Olle Linge - Languages, literature and the pursuit of dreams · Languages, literature and the pursuit of dreams

Chinese proficiency report 16

2012-05-02

This is a report detailing my progress towards the goals I specified in January 2012. This won’t be a traditional proficiency report, because it’s primarily an evaluation of the goals mentioned above rather than an assessment of my overall proficiency in Chinese. I will start with a chart summarising the data, then move on to commenting the different categories and finally round off with a brief discussion.

This is what I’ve achieved in March and April:

Number of hours spent practising various aspects of the Chinese language in March and April, 2012. The total number of hours is 448 which gives an average of 7 hours and 20 minutes per day, including weekends, holidays, my birthday and so on. Remember that we’re talking about pure study time here; breaks, transportation and similar things don’t count. Studying means anything that I consider to be studying Chinese, but which isn’t covered by the other areas (speaking, thesis writing, etc.). Administration means things necessary to study, but which isn’t studying itself (finding suitable audio material, writing this article).

Last time, I repeated all the goals and provided some information about progress for each of them. I’ve found that to be impractical and time-consuming, so I have decided to update the original post instead. That means that you should check here if you want to see how I’m doing on a more detailed level. The rest of this post will be about the bigger picture. Here are a few insights:

What I’m doing now is not enough – The things that aren’t counted in hours (such as writing my thesis or managing Hacking Chinese) takes much more time than I thought. Thus, completing the goals involving huge volumes of time (reading, listening, writing) will not be possible if I continue at this rate.
The goals are harder than I thought – I think that I have underestimated the time it takes to complete the goals on this list. I thought that eight hours a day would be enough, but I think that’s not the case. I think the true number is above 12 hours per day, which is inhuman in the long run. I don’t know how to handle this yet. I haven’t given up, though, I just need to plan my damage control.
March was a catastrophe – Sure, I applied for universities and a scholarship, but I hardly did anything else. Adding a week of relaxing in April meant that I achieved about as much on the reading, listening, writing front in March and April as I did in February alone. That’s not very good.
Satisfying overall output - That being said, I still think the overall output is acceptable. I was fairly close to eight hours a day, which is what I planned. I will keep being satisfied as long as I spend at least eight hours a day studying Chinese or doing things related to studying. It won’t allow me to reach all goals, but I’ll just have to accept that.
The previous few weeks were quite good – One summary for two months makes it look like I haven’t done much at all, but I’ve actually done much more reading, listening and writing recently. If I extrapolate the hours from these weeks, the future looks quite bright after all.
The summer contains fewer obligations - May will most likely be the last month when I have any serious obligations related to my education. During the summer, I will have lots of time and almost no fixed duties. The potential to study Chinese is enormous, even though Chinese will have to compete with unicycling, volleyball and much more!

in Chinese, Education, In English | 2 comments

Tags: Chinese proficiency report, Studying Chinese

Bernard Suits – The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

2012-04-18

Title: The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
Author: Bernard Suits
Year: 2005 (1978)

The truth is that Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia is not only the first book I review this year, it’s also the first non-fiction, non-language book I read for quite some time (at least since last autumn). Of course, I maintain an avid interest in reading, it’s just that I have spent most of my time reading Chinese and that I have deliberately focused less on reading anything in any other language. However, I do realise that there are many books out there I would enjoy immensely and that would contribute significantly to my own personal development and understanding of myself and/or the world. Since games have always been an integral part of my life, so reading The Grasshopper seemed like a good first choice in what I hope will turn out to be an increased reading of non-fiction in English or Swedish.

In this book, Bernard Suits sets out to refute Wittgenstein’s claim that games (and anything else for that matter) are undefinable. Suits claims that not only are games definable, but that they also play an important role in the notion of the good life and utopia. Basically, The Grasshopper contains two parts: the first presents a definition of games and the defence of this definition; the second deals with games, life and utopia. Both these parts are written as dialogues between a grasshopper and his disciples (mostly one aptly named Skepticus). The style is lightweight, lucid and entertaining, which is very rare indeed (allegedly, it’s even more rare in the realm of philosophy, but I can’t really verify this claim since I haven’t read much). Following the dialogues between the insects and listening to the sometimes outrageous examples is almost as interesting as following the underlying arguments.

The first part, the one about games, is also the most interesting one. Here is Suits’ definition of what a game is (note that “lusory” is derived from the Latin word “ludus”, meaning “game, play”) (pp. 54-55):

To play a game is an attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

He also offers a more colloquial version (p. 55):

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles

So, for instance, in a closed game like chess, the goal is to bring about a state of affairs in which the other player’s king is mated, doing so following the rules of the game, which prohibits some of the most efficient means of reaching that state of affairs (such as simply moving all the pieces to a mate position before your opponent can react). Furthermore, both players accept these rules simply because they want to make it possible to play chess. Open games, such as role-playing, works in a similar way, but here the goal is to maintain a state of affairs that is valid according to the rules of the game (dramatic or otherwise).

