Good News

A lot of updates today.

First, I completed the first audio project session with Chandler a few days ago. I’m in the process of checking my success with the transcript, (Method: (Total correct pinyin and tones)/(Total number of pinyin and tones)) but from my estimates I’ll probably get about 45% correct, which is above my goal of 40%. That said, I still have a lot of work to do.

A few days ago I blogged about the learning tool Mnemosyne that features an intelligent algorithm based on exponential decay of knowledge. Since then, I’ve added about sixty flashcards to the pile. Some of my favorites are 电子人 (cyborg) 眼镜 (eyeglasses) and 应该 (should, ought to). About Mnemosyne I have both positive and negative thoughts. On the positive side, it’s a perfectly good flashcard program, and I wish I had started using something like it sooner. It’s also nice to have it split the flashcards up into different days based on my performance and rating. However, I’m not that impressed with the actual algorithm, or maybe I don’t understand it correctly. Today, when I clicked Level 2 for a card (out of 5 levels) it scheduled the next viewing for seven days from now. That seems a little long for a card that I’ve tenuously memorized, but we’ll see. Also, the flexibility of Mnemosyne isn’t that great. It doesn’t let the user manually choose how long he wants to wait before seeing the card again without deleting and recreating the card. The addition of that feature would increase the usability.

Finally, the Big News. Today I received word from NSEP, and I am happy to say that I have been awarded the scholarship. That means, yup! I’m heading to China There are still some items to take care of, such as the matriculation question and how much I’ll actually receive towards the program, but it’s definitely a momentous step in my life. From here on out, I’ll have to double my efforts to learn as much Chinese as I can in the coming months. That means…a lot of Mnemosyne.

 

A Learning Tool

I was reading Lifehacker today and one of the featured articles was about a program called Supermemo. Supermemo boasts a sophisticated algorithm applied to flashcards that keeps track of how often each card needs to be displayed. Well, I looked at Supermemo and it didn’t appear to be outstanding for the price, so I instead found this other program called Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne does the same thing for free, and it allows Asian characters. I’m going to give Mnemosyne a week’s trial run to familiarize myself with the algorithm. My goal is to learn to recognize all of the Kangxi radicals with 2-6 strokes by next week; if I can write them by memory, all the better. In addition to the radicals, I’ll be adding a few random vocabulary words (like 电子人 (android)) to see how effective Mnemosyne is for learning and retaining vocabulary. I’ll get back to that in a week.

Tonight I worked on the audio project and got some feedback from Chandler. I’ve determined that getting 40% of the tones and pinyin on the first try will be a pretty acceptable outcome for my first attempt. To calculate that I’ll add up everything I get correct and divide it by the number of possible correct letters/numbers.

I’m looking forward to the progress I see from Mnemosyne.

 

Reflections 1

Well, I’ve been studying Chinese from August 23rd to today, April 20th – about six months. Since I’m in a reflective mood tonight, I’d like to put down some thoughts that have been circulating in my mind throughout my learning experience.

Chinese isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Incredulous as I am writing that, I actually think it’s true. That first day of Chinese 121, I really had no preconceptions about Chinese; I knew about the tones and vaguely about the ideograph system, but beyond that Chinese was conceptually foreign to me, just like it is to many Americans. I think that’s why I was so surprised and delighted by the simplicity of Chinese grammatical structures – no tedious verb conjugation, no confusing noun declensions, tense indicated by auxiliary particles – it really is a beautifully structured language. I think that beauty is the reason why I fell in love with Chinese so quickly.

Of course, Chinese is no walk in the 公园. Plenty of hurdles exist for any nonnative speaker: tones, morpheme similarity, ideograph system, not to mention that daunting deluge of homonyms, such as 是事试and 视 and about fifty other fourth tones “shi” words. But is it this homogeneity that makes Chinese so much fun to learn; I have to be a detective, piecing together the context clues to figure out what is being said.

Of course, I don’t really have a lot of perspective on language learning experiences. I studied German for four years in high school, but I’m really not close to fluency. In fact, at the rate I’m learning Chinese, I will probably surpass my German competency by next year, especially if I go to China.

But for now, all that matters is the happiness I get from studying Chinese.

