only problem is that most flash cards are made for the eyes only. So what often happens is that people don't understand when they hear the words.

An improvement is that you can make your flash cards into audio ones. A lot of phones can do the recordings right now. So if you happen to have one of those, that can be quite convenient. If you don't have one, you can use your computer to do the recording. Windows has this feature. You can ask your teacher to record those words, or you can record them yourself. One advantage of doing it yourself is that you can hear yourself talking. If you are not happy about your pronunciations, you can make a conscious effort to improve. And nothing can be more important than a conscious effort.

You can record 20 to 30 words or phrases at a time, and save the audio file into your phone or mp3 player.

The next step is to listen to your home made audio flash cards whenever you got two minutes free!

april
www.mslmaster.com

Why Can't I Remember That Word?

2009-06-09T13:00:00.002+08:00

It happens often to language learners that there are some words that don't want to be remembered. It could be a simple word or a complicated one. For some reasons, we just can't remember them. Different people will have different group of words which fall into this category.

There are some similarities between a newly acquired language and the language you have already spoken. A science article Why your brain just can't remember that word gave some insights on tip-of-tongue experience, especially for people who are bilingual. And I believe it applies to language learners as well. From the article:

One possible explanation is that similar-sounding words compete for our brain's attention. Since bilinguals know twice as many words as monolinguals, there's more chance for tip-of-the-tongue experiences. Since bilinguals, by definition, speak two languages, they are bound to use many individual words less frequently than monolinguals.

The key issue is right there. If we use a word less frequently, we tend to have this experience. And it applies to language learning. When we use a newly learned word all the time, and even it is a rather complicated word, we will remember it. But for less frequently used words, they are easily forgotten.

To activate a second language is to use it as often as possible, even when you are talking to yourself.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Studying Grammar

2009-06-03T19:59:00.002+08:00

Grammar is a very important part of every language. It is important for both native speakers and non native speakers.

For native speakers, learning grammar can help him gain full awareness of the language. While for non-native speakers, it's the path to true proficiency.

Luckily for Chinese beginners, Chinese grammar is over overwhelmingly simple. Word orders, verb conjugations (there is no verb conjugations!) and sentence patterns are made so logical and straightforward.

The grammar part of Chinese is definitely a blessing.

april
www.mslmaster.com

How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?

2009-05-25T13:15:00.002+08:00

When starting learning a new language, people are often obsessed with how big their vocabulary is. But the really important issue is not how many words you know, but how you use the words you know.

Take the example of the master of English language, Shakespeare. There are some wonderful statistics in Bill Bryson's work Shakespeare The World As Stage:

Marvin Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance counts 29,066 different words in Shakespeare, but that rather generously includes inflected forms and contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms of a word - for example, take, takes, taketh, taking, tak'n, taken, tak'st, tak't, took, tooke, took'st, and tookst - as a single word (or lexeme, to use the scholarly term), which is the normal practice, his vacabulary falls back to about 20,000 words, not a terribly impressive number.

Obviously, it wasn't so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them - and no one has ever done more.

Right there, we can see that Shakespeare's vocabulary was not greater than any average educated person now a days. It is thought, the average person today knows probably 50,000 words. A simple reason is that there are thousands of common words - television, sandwich, seatbelt, etc. - that Shakespeare couldn't know because they didn't yet exist. So vacabulary alone didn't count for what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Another amazing thing about Shakespeare is that he was really liberated to coin new words whenever he felt the needs. More from Bill Bryson:

He coined - or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of - 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour's Lost, two of his earliest words, have 140 new words between them.

In plays written during his most productive and inventive period - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear - neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one every two and a half line. Hamlet alone gave audience about six hundred words that, according to all other evidence, they had never heard before.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, well-read, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?

That was amazing. I wonder if anyone can do the same thing today, if anyone can write a play, or a fiction with this large amount of newly invented words there.

On another thought, it also shows how easy it is to coin an English word. It won't be as easy to invent a new Chinese character. That is one of the reasons that Chinese has stayed so stable over the past thousands of years. And expressions invented 3000 years ago are still in use.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Learning Spanish

2009-05-14T20:59:00.002+08:00

Four weeks ago, I started to learn Spanish. It is fun and difficult at the same time. Since I'm a complete newbie in Spanish, naturally I have some thoughts when learning this language.

I followed a small book called 15 Minutes Spanish. And clearly I spend more than 15 minutes a day to learn it.

The first difficult part is that I can not pronounce the trilling "r" sound. This sound makes Spanish so lively and musical. But for the time being, I'll have to let it pass. And I hope one day it will come to me. It's like the "r", "j" sound in Chinese. Eventually most of students can do it.

The second difficult part is all the differentiation of genders. Women speak a word ending with a, while men speak the same word ending with o. And also the nouns and adjectives have to tally with each other, not mentioning the verb conjugations. Those really make learning speaking Chinese (through pinyin) bread and butter. And that also makes me wonder whether that makes a Spanish speaking woman more feminine, and a man more muscular.

It's also interesting to notice that the first chapters cover family and food. I wonder whether it is because Spanish people value family and food the most. And the questions like "Tiene ninos?" "Esta casado/a?" make me feel that Spanish people are like Chinese, not so much about personal privacy which English people value so much.

It is so much fun to learn a new language and what this language represents. I am not in a Spanish speaking environment, but I hope in one year, shall I have a chance to visit any Spanish speaking countries, I would do just fine.

april
www.mslmaster.com

The Advantage of Being a 40 Year-old Learner

2009-05-04T09:32:00.002+08:00

Everybody knows that for a person to learn a new language, the younger the better. If you can start learning at 4 years old, it certainly beats learning it at 40 years old.

It's certainly true. But that doesn't mean that 40 year old doesn't have his own advantages.

The number one advantage is: The concentration level a 40 year old can bring into his study. He can put two hours every day to study. And he is conscious about what he is doing and where he can improve. You will not expect a 4 year old to do that. And that makes a huge difference on the outcome.

The second one is: The cognition level is a huge advantage for a grown up to learn a new language, not only the language, but also the culture behind the language. He certainly appreciates it more than his 4 year old counter part.

The last one is: A 40 year old requires shorter time than a 4 year old. Time is definitely 40 year old's best friend. For example, if a 40 year old dedicates himself into learning Mandarin Chinese for one year, and by the time he turns 41, he can function well anywhere in China. But you can not expect the same thing to a 4 year old.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Victory Belongs to the Most Persevering

2009-04-12T10:16:00.002+08:00

That is from Napoleon.

It's a very inspirational quote. Especially during holidays, like now - a long Easter weekend, or when you're so content with everything, or when work load is huge, or when life gives unbearable burdens, one must remember that at all times.

april
www.mslmaster.com

The Most Useful Language - English

2009-03-26T13:40:00.006+08:00

With the former British Empire expanding in the last four centuries, which began with the American colonies, culminated in India and Africa, the English language was spread, even after the Empire died. Today, there are as many English speakers in India as there are in England, and five times that number in North America. Across the world, one and a half billion people speak English. Yet for many years, for centuries, English was a minority tongue, which hung on only with great difficulty. But now it's the world's most useful language.