Of course, I do not intend to go through Suits’ defence of his definition in detail here, so I will let it suffice to say that it is very convincing and works for almost all games I can think of. Some needs a bit of squeezing to fit the definition (such as role-playing games), but the definition holds quite well. His definition might include things that are typically not games, but only things that are essentially games even if we’re not in the habit of calling them that (such as mountaineering and racing). However, I’m not too concerned with the philosophical goal of arriving at a a watertight definition of what a game is, I’m much more interested in the arguments and what the definition can teach us about games. In this area, The Grasshopper has lots to say. For those interested in how the definition applies to other examples of games and non-games, I suggest reading the book.

The second part of the book deals with utopia and is much less convincing than the first part. Briefly put, Suits argues that in utopia, the playing of games is the only desirable (indeed the only possible) activity. The argument goes something like this: only the way in which we go about doing something can be important in utopia, because in a perfect world, all products could be produced instantaneously. Other pursuits (such as art or scientific inquiry) can’t exist as we know them either, because there is no need for them (they are either driven by things not present in utopia or made irrelevant because utopia contains everything we want), even though they might turn up as games (i.e. doing research for the fun of it, even if the research is completely useless because we already know everything). This might be true if we accept his definition of utopia and follow his arguments, but for me, this fails to be either significant or interesting. I also fail to see how this has much bearing on life in general.

This discussion about utopia makes me think of Iain Banks (Look to Windward in particular). In many of his books, an utopian society called The Culture is an important element of the plot or a part of the setting. This is a society which is fairly close to the utopia Suits describes, but which differs in one important aspect. In Look to Windward there is a passage where a famous composer asks an intellectually vastly superior AI if the computer would be able to mimic the composer’s style and produce a piece which critics would believe was written by the composer. The AI answers yes, it would be possible, but continues that the argument is meaningless. It uses an analogy and says that climbing a mountain does not become meaningless just because you find that someone else has already reached the summit in a helicopter. It’s the game that matters. I find it quite interesting that mountain climbing and helicopters (or escalators) are part of one of the fundamental examples in The Grasshopper.

The reason I bring this up is because I agree so far, but not with Suits’ extension. All three of us (Suits, Banks and I) agree that it is the game that counts, but we disagree on how far to stretch this conclusion. In Look to Windward, the AI argues that it matters greatly how something was produced. A piece produced by a human instead of an AI would be much more appreciated by other humans, even if it is exactly the same piece of music. This is something Suits denies, a denial I find difficult to accept. To, me pressing a button to receive a ready-made house is vastly different from building it on my own, even if the end result is the same house. It’s not a matter of just enjoying the process, the difference lies in the knowledge that I’ve accomplished something difficult, i.e. that the knowledge of a game well played.

Thus, to conclude this review, I’d like to add this idea to the argument. I think that playing games can be said to be the only activity in utopia, but that the influence of games lasts beyond the playing of games. Building a house when there is no reason whatsoever to do so is certainly a game, but that doesn’t cease to be important just because the house is finished . Games are played for themselves, for their intrinsic value, but I see no reason why that value should disappear just because the game is over.

The Grasshopper is thought-provoking and quite interesting. I recommend it to anyone who has the slightest interest in games.

in In English, Reviews | No comments

Tags: Bernard Suits, Games, Iain, Look to Windward

Total language immersion project starting now*

2012-04-01

Many people will tell you that children learn languages faster than adults. This is not true. However, it is true that children attain a higher level than adults in the long run (averagely talented children always reach fluency in their native language, adult learners of a second language don’t). It is less clear why this is so. Is it because children’s brains are more plastic and can accommodate more quickly? Or is it simply that they practice relentlessly and have strong psychological and social reasons for correcting their own mistakes and adapting their language to their environment?

I’m inclined to think it is the latter, because after all, practice is what matters most. Children have no alternative to learning their native language if they wish to socialise with their peers and thrive in society. As a a second language learner, however, there are many incentives for not learning a language to a native level. The most important thing is of course immersion. If you are completely immersed in a language and have no alternative, you have no choice but to learn that language. However, as a grown-up Swede studying Chinese, I have lots of other choices. For instance, I’m writing this article in English and I chatted with a friend in Swedish yesterday. This kind of distraction distorts the immersion environment and inevitably leads to reduced language learning.

I have come to realise that if I’m going to learn Chinese to a near-native level, I have to do something drastic. In this case, I have decided to step up the immersion effort, which will mean that from now on, I will put severe restrictions on the use Swedish and English. This will have some quite far-reaching consequences. For instance:

I’ll stop reading/writing in English or Swedish on Facebook, Twitter and other websites
I won’t update Snigel.nu or reply to comments in English or Swedish
I won’t speak Swedish or English and will do my best to change my internal discourse to Chinese

Since I realise that this will cause some problems in the social sphere, considering that most people I know and care about don’t speak Chinese at all, so communicating with these people will of course be a problem. As you know, I’m not an unreasonable person, so I will allow myself to use Swedish or English on Mondays (weekends aren’t good because it would be impossible to contact companies or authorities in Sweden). This means of course that if you try to contact me at any other time, you will either have to wait or hire an interpreter or use Google translate. Some of the finer nuances of your message might be lost in translation, but I’m sure I will get the gist of what you’re saying. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a sacrifice I have to make in order to reach my goals.