 

First Efforts

This weekend I started attempting to transcribe the text that Chandler sent me. It’s pretty difficult. I ran into a snag pretty early on when I realized that he had combined two characters into one utterance: instead of pronouncing 让我们 as rang4 wo3men he said something like rao4men and confused me. I deduced from normal sentence order rules that a subject had to go in that spot, and 我们 was the only likely word, and I had a feeling that 让 was used, but I didn’t realize until tonight that he had combined them together. I guess that happens a lot in Chinese, just like in English, and it’s something that I’ll have to look out for in the future.

Tonight I also heard the Chinese Olympic song featuring Coca Cola （可口可乐）. For a song that ties national pride together with a soft drink, it was actually pretty good. The chorus goes like this:

好呀好呀中国人红起来，好呀好呀畅爽呀。 I’m not sure how well 红起来 translates because literally it means “Are standing up red,” but I think it’s an expression of national pride. Roughly translated because my skills are nowhere near adequate, it means “Yes! Yes! Chinese standing up in red. Yes! Yes! Smooth and refreshing.”

The song has a really great melody and I think really captures the excitement in China about the Olympics.
This is a link to it:

Chinese Olympics Song

 

A Task

Chandler, my friend from China, and myself swapped our first set of sound clips this evening. I sent him a blog about the television show Heroes, and he sent me an article about the NBA written in Chinese. As expected, we both are having trouble writing transcripts of the recordings because neither of us has highly developed listening comprehension skills. However, that is the stated goal of this project – to improve vocabulary yes, but mainly to improve listening comprehension.

Tomorrow I’m waking up early to start work on my paper for East Asian history. This will be the first historical analysis I’ve written about a novel, so I’m nervous and unsure of how to go about it. I think that if I spend enough time on it, though, I will produce a quality essay of which I am proud.

This afternoon I went to the weekly table tennis club meeting. I was surprised at how well I played today, since lately my strokes have not been precise. I think I finally figured out the forehand block, which helped tremendously against some of the more aggressive players. So far these are the strokes I’ve developed:

Forehand push
Forehand block
Forehand chop
Forehand slam
Backhand push
Backhand block
Backhand chop
Backhand slam

My coach said that the rubber on my paddle is not good enough for him to teach me the loop stroke, but I disagree. The loop is an incredibly versatile and therefore important stroke that I think should not be omitted from a player’s repertoire. Maybe I will ask someone to show it to me before I go to China.

That’s all for tonight. It’s about bedtime. My friend taught me a phrase in Chinese similar to the English idiom ‘Early to bed early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ It goes:

早睡早起身体好

Roughly it means Sleeping early and waking early makes good health.

I think that sums up my nocturnal inclinations.

 

First Post

I stayed up late last night chatting with my friend Chandler on MSN. I proposed my idea of recording ourselves reading native texts and then sending them to each other, so we can both develop our listening comprehension skills. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.

This morning I set my alarm thirty minutes later than usual to compensate for the night before. Springing from my bed at 645, I showered, went to the Russell House for my daily ritual, and then walked over to the library to continue reading the book Encountering the Chinese: A Guide for Americans. Encountering the Chinese is a pretty useful book; like the title says, it delineates some of the major cultural differences between Chinese and Americans, focusing especially on collectivism vs. individualism. The Chinese word for Individualism is Ge4ren2zhu3yi4 个人主义, but besides meaning individualism it also connotes selfishness. The word for Socialism is she4hui4zhu3yi4 社会主义; 社会 means society. Capitalism in Chinese is zi1ben3zhu3yi4 资本主义. Obviously 主义 means -ism. Another word I learned was tong2zhi4 同志 which means comrade. However, I probably won’t use it too much because Chinese frown upon foreigners using it as a form of address.

Lately I’ve been really nervous about my prospects in going to China. Most likely the government will award me with the NSEP, but even if they do, there are still so many things that could go wrong. I technically won’t be a student at whatever college I end up deferring admission to, but the NSEP requires that a student be matriculated in a four year program at a university. No university, no NSEP. Similarly, the CIEE program, from what I understand, requires me to enroll at Nanjing University as some sort of part time student, but most colleges will not let me defer if I’m concurrently enrolled somewhere. Therefore, Duke or Swarthmore or Pitt or wherever I go will not let me enroll, and I wouldn’t receive the NSEP. Jesus what a mess. I really hope it sorts itself out.

On a lighter note, I’m really happy to be finally writing this blog. It will be a nice place in which to dump all of my thoughts, anxieties and Chinese characters.

I am preparing to record my first audio sample for Chandler. More updates to come about how that goes.