Can this status be challenged? I wonder. Sometime ago, there was prediction that Mandarin Chinese would rise to go head to head with English. With the whole world is in a panic mood of dealing with current recession, how will languages play their parts?

april
www.mslmaster.com

Sanskrit Language

2009-03-12T11:40:00.002+08:00

William Jones was a brilliant linguist. He was the son of a professor of mathematics, and on top of everything else, an accomplished poet. He published poems in Greek at the age of fifteen, while at sixteen he learned Persian from ' a Syrian living in London'. He later said that he had studied twenty-eight languages and had a thorough knowledge of thirteen.

He delivered a speech "On the Hindus" on 2 Feb 1786. He said: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

The above quoted from Peter Watson.
april
www.mslmaster.com

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-02-28T17:23:00.003+08:00

Slumdog Millionaire was rated as the best movie in 2008 and it won so many prizes in last week's Oscar. Although I know it portrayed only the lowest class in India, I am still affected in thinking that the whole India is like that. I am being terribly ~~rational~~ biased, and that's not fair.

The same thing happened to Chinese movies too. There are movies showing only a small part of life. But people outside of China will have mistaken that particular life for being the norms.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Why Learn French?

2009-02-18T18:46:00.002+08:00

When reading Peter Wason talking about French language, I found it shared some similar historical path as Mandarin. The following is from Ideas:

In the eighteenth century, France was "the cultural dictator" of Europe. People looked to France as the model and standard of taste in literature, art, architecture and the ancillary arts that had blossomed and even today occupy a special position: furniture, fashion and cuisine.

French is one of the group of languages which are derived from Latin. Starting around 1549, French language was a self-conscious entity in France's intellectual and national life, in a way that other languages have never been. Throughout the seventeenth century, the language was refined and developed and purified.

This rational tidiness helps account for the language's great beauty but also for its comparative dryness and its relatively small vocabulary. Whereas other languages spread naturally, French was - to an extent - an official language, and for this reason even as late as the mid-twentieth century there were two million people in France whose mother tongue was not French (Alsatian, Breton, Provencal, etc.).

French, anyone?

april
www.mslmaster.com

The Differences Between Beijinghua and Putonghua

2009-02-12T17:47:00.004+08:00

Many Mandarin learners believe that Beijinghua is Putonghua. They seek teachers originally from Beijing, or they believe that they should go to Beijing to learn Putonghua.

As your humble blogger is from a small city which is 30 minutes away from Beijing, I can tell you for sure that Beijinghua is NOT Putonghua. I am in a position that I can understand Beijinghua, and sometimes fake a Beijing accent, yet at the same time, know Beijinghua is not Putonghua.

Linguistic expert pointed out that Beijinghua was heavily influenced by Manchu language. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, when Manchu people lived in Beijing were learning Chinese, their accent was influenced by their first language. And the result showed today is that Beijinghua is filled with massive neutrol tone words. So, if you have been learning standard Putonghua, you will find it challenging to understand Beijinghua. That is the same reason for people who learned Cantonese find it challenging to understand Haka, or people who learned Shanghaihua find it difficult to understand Ningbohua.

The second reason is that, just as any other dialects, Beijinghua is full of its very own coloquials and slangs which don't exist anywhere else. And therefore, those coloquials and slangs probably won't be understood by people who didn't grow up in Beijing area.

If you are learning Putonghua in Beijing, your putonhua will be influenced by Beijinghua. The same thing goes to if you are learning Putonghua in Guangzhou, your putonhua will be affected by Cantonese. That is the same reason why Chinese people carry their accent when they speak Putonghua. But luckily, there is a standard version of Putonghua which helps people understand each other no matter where they come from.

april
www.mslmaster.com

Mandarin and Other Chinese dialects

2009-01-28T09:59:00.006+08:00

There are a lot of Chinese dialects, probably 250. Among them, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien are the most popular judged by the number of people who speak it. Mandarin was made official and dubbed as putonghua (the common language). All Chinese students study through putonghua at school.

There are reasons why Mandarin was chosen to be the official language, but not other dialects. One is that Mandarin is in the closest relation to the written form. Almost all spoken Mandarin can be written down. But it's not the same goes to other dialects.

The second reason is that most Northern dialects are quite similar and sounds very close to Mandarin. People from Beijing, Heilongjing, Tianjin, JiangXi, Jiejiang, Henan understand each other, with only minor difficulties. But Southern Chinese dialects are so different that sometimes even neighboring towns will have their own distinguistive dialects. That made pushing Mandarin through the country a lot easier than pushing any other dialects.

Since I have been learning Cantonese for a while now, I noticed that some old words and sentence patterns are still in use in Cantonese, but not in Mandarin. Cantonese is full of slang while Mandarin has no equivalence.

Some people say that Southern Chinese were refugees from the Central part of China, escaping persecution and war. And Cantonese and Hokkien are related. Hokkien is a more ancient dialect than Cantonese.

Had it not been the commonality of the written Han Chinese language, Chinese dialects would have diverged even more, like in Europe. Thousands of years ago, when Europe was still divided among state cities and tribes, if war had broken out among them and someone had united all tribes, we would not have had the need to face so many different languages now!

april
www.mslmaster.com

New Year Only Comes Twice

2009-01-22T10:10:00.002+08:00

Chinese New Year, the year of cow or ox, is just around the corner.

The New Year Eve falls on 25 of Jan, and the celebration will last for 15 days until 9 of Feb.

Get ready for this festivity.

www.mslmaster.com

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T10:34:00.002+08:00

Wishing you all the best in 2009!

Here's a joke talked about the New Year resolutions you can keep:

Are you sick of making the same resolutions year after year that you never keep? Why not promise to do something you can actually accomplish? Here are some resolutions that you can use as a starting point:
1. I want to gain weight. Put on at least 30 pounds.
2. Stop exercising. Waste of time.
3. Read less.
4. Watch more TV. I've been missing some good stuff.

Read more here: new-years-resolutions-you-can-keep--
And I want to add one more: Quit taking Mandarin lessons. I'll forget anyway.

www.mslmaster.com

A Parable of Zen – Seeking a Cure for Baldness

2008-12-10T18:10:00.000+08:00

There was a bald man whose head felt very cold in winter. But in summer, he always got bitten by mosquitoes on the head and found it hard to get a good night’s sleep. He was very trouble by this problem, but there was nothing he could do about it.

One day he heard about a famous physician who cured many difficult diseases and solved many problems. He decided to consult him.

He traveled for days and finally met this famous physician. This Physician was dressed in very plain clothes and wearing a hat.

The bald man came up and said to the physician: “Doctor, please cure me of baldness.”

The physician looked at him and replied sadly: “If I had a cure for baldness, I would have cured myself first.” And he removed his hat and showed his own bald head.

The conclusion from the Zen master: Fellow sufferers of the same illness empathize with each other.

The conclusion from April after she read the parable: Famous people don’t always have answers.

www.mslmaster.com

Is It Too Late to Learn Chinese?

2008-12-06T21:39:00.004+08:00

When the humorist Dave Barry went to Japan in the early 1990s, he attempted to learn the language by reading a paperback phrase book, Japanese at a Glance, on the flight over. "That is not the method recommended by experts," he wrote. "The method recommended by experts is to be born a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan."

The language of the moment is Chinese, and the expert advice is depressingly similar.

