The Weakest Link in Communication

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

"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"

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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