Difficult--but not impossible. In some areas, such as vocabulary memorization, older students can actually outperform younger peers. "Adults shouldn't say 'I'm too old to learn,'" says Long. "All over the world, millions of people have become extremely good in a second language, even when they started in their 30s and 40s." You can't expect to soak up Chinese like a sponge, but you do have the ability to concentrate and to study for hours on end. Unfortunately, if you want to learn Chinese, that's what you'll need to do.


www.mslmaster.com

Learning Tips During Holiday

2008-12-02T00:05:00.001+08:00

Have you ever packed your Mandarin Express books into your suitcase but didn’t read them? Have you taken your iPod loaded with audio lessons to the beach but didn’t listen to them? As the holiday season draws closer, many people will have a two week school break. They are determined to stay on the learning track during the break, only to find out that they haven’t done any studying at all.

The problem here is that they set their expectations too high. They think they can block an hour each day devoted to learning Chinese, but often find themselves involved in something else all the time. That’s where they fail. But often enough, after the holiday, they regret it. The worst is that they feel that they have forgotten everything. They felt they should have done at least a little bit of studying, if not a lot.

What can you do? Don’t even try to block one hour for learning. You’re not at school any more. Just dedicate a few minutes instead. It’s easier to spend a few minutes during your morning coffee than to try blocking one hour from everything else. Here is how you can do it.

There is no need to pack your students book and workbook. They are heavy and you won’t read them anyway. Instead, prepare a short vocabulary list which you think is important. For example, select a few key words from each lesson, and build a nice one- page vocabulary list containing about 30 – 50 words. During your holiday, use a few minutes during your breakfast to review these key words and try to recall what the lesson is about. You can have a quick mental review of one lesson during a cup of coffee.

Second, write a journal in Chinese or partially Chinese. Even the briefest journal will keep your Chinese active. Spend a few minutes and write some words, phrases about your daily activities or people you meet. This journal will not only help you learn Chinese, but also serve as a wonderful souvenir after your holiday.

Third, listen to your audio lessons while you’re sleeping. Some experts say that your brain continues to function and be more receptive when you’re sound asleep. And this is the best time to learn subconsciously. You may not realize it after you wake up, but your learning is already there.

Now armed with these wonderful learning tips, you’ll never “forget everything” during your holiday any more.

www.mslmaster.com

Things You Can Do Amid the Economic Downturn

2008-11-21T16:23:00.002+08:00

The stock market is down. The housing market is down. People are losing their jobs. Newspapers, full of these staggering headlines are sinking people’s already desperate feelings even lower. However, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. For hard working, prudently saving people, this economic downturn provides opportunities for things they can do now, but wouldn’t even consider a year ago.

Holiday season is approaching. We all want to stretch our dollars. What is a better way than buying good quality stuff? Shops and stores are discounting their inventory to lure customers in. The higher end brands are hit hard by this credit crunch. And they are giving 50% or even more discounts in the effort to recoup some severe losses. That is a good opportunity for people to get their hands on some good stuff. Good quality clothes, shoes and furniture will certainly last longer than the recession. And you’ll feel good when using them.

Real estate prices are expected by many to fall in the coming year, it could be a good time to buy property. When zero interest is on the horizon, buying when the market is down looks really attractive. We can expect the housing market to finally turn around in three to five years. By then, you have already made millions of dollars.

Many Business schools and vocational schools in the U.S. have reported that this year their application rates have gone up. That is because many people have chosen to improve themselves during this economic downturn, and when things are good again, they come out better and stronger. There is always a new subject to study. You can study for a degree, or you can learn a new language.

Don’t get so beaten up by all the sensational news. Explore the opportunities presented by the crisis. Right now, the economy is a lemon, make some lemonade!

www.mslmaster.com

China and Chinese – Quotes from Ideas by Watson

2008-11-16T11:05:00.001+08:00

The Greek name for the Chinese was Seres, from which the Latin word serica derives, meaning silk. The writer Pliny was just one who railed against the luxurious indulgences of his stylish contemporaries, complaining that enormous quantities of Chinese silk had entered Rome. Chinese textiles traveled west along the Silk Roads from at least 1200 BC because, until AD200, or thereabouts, only the Chinese knew how to process silkworms.

As this implies, by medieval times, the most intellectually sophisticated country in the world, and the most technologically advanced, was China.

The Chinese had writings as early as the Shang Dynasty (1765 - 1045BC). These consisted of animal bones or tortoise-shells which had been cracked with red-hot pokers, for the purposes of divination, and on which written characters had been inscribed, interpreting the cracks in the bones. This practice gradually gave way to books made of bamboo slips. These were bound together with strings or thongs.

Confucius himself used books of this kind when he was studying the I Ching and he was apparently so earnest a pupil, so hard on his books, that he broke the thong three times.

Silk sometimes replaced bamboo – it was lighter, stronger, more resilient, and it could be wrapped around a rod, saving space. In this way, the Chinese word for ‘roll’ became the word for ‘book’.

With the coming of paper, so the invention of printing was not far behind. Printing raises the issue of writing and language.

Chinese language doesn’t possess an alphabet; instead it consisted of thousands of different characters.

Although there are many dialects of Chinese, Mandarin – the native tongue of north China – comprises about 70 per cent of what is spoken today. All its characters are monosyllabic. Moreover, there are only about 420 syllables in Mandarin, as compared with 1200 in English. Therefore, there are many characters, words pronounced using the same sound or syllable. To obtain the diversity of meaning that is needed, all syllables may be pronounced in different tones: high, high-rising, high-falling, low-dipping. For example, there are forty-one characters with the same pronunciation of yi in the fourth tone, including ‘easy’, ‘righteousness’, ‘difference’ and ‘art’. Meaning must be inferred from context.

And in Chinese, words do not change according to number, gender, cases, tenses, voice or mood. Relationships are indicated either by word order or the use of auxiliary words. Take for example this sentence as it would be delivered in Chinese: ‘Yesterday he give I two literature revolution book.’ ‘Yesterday’ indicates that ‘give’ means ‘gave’. Word order indicates that ‘I’ means me, and ‘two’ indicates that ‘book’ means ‘books’. The word order also indicates that ‘literature revolution’ means ‘literary revolution’ and not ‘revolutionary literature’. And so the full sentence means ‘Yesterday he gave me two books on [the] literary revolution.’

In the same way that the Chinese language is based on a different set of ideas from the Indo-European languages, so its script is very different from the Western alphabets. It recalls much more the early pictographs used in Mesopotamia at the birth of writing. All Chinese dialects use the same script, on which others such as Korean and Japanese are based.

These various aspects of Chinese language and script have had a major influence on Chinese thought. There is not only the pictorial quality of the characters themselves, but the various tones in which words are pronounced, which in particular, for example, give Chinese poetry added elements or dimensions that are quite lacking in Western languages.

Top 10 credit crunch jokes

2008-11-05T11:28:00.001+08:00

It's time for a laugh! From Hannah Wood at Mirror.co.uk: Top 10 credit crunch jokes to have you laughing all the way to the bank

1) I went to the ATM this morning and it said "insufficient funds"..

I'm wondering is it them or me?

2) Petrol is way too expensive these days. I actually can't afford to drive.

Last time I went dogging, I had to ask my mum to give me a lift.

3) With the current market turmoil, what's the easiest way to make a small fortune?

Start off with a large one.

4) How do you define optimism?

A banker who irons five shirts on a Sunday

Three Men and the God of Language Learning

2008-10-27T13:40:00.003+08:00

There were three men working for the same company who decided to take a class and learn Mandarin. And they were blessed by the God of Language Learning. The God of Language Learning granted them each a wish.

The first man said: “I’d like to be very smart and be able to understand all the rules of grammar and pronunciation so they will come to me very easily.” The God of Language Learning said: “Done!”

The second man said: “I’d like to be surrounded by lots of native Mandarin speakers as friends. And they will be very willing to help me master Mandarin.” The God of Language Learning said: “Done!”

The third man said: “Please grant me determination to help me carry on when I’m very tired and tempted to do other things or when I get distracted.” The God of Language Learning said: “Done!”

So these three men went to class twice a week. And they worked hard and even took on additional assignments.

The performance of the first man in the class was spectacular. Nothing was difficult to him. He had native-like pronunciation, mastering the tough ones like zh, ch, sh, r, j, q, x in a split second. And all the grammar was easy. The teacher taught him even more advanced grammar like when to move the object in front of the verb. He understood it instantly and could even make a few sentences.

The second man and the third man did just like were average students in the class. They tried and they practiced. There were things they understood well, and there were things not so well.

But the Second man had lots of Chinese friends who were more than willing to help him. When he learned how to say “ni hao. Ni jiao shenme mingzi?” His friends hurriedly explained several other possible ways to greet people and ask their names, and went along to explain how to address different people based on their relationship and different customs and habits in different regions in China. When he learned how to ask “cesuo zai nar?”, his friends hurriedly explained any possible names Chinese could name their toilets and jokes associated with them.

The third man would just go home, review his textbooks, do his homework, listen to the recordings and spend 30 minutes a day learning vocabulary. There were times he wasn’t very much in the mood to study, and there were times he was tempted to do other things, but he carried on. He was blessed with determination.

Two months later, the first man dropped out of the class. He did so well in the class and hardly spent anytime outside of the classroom studying. Although he could understand and comprehend quickly, he had a great deal of trouble retaining and using what he learned so he was soon overwhelmed by it all. He dropped out.

Three months later, the second man had to constantly hide from all his Chinese friends to get any studying done. He was overwhelmed by all the suggestions they made and all the tips they wanted to give him, when he just wanted to practice with them what he learned in class. He quit class eventually because wherever he went, his friends would find him and wouldn’t leave him in peace.

The third man carried on. After he finished the first module, he signed up for the second. A year later, he could talk easily with most Chinese people. He was happy with his result. And he truly thanked the God of Language Learning for blessing him with determination. In language learning, nothing else really mattered.

The moral of this story is: In learning a language, brilliance on grammar and pronunciation will fade out. Helpful friends will make matters worse. What can bring success and satisfaction is determination.

www.mslmaster.com

Is It Still Good to Learn Mandarin in the Middle of an Economic Downturn?

2008-10-22T21:38:00.003+08:00

It all started in the summer of 2007. Suddenly, things become gloomier and gloomier. The house markets in many countries went into a long decline. The stock markets in general have evaporated huge amount of wealth. And China couldn’t keep herself out of the trouble either.

Is it still good to learn Mandarin? After all, one of the major reasons why people want to learn Mandarin is to do business in China. But the reality shows us many companies and factories in China have closed down largely due to this economic slow down or recession in the world.

Is this Mandarin learning boom (or fad) over? I don't think so. If learning Mandarin was ever a bubble because of the booming Chinese economy during past years, slowing down economy might provide the best opportunities of learning for those who want to be prepared.

Still, tough time is coming for all of us and it requires tough decisions. We don’t know how long this recession is going to last and how deep it will affect us. Does one want to huddle in the shelter and worry about when the things will turn up, or does one find the courage and continue to learn to prepare for a better time in the future?

A simple conclusion would be: No matter what happens, learn our way out.

www.mslmaster.com

Website Re-branded

2008-10-22T11:48:00.005+08:00

Once in a while, something needs changing. This time it is the main website. The site has grown out of its old name, and now re-branded into www.mslmaster.com

It's a better site and easier to navigate and explore the huge amount of information that it hosts.

So, update your bookmarks. The old one will soon become a broken link.

Listening Comprehension

2008-10-07T17:24:00.002+08:00

Over the years, I found out that a mark of big improvement over learning a language, is not how fluent you speak, is how well you understand while you are listening.

Can you tell the underlining message under different tones? Can you spot a pun when you hear it? Can you tell the different subtle choices of small words?

Those abilities can show how good a person has come to. Well, in the end, we are meant to listen more. We have two ears, but one mouth.

Get Real!

2008-09-20T17:14:00.002+08:00

A couple of days ago, I came across somebody saying:"Learning Mandarin is really easy, as long as you can tell the differences between the four tones." Then he went on and did a demonstration of how the four tones sound like. Apparently, for him, even though he is still yet to manage a simple conversation, he already believes that Mandarin is under his belt.

I really want to tell him:"Get Real! It's not an easy stroll down the park!" But out of politeness, I only said something like: "It's actually very difficult. Be able to tell the four tones is nice, but the difficult stuff is yet to come."

Whoever is broadcasting this "simple" language view is being irresponsible. It's so much like the sub prime mortgage borrowers. They don't know what lies ahead of them. If anyone heads into learning Mandarin because of this, he is behaving like an irresponsible learner. The weight, the stress and the complexity will soon crash him out of the learning path.

What is learning Mandarin really like? It's like running a marathon in a very beautiful place. The road under your feet is winding and bumpy and full of obstacles. But as long as you are making the effort on the way, you will be immensely rewarded. The most breath taking scenery will unfold itself. Flying angels will bestow their best wishes on you. It's a path of realizing your potential and doing what you can do with a great amount of effort.

Get real and don't be tricked into learning Mandarin under a false perspective. Be very well prepared.

Bird Watchers

2008-09-15T11:26:00.002+08:00

Bird watchers have trained their ears by listening over and over again to recordings of bird songs, comparing and contrasting until very subtle differences become apparent.

A great deal of research shows that the ear must be trained to hear just as carefully as the eye to see.

Accent

2008-08-31T20:44:00.002+08:00

It's interesting to see how English manipulate letters to create a kind of accent. For example:

'ee 'ees goodlooking, innit?

Well, you certainly can't do the same thing to Chinese. Instead, you have to manipulate words to reflect that. For example:

"他很好看。" can be said in following ways:

他真俊。
他中看。
人家咋这么有样呢。

They all express the same thing, but also represent a certain accent departed from standard Chinese.

Take a natural approach, learning speaking first

2008-08-05T15:08:00.002+08:00

Chinese characters have very special characteristic and charisma and often draw people from everywhere in the world to learn them.

Unfortunately, learning Chinese characters is like everything else: practiced by many, mastered by few. A sheer number of characters and the time needed to maintain them active are often obstacles. This is especially true for people who learn characters as their tools to learn speaking. Speaking ability often get drawn back by the limitation of characters.

A natural approach will work much better. Use pinyin to get started with speaking first, and after a certain fluency achieved, start learning reading and writing characters.

Every serious Chinese learners should learn reading and writing. It's just the path one chooses makes quite impact on how enjoyable the learning journey is. If you want to stick to something longer, sometimes choose an easier path will help. Make small incremental improvement over the time beats try to leap a obstacle made of 1000 characters.

The level of podcast

2008-07-11T09:35:00.002+08:00

Occasionally I found discussions on which level my podcasts (http://learningmandarinpod.blogspot.com/) are. Most people categorized them as pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate.

I would rather categorize them as real life issue expressed in simple language. Why make things so complicated when you can make them nice and easy, and moreover, easy to understand? I have seen no reason to do so, especially when I'm trying to break a stubborn pattern held among many that vocabulary is everything.

Master Chinese in Three Months!

2008-07-04T10:30:00.002+08:00

I would have never believed this. But it happened. Read on:

http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/story_english.jsp?id=001020381&loc=story

Chinese spirit

2008-06-23T15:17:00.002+08:00

The devastating earthquake happened last month is starting to fade out from people's attention. This year is full of disasters happening everywhere.

What I am really touched and proud of is Chinese spirit. People don't just sit there and feel sorry for themselves. It's the self-reliance action that people took shows how different Chinese people are.

Strong body, Weak mind

2008-05-31T17:40:00.003+08:00

There are always something that we want. It could be speaking putonghua really well, or getting that lean, trim and muscular body, or playing piano beautifully, or being a golf master, etc, etc.

There are somebody out there already doing that. Why can't this person be me? If you only got one single reason, like you have speech recognition problem and that keeps you from speaking putonghua well, or you have curved fingers that keeps you from playing a musical instrument, you are indeed couldn't be this person. There's no coulda, shoulda, woulda there. If you can come up with a thousand reasons why this person is not you, you belong to the category of strong body with weak mind.

It's your weak mind sabotage you all the time. While your body is capable of doing something, but your mind can't.

Chinese Characters

2008-05-20T09:36:00.002+08:00

汉字是现今世界上唯一的表意文字，其他所有的文字都是拼音文字。不论是从拉丁文发展出的法文、德文，或者英文，还是阿拉伯文，韩文，泰文，以及日本的假名等等，都是以字母发音为基础的拼音文字。世界上至今还在通用的文字里，只有汉字是表意文字。

This can be the pride of all Chinese people and all people who can read and write Chinese characters!

It's nice to learn from a young age

2008-05-12T13:28:00.002+08:00

When it comes to languages, one hears that it's good to learn from a young age. When it comes to musical instrument, one hears that it's good to learn from a young age. It's almost certain that a young person has great advantages in learning new things.

That's the reason why I've seen a increasing number of kids running around from classes to classes. Apart from their normal school, they have additional curriculum. Monday, piano lesson. Tuesday, dancing lesson. Wednesday, Chinese lesson. Thursday, French lesson. Saturday, homework tutoring. Sunday, off.

It looks to me that learning at a young can be a double edged sword. On one hand, this kind of busy children will have a head start in lots of things that can make their adult life more competitive. On the other hand, this kind of busy children don't have childhood that they will cherish and love, and that may not lead to a competitive adult life. They would probably spend all their time playing toy trains.

The 2nd best time of learning

2008-05-02T10:39:00.002+08:00

The first best time of learning a language is during childhood. At that time, learning is a duty; learning is a responsibility. The sad thing is that we only have one childhood per person. There is not enough to go around. And when it's over, it's over.

The 2nd best time of learning is the rest of one's life. However it's plagued with other duties and responsibilities, like work, family, inflation, and house, etc. Learning is very difficult to carry on.

Don't fail this second chance, because there isn't any left after this.

If you travelled around the World 100 years ago

2008-04-25T20:58:00.005+08:00

如果你可以在一百年前就进行环球自助旅行, 那你肯定是幸福的，因为那时还没有“全球化”，所有国家的建筑都具有浓厚的本民族特色。譬如你到了越南的河内，看到的就是越式风情；到东京，看到的就是和式建筑。不论到哪一个国家与民族，他们穿的衣服和城市的建筑都有着很鲜明的民族特色。这时你看到的是一个完整的、承传自身文化的国家，没有外来文化的杂质，整座城市，不论是传统建筑，还是人民身上的服饰，其文化的协调性都很强，可以想象那真是一种属于本民族的极致美学的画面。

The above is quoted from a magazine article 《做有质感的民族》. Unfortunately, even 100 years ago, you would not be able to see a pure culture. All the cultures are connected with one another in one way or another.

What is Business Chinese?

2008-03-26T19:04:00.002+08:00

I have seen some Business Chinese books. They all talk about trading, buying, selling and bargaining. What happened to other businesses? My guess is that people in other businesses do not need to learn Chinese. Or, those Business Chinese books should be tossed to the nearest waste basket.

There is no so called Business Chinese. There is Chinese and some business terms.

Can't Find Chinese Fortune Cookies in a Chinese Restaurant in China

2008-03-09T23:48:00.002+08:00

Things can be so different after traveling overseas. For example, Chinese food.

So many people living outside of China think that fortune cookies are an essential part of Chinese food. But when they come to China and eat in a Chinese restaurant, they never find them.

The question is: Where can you taste the most authentic Chinese food? In Chinese restaurants outside of China, or in Chinese restaurants in China? They are quite different things, mind you!

Writing is an Idea

2008-02-24T18:50:00.002+08:00

Quote from Ideas A History From Fire To Freud by Peter Watson:

Writing is an idea, a very important idea, which was invented before 3000 BC. Today, however, we tend not to regard letters or words as inventions, as we do computers or mobile phones, because they have been so long with us. But inventions are evidence of ideas. I have treated language an an idea, because language reflects the way that people think, and the ways in which languages differ characterize the social and intellectual history of different populations. In addition, most ideas are conceived in language. Thus I consider th history and structure of the world's most intellectually influential languages: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, French and English.

Do you know why people don't understand you

2008-02-09T20:38:00.000+08:00

After said something about the possible reasons of why you don't understand other people, it's time to say the other way: why people don't understand you.

Successful communications take two ways. For a Mandarin Chinese learner, it's not uncommon that they tried so hard to say something, and that something didn't get across to the other end at all. I have witnessed countless times when this happened. It's very discouraging to any learners indeed.

Most people will naturally point it out that it's the pronunciation that fails the learners. Especially Mandarin, a radically different language, has so many different sounds, and so tonal. However, from my observation, this is the last thing between you and your listeners. There are other things far more important. Here are my three points listed in order of importance:

1) Language structure and habit
2) How to use the vocab you know to say something you don't know
3) Your accent (pronunciation)

Most people get tumbled on the first point when they think it's everything but. For instance, one person wanted to order water in a restaurant. He learned that water is "shui" with the third tone. So he told the waitress: "shui3." And the waitress looked all confused and didn't understand what he wanted. It's not that he said anything wrong. It's that he didn't know when Chinese people order water they wouldn't only say "shui3" as a westerner would do in a western restaurant. Chinese people tend to say a bit more like: "yi ping kuang quan shui", or "yi bei shui", or "yi bei re shui", or something shui.

The second point baffled so many people. One common complain is that "I don't have enough vocab." Probably nobody will ever have enough vocab even for native speakers. The trick is that as a second language speaker one needs to change some speaking patterns that he is so used to as a first language speaker. If you don't know how to say "Don't hurry.", you can say "We have time" (wo men you shi jian.) instead. For those diligent students, they will look up a dictionary and find hurry as "gan jin 赶紧", or "cang cu 仓促", etc. But then they tend to fall in the first catch of neglecting structure or habit and say something like: bu cang cu. And that will not get your meaning across.

The last part that may hinder people understand you is your accent (pronunciation). If you have taken care of the first and second points, you are fine most of the time. If you know "don't hurry" is "bie zhao ji 别着急", you can assure that people will understand you even you say the phrase in a quite different accent. A person from Qing Dao will say "bie zhao ji" quite differently from a person from Luo Yang. And you, just add some flavor to hundreds of different accents that Chinese people already have, get a quite nice and distinctive Spanish accent, German accent, or English accent. No big deal.

Now it's time to think what is the real thing that stands between you and a smooth communication.

You Need to Know Why You Don't Understand People

2008-01-24T10:45:00.000+08:00

If I ask 10 people this question: Do you think why you don't understand when you are talking to Chinese people?
It's a safe bet that I'll get one answer: It's the vocabulary. I need to learn more vocabulary.

Vocabulary certainly is a barrier, but it is one only for beginners. There are people who have learned Chinese for years, and accumulate vast amount of vocabulary. But when in real life, they still get lost quite quickly.

In fact you face three barriers:
1- vocabulary and sentence patterns
2- talking speed
3- accent

The first one is the easiest one to solve. You can employ many different methods. The end result is to remember certain words and sentence patterns. It's also the reason why learning reading and writing is easier than learning listening and speaking. When in reading and writing, your brain has time to recollect your memory, and if you have done your homework well you will find it easy to learn reading and writing. Although it's the easiest one to accomplish, memorizing large amount of vocab and grammar patterns can still be a daunting task.

The second one is not so easy to tackle. And most of the time, it's speaking speed that hinders your understanding. You have no time to reflect and it's already over. You need to have rigorous training on listening until a foreign sound becomes so familiar and you can call it your second nature. It's not so easy. It requires hours and hours of listening training.

The third one is the most difficult. When you are out of your classroom and your standard tape recording, you face people with different accents. There are so many different accents out there. And those accents can really lost you. The good news is if this is the only reason why you don't understand, you can adapt to it fairly quickly.

In the end, that's just why there's so much fun in learning Chinese!

Want to ride a bus, anyone?

2008-01-10T17:10:00.000+08:00

I stayed in Beijing for a week from Dec 26, 2007 to Jan 1, 2008.

It was a good time to visit Beijing, to appreciate the Forbidden City and the Great Wall in the cold and very windy winter. And indeed I saw plenty visitors from all over the world in those places. People speak all kinds of languages and some of foreign visitors can speak Chinese too.

But when I was outside of the tourist attractions, I saw no foreign visitors. When I was in a public bus, or when I was in a small neighborhood restaurant, or when I was in a local convenient store, I had no foreign visitor in sight! Where did they go? What did they do?

I sincerely hope that Beijing's attraction is beyond the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. And people (at least those who take Mandarin lessons) are courageous enough to explore some small wonders in the nearby neighborhoods, and can have the opportunity to see ordinary people's lives.

I want to go to Beijing for one month

2007-12-07T18:41:00.000+08:00

I heard this quite often: "I want to go to Beijing for one month and study putonghua."

It sounds good, but the real question should be asked is "then what?"

If anybody believes that one month stay in Beijing (or even six months stay) can make a person a fluent putonghua speaker, and require no further study, this person is too naive.

A devoted full month study is excellent no matter where you are. The real challenge comes after that. When you don't have that much of time, when your life goes back to pre-study routine, it's time for you to really concentrate on how you can carry on your study.

I read this sentence in a coffee shop. It's excellent for putonghua learners as well:

You do what you can at where you are.

Training Your Hand rather than Your Brain

2007-11-20T09:08:00.000+08:00

I've seen many many people bought a huge stack of Chinese characters cards, roughly 1000 at least, to study. They read each card, trying to remember what the character looks like, and read the explanations, and, try to read the sample sentences, but often failed here because there are too many news words in the sample sentences. Then what happened?

They quickly forgot what they learned.

Leaning characters is a process of training your hand rather than your brain. If you write enough times, your hand will remember each characters better than your brain can. And your hand will remember those tiny details that differentiate different characters. For example: 已, 己, 巳.

Trust your hand more. It's more reliable.

Running in the dark nights

2007-10-20T09:31:00.000+08:00

It is said that sometimes people want to get somewhere quickly and they run in the dark nights. The problem is that they are running in the wrong direction. But running itself keep them feeling comfortable and hoping that they are getting closer.

If you want to learn Mandarin as much as you can and as fast as you can. Be careful, and be alert on where you are going. If you want to achieve speaking and listening fluency, reading lots of grammar will not get you there. Only speaking and listening exercises will. If you want to achieve reading and writing fluency, study decks of decks of character cards will not get you there. Only reading and writing passages will.

You don't want to run in the dark nights in a wrong direction. Even you run as hard as you can, you won't get to where you want to be.

Putonghua and local dilect

2007-09-22T18:45:00.000+08:00

For lots of Putonghua students, it's their goal that they can travel around China using only Putonghua. It's very doable in many places, but it can also be quite difficult.

I just had a short trip to Wuhan, Hubei. And I was surprised to find out that Wuhan people prefer Hubeihua rather than Putonghua, even when they are talking to Putonghua speaking people. Hubeihua sounds kind of similar to Putonghua, but only to native ears.

I believe it's very difficult for Putonghua students to understand them, especially those who are programmed in standard four tones.

When asked why they only speak Hubeihua, Wuhan people said that it's habit, or it's not enough education. One or the other. They certainly have no problems understanding Putonghua. They just don't want to speak it!

Not satisfied at your progress?

2007-09-01T20:03:00.001+08:00

If you have spent at least one hour per day to study Chinese, to review, to do homework and probably watch Chinese programs on TV, but somehow you don't feel you have made any progress.

It could be that you still utter badly pronounced words, or you still struggle to make a full sentence, or you still can't understand the simplest questions when you hear them. Maybe it's time for you to consider that it's your teacher who didn't do a good job.

Moving forward is as important as review

2007-08-03T13:58:00.000+08:00

Sometimes people stop learning because they feel that they need to re-study what they have learned before. It's a good idea. But most of time, it turned out to be a trap.

Re-study can be boring, and that leads to low motivation, and that leads to low self-esteem, and that leads to stop, and that leads to abandon, and that leads to totally forget whatever you have!

Feelings sometimes can be very misleading, and waiting for tomorrow's miracle certainly will never happen. The best way is to forge ahead, move on, roll and stop worrying so much.

Is Summer a good time to study?

2007-07-05T18:42:00.001+08:00

Maybe not. That's why schools are all closed during the Summer.

There are too many distractions. Good weather, bad weather, sports, TV, movies, trips and meals, etc, etc. To keep a good disciplined study plan is almost impossible.

Do you want to play the leading actor/actress in Study Mission Impossible?

11 years in China

2007-06-16T17:47:00.000+08:00

Over the years, I have met people who have stayed in China for 11 years and don't speak Chinese, and also those who do. Sometimes I'm not sure which type is more impressive. How can anybody resist the temptation of speaking to the locals using their own language?

The gentleman in the picture, Guo Tong, has stayed in China for 11 years, speaks good Chinese, and doing business in China. Chinese language skills are essential to him.

Reading stories

2007-05-18T19:57:00.000+08:00

If the whole textbook is full of conversations, dialogs which are supposedly very useful but actually are not (people are not scripted when they are speaking), what can you do?

My suggestion is: start reading interesting stories.

Mandarin Songs

2007-04-21T14:54:00.000+08:00

Last night I went to a Turkish restaurant for dinner. There had live music. I guess they could be from Philippines, Mexico, or some other tropical countries since they have this nice brown skin.

They sang a lot of English songs. Since it was a small restaurant and also I was sitting right in front of them, they asked me where I was from. After learned I am from China, they smiled and said "ni hao" to me. That was really nice of them. And then, they did something even nicer - they sang two Chinese songs.

One was Qi Qin's "da yue zai dong ji", the other one was Deng Lijun's "yueliang daibiao wo de xin". They did really well, and I was very happy sitting there and listening. Later on they told me it had been a long time since they sang Chinese songs, but they really loved it.

How far can good memory go?

2007-04-04T12:02:00.000+08:00

Not very far. I have seen people with excellent memory. Quite often, once they see a new word, or hear a new word, they will remember it for as long as a day. That's all there is. If they don't review, or practice in one form or another, they will forget what they have learned.

It's a great advantage for people who have excellent memory, but also a great pit fall. This type of people tend to be over confident and neglect the fact that learning a language requires more than just memory. Learning a language is a journey with commitment.

Object vs Context

2007-02-24T11:37:00.000+08:00

Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought is a very interesting read. Asians and Westerners are so different in so many ways, and they live in literally a very different world.

He discussed the language effects which I find really intriguing.
Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a "subject-prominent" language. There must be a subject even in the sentence "It is raining." Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are "topic-prominent" languages.

I don't know Japanese or Korean, but I do know "It is raining" in Chinese is "xia yu le!"

It's indeed very different. It shows that to learn Chinese, at least for English speaking people, it's much better to learn through context than to memorize a dictionary. And be prepared, learning Chinese can change your world, literally!!

Learning a language is too expensive to waste

2007-02-07T16:53:00.000+08:00

Learning a language can be very expensive. Not only the money you paid to school or your tutor, but also the time and energy you committed.

If you started with two weeks program, and four weeks later you forgot everything, all the effort your have made is wasted! It's better that you didn't start it at all. You can use the money, the time and the energy to do something more beneficial, like go hiking or read a book.

My advice is that if you are not sure, don't start. If you have committed, you should carry on for more than one year to not waste anything.

Workbook Basic Level B Available Online Now

2007-01-30T14:51:00.000+08:00

Workbook Basic Level B now is available at online store front www.msllearningcenter.com/catalog.
It is good for people who have had 150 - 200 hours of Mandarin instructions, and in need of more good exercises, especially listening exercises.

Have fun!

Workbook Basic Level B

2007-01-23T13:07:00.000+08:00

The production of Workbook Basic Level B is finished!
This one is loaded with listening exercises.

I always say that listening exercises are crucial and I can't stress more on how important it is to language development. This is good news for anybody who is on Basic Level B, loads and loads of listening exercises are right there! 74 listening exercises out of 120 exercises in total.

This book will hit our online store front soon!

Learn a New Language, Delay Dementia

2007-01-15T11:02:00.000+08:00

This article is interesting, or at least to anyone who is learning a new language:

By knowing more than one language, researchers from Toronto say you can delay the onset of dementia symptoms.

The new study suggests that the mental agility required to speak two or more languages may actually stave off mental decline.

The Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto looked at 184 Toronto-area people.

Researchers found that in people who only spoke one language, symptoms of dementia showed up on average at the age of 70 in men and 71 in women.

For those who knew two or more languages, the study found that dementia didn’t appear until age 76 in men and 75 for women.

The study will be published in the February issue of Neuropsychologia.

This article is from newsmax.com, you can read editor's note here:
http://www.newsmax.com/blaylock/2.cfm?s=sp&promo_code=2C19-1

So, happy learning!

Who had a great New Year?

2007-01-05T16:29:00.000+08:00

If you ate, drank, watched a lot of TV, it's time to shake up now!

Did you put exercises into your daily schedule? Did you put your study plan into your daily schedule?

If you did, great! If you haven't, do it today!

As a long New Year celebration and gift, from Jan 1 to Feb 28, right after Chinese New Year, all Intro level audio lessons have 20% discount. Check them out here.

A very fair and reasonable comment

2006-12-23T11:10:00.000+08:00

A Mandarin Student Chris in UK discussed about my Learning Mandarin Podcast in his blog.

I run into his blog and delightedly read through his fair and reasonable comment. It's really nice since he obviously sated very clear and accurate of the purpose of my setting up this podcast.

you can read it here.

The use of a dictionary

2006-12-19T10:40:00.000+08:00

Have you ever thought about that if you remember all the words in a dictionary, you will speak fluent Mandarin?

Well, if you are like me 20 years ago when I was learning English, I guarantee that you will fail.

20 years ago, I thought the reason that I couldn't speak English was I didn't have enough vocabulary. So I bought a dictionary like book English Vocabulary 10000. This book guaranteed me that after remembered all the words there, I could speak great English.

It took me four to five months to get through the book from cover to cover. I learned a lot of interesting words that I don't remember now. But guess what, I still couldn't speak English. And I realized that by just expanding vocabulary doesn't work. I have to try something else.

Diet Chocolate Cake

2006-12-18T10:28:00.000+08:00

Christmas is around corner. Holiday season usually means "eat a lot and get fat".

But there was a TV show I watched last week said something different. They invented diet chocolate cake, low calorie pudding, and low calorie cookies. If you want to eat a lot and still be healthy, there is a way now!

Also, treasure this: if you spend 20 minutes a day to review your Mandarin or to listen to an audio lesson track, you will feel even better!

This is this holiday season's keep fit suggestion: diet chocolate cake + 20 minutes Mandarin/day

The habit of accomplish your goals

2006-12-15T10:28:00.000+08:00

You enjoy learning Mandarin more when you accomplish more.

But accomplish more doesn't mean that you suddenly speak fluent Mandarin next week or next month. Accomplish more means you set up many many smaller goals and then achieve those small goals. Every step is an achievement, each week is a time to celebrate. Thus you get yourself into a habit of accomplish your goals.

You should feel good about yourself on every small step you made. You should be proud of yourself on every small goal you achieved. The very next small step is all you need to concentrate on, and this small step is very achievable as well.

In doing this, there is only one ultimate result in front of you: success.

The inevitable bump

2006-12-14T10:55:00.000+08:00

Learning Mandarin is just like everything else in life. There will be times that you feel terrible about yourself, or you are too distracted by other things.

The way to handle it is also the same way to handle other inevitable bumps: Stick to your road map. Summon your extra strength to put one foot in front of another. Hang in there.

When the dark time is over, you will be happy that you didn't give up. You carried on.

It's time to formulate a road map

2006-12-13T12:27:00.000+08:00

If you have decided that in the end of 2007, you want to be able to carry on basic simple conversations in Chinese, you need to formulate a road map NOW.

The importance of the road map is to break down a major task into many many small tasks, into many many smaller goals. So that you can ONLY focus on the next goal.

From my experience, most people can carry on basic simple conversations after they finish Intro level. In Intro Level, there are two books, Intro level A and Intro Level B. Each book has 10 lessons and two reviews. From now till the end of 2007, you have 52 weeks. Here is a basic road map (the assumption is that you are doing self-study):

Week 1 : Listen to Intro A lesson 1 audio lesson every day
Week 2: Finish Intro A workbook lesson 1 (10 exercises in total, so 2 exercises per day).
Week 3: Listen to Intro A lesson 2 audio lesson every day
Week 4: Finish Intro A workbook lesson 2 (2 exercises per day)
Week 5: Listen to Intro A lesson 3 audio lesson every day
Week 6: Finish Intro A workbook lesson 3

...

Week 11: Review lesson 1 - 5 by listening to the audio lessons
Week 12: Finish Intro A workbook review 1-5 exercises

...

Week 23: Review Lesson 6-10 by listening to the audio lessons
Week 24: Finish Intro A workbook review 6-10

...

Week 47: Review Intro B lesson 16-20 by listening to the audio lessons
Week 48: Finish Intro B workbook review 16-20

Week 49 - 52: It's time to celebrate your success and plan for your next road map. Also time for a great Christmas!

The key issue is that you need to set your road map step by step to carry on from where you are now to where you want to be, and make sure you follow your map. Don't rush too fast, neither too slow. Always ONLY focus on your next step!

Shoot for the stars!

2006-12-12T09:51:00.000+08:00

Before you set up any plan, it's important to know where you want to end up.
Do you want to:

Carry basic conversations
Express your self freely
Use natural speech when socializing with Chinese people
Discuss world issues and all kinds of topics

Where do you want to go? Can you create a picture in your mind? Can you describe your future successful in details?

If you don't know where you want to end up with, you won't go anywhere!

Set a goal! Shoot for the starts!

Make Year 2007 Your Most Successful Year

2006-12-11T09:13:00.000+08:00

To make year 2007 your most successful year takes planning. You can plan anything now for the things you want to achieve next year. To narrow our focus, we only discuss learning Chinese here.

This is a borrowed quote:

The best time to learn Chinese is last year. The second best time is this year.

If you started in 2006 and carried on, it's time to appreciate how far you have gone. If you didn't start in 2006 and would like to learn, now is a good time to set a plan!

The Toilets in China

2006-12-08T09:56:00.000+08:00

Very often I heard people telling me about their trips to China were very exciting, interesting in many ways except their experience of the public toilets.

I agree that public toilets in most of the places are not great.

If all the public toilets are improved over night, things will be perfect. As life has taught us many times that nothing is perfect, so take this as part of the package of your China trip and enjoy more with talking to people, eating great Gong Bao chicken.

This is for those who have made amazing results.

2006-12-06T23:57:00.000+08:00

There are success stories happening everyday around me.

Henry started his Mandarin lesson in Nov 2005. In a year time, despite all the trips, travels and work load, Henry made very impressive results by finishing Pre-intermediate B.

Tim and Wantanee started their lesson during mid 2004. During this one year and half, they had some very long breaks. They are really amazing people. They made the commitment, and they carried on.

Nathan started his lesson during the summer last year. He consistently studies and the result is amazing.

Doron started his lesson early this year. He completes all the exercises and will do more. This is what gives Doron an edge.

And there are always more.

One common trait of them is consistent and self-discipline.

I feel lucky that I can witness their success, or in some cases, be part of it.

Priceless Moment

2006-12-06T11:34:00.000+08:00

This is a story of a student. AT the time he was half way through Intro Level A, he went to Shanghai to do business. He was talking to his Chinese supplier on the phone and trying to set up an appointment at 6pm. But English didn't carry him very far. He found his supplier didn't understand "six o'clock pm". Then he tried "xia wu liu dian". And it worked! He was very excited!

Things like that are priceless for a language learner. It justified every effort you made.

What is the priceless moment you had?

What if you never had a chance to use Chinese

2006-12-05T12:20:00.000+08:00

What if you never had a chance, and probably never will have a chance to use Chinese you have learned or are learning, would you want to commit yourself into this learning journey?

How many of you out there are putting 30 mins everyday for learning Mandarin and know you would probably never use it?

This reminds me that there are many people learning English in China. Some of them probably won't have any chance to use it, but they are happy to take a new adventure in an English speaking world. Why do they do this? What is the incentive?

My answer is that it's a self-satisfaction experience there. It happens when you are listening to radios, watching movies, reading books or newspapers. It's something out there that not so easy to master but ultimately satisfying to us humans.

Tips On How To Use Workbooks

2006-12-04T15:18:00.000+08:00

To use workbooks effectively will save you lots of trouble and sweat in the future.

Before you start doing all the exercises in your workbook, make sure you have learned the corresponding lessons in your students book, then you can:

1. Do all the written exercises first. In this way, you will see all the target words again and again, and this visual impact is important for further task.

2. Do 2-3 listening exercises. Make sure you understand 98%. If you have questions, go back to your book or ask your teacher, do a short revision

3. Finish the remaining listening exercises.

4. Review and further exercises.

MSL Featured Photo

2006-12-04T09:58:00.000+08:00

Take a look at recently updated pictures here!

http://www.msllearningcenter.com/our_students.htm

Also, if you have a great photo and would like to share with us, send it to me.
After all, it's sharing makes a good photo great!

Learning Mandarin is a Commitment

2006-12-01T11:23:00.000+08:00

Provide the right materials, the right environment, the right method, learning Mandarin can be fast, but not that fast like you can master this language in one month.

Using the same materials in different ways is a very good way to speed up the process. That is why I made students book, CDs, workbook, audio lessons. But still you need a year to finish Intro Level and Basic Level to develop into a relatively good proficiency.

My definition of advanced learners is near native. They can THINK in Mandarin. Anywhere less than that is not advanced. There is middle point between beginning to near native. At this point, you can communicate in any topics and can understand most of what other native speakers said. You can understand 50-60% of movies without subtitles, or 90% with subtitles, and maybe 30% of news. This point is Intermediate.

If you study consistently using Mandarin Express series, from beginning to intermediate it will take about 1.5 to 2 years. From there to advanced level may take another five to ten years. And after that, you are still learning as the language is a living thing.

So, learning Mandarin is a life long commitment.

10 New Pre-Intermediate B Online Lessons Released!

2006-11-30T13:58:00.000+08:00

These set of new audio lessons are based on Mandarin Express Pre-Intermediate Level B.
The ten lessons are about:

11. Past event, present and future
12. Abilities, skills, careers
13. Personality traits and job preference
14. Aspects of countries, world knowledge
15. Describing recent experiences
16. Describing movies, actors/actresses, and movie directors. Oscar Awards.
17. Gestures and culture shock
18. Sleep and dreams
19. Predicament and dilemmas
20. Excuses and white lies

Check the lessons out at our online store.

Learning Mandarin is not confined to the classroom

2006-11-30T11:35:00.000+08:00

It's on the street;
It's in restaurant;
It's in taxies;
It's talking to people;
It's reaching;
It's communicating.

The Tones Are Important, But Not Essencial

2006-11-29T09:31:00.000+08:00

You should not worry too much if you can't get tones perfect. Context is way more important than tones.

For example, below is a text written in pinyin with no tone markers. You still can understand everything, can't you?

ni men hao. wo jiao dawei, wo shi mei guo ren. wo zhu zai shanghai, wo de nv peng you hen piao liang.