This immersion plan starts next week and will be active until further notice, but at least for three months (until the end of June, that is). It’s time to leave the surface and immerse for real. Bye!

*Update: This was of course an Aprils Fool’s Day post and I’m not serious. Everything up to the final few paragraphs are of course reasonable, but scheduling time to talk with family and friends (including receiving phone calls and so n) is quite unreasonable. I will listen and read as much Chinese as I can, but I’ve done that for years and I don’t think my English or Swedish-speaking friends suffer very much.

in Blog, In English | No comments

Tags: Chinese, immersion

Snigel.nu restored after server crash

2012-03-29

I’m happy to announce that the website is now back again after a few week’s downtime because of a server crash. I think everything should be back to normal, but if you find something that doesn’t work, please let me know. There are some things I know aren’t working or is still missing:

Pictures from Taiwan are available, but it will take some time to restore the folder category, so old posts might lack pictures
Pictures taken after I came back from Taiwan might be lost (fortunately not that many)
Comments to posts made after 2012-02-28 are definitely lost
The Chinese blog I launched is completely lost, but fortunately all articles exist elsewhere

When both Snigel.nu and Hacking Chinese went down, it felt like the latter was the more important, simply because it’s something I’ve invented hundreds of hours in recently, whereas this website is perhaps more important in the long run. I didn’t realise fully how much it mattered until I saw it online again earlier today. When Hacking Chinese went online again after the crash, I felt relieved, but when Snigel.nu came online again earlier today, I felt happy.

in Snigel.nu | 1 comment

Tags: Hacking Chinese, Pictures, Server crash

Chinese proficiency report 15

2012-03-01

This is what I’ve achieved in February:

Number of hours spent practising various aspects of the Chinese language in February, 2012. The total number of hours is 259.5 which gives an average of 8 hours and 6 minutes per day, including two days in January. Remember that we’re talking about pure study time here; breaks, transportation and similar things don’t count.

Now, let’s have a look at the individual goals.

Listening

Continue aural immersion (mostly passive listening): Not too many problems here. I keep listening to the radio quite a lot and even though it’s natural that an increase in active listening means less passive listening, I still estimate that I listen several hours a day to new material. I also pick up occasional words and phrases from background listening.
Spend 300 hours actively working with listening material: I’ve spent around 33 hours actively practising listening. this is quite good, although it’s much less than the two hours/day necessary to reach the goal before the end of the summer (I would have needed 64 hours for that). I’ve mostly transcribed news-related programs and then reinforced the knowledge through careful listening afterwards. I’ve also tried reading along without a transcript, which is really hard but feels worthwhile.
Listen to, transcribe and check 5 hours of news broadcasts (mainly from RTI): This goal isn’t very good, because when I wrote it, I thought I would focus on short news items, not fairly long “special reports” (5-10 minutes). Transcribing takes an awful lot of time, but I do think it’s very good practise. I will change this goal to “listen to, transcribe and check five hours worth of formal Chinese”. I have only managed a puny 16 minutes so far.
Listen to one audio book: No progress, I plan to wait a few months.

Writing

Spend 300 hours actively working with writing of any kind: This is going fairly well, but not well enough. I’ve spent around 41 hours writing, which is much, much more than even before (but still less than the desired 64 hours). Most of what I’ve written can be found on my new Chinese blog, but those hours also include written preparations for class and so on, which probably won’t be published.
Spend 75 hours practising handwriting: This isn’t something I’ve spent much time doing, actually. I’ve done some practising with Anki, but most of the 9 hours come from trying to memorise 道德經. To reach my goal, I would have needed 16 hours.
Update twitter account daily in Chinese (everyday language): This goal has been largely neglected, mostly because I have failed to find enough people that can correct what I’m writing. If no-one corrects the tweets, it’s more or less useless. I’m not sure how to handle this properly yet.
Summarise everything I read in some way (reviews, analyses, chapter summaries): This is going okay. My main method is to mark anything of interest I’m reading and then go through that again afterwards, writing summaries based on what I’ve marked.
Translate both my theses into Chinese (~60 pages about phonology): I have no plans starting this task yet.

Reading

Spend 300 hours reading any material: I’ve spent 45.5 hours. I feel that I lack light-weight reading material.
Study 漢語語法: Not started.
Study 華語文教學規範與理論基礎: Finished, but not summarised.
Study 漢字說清楚: Not started.
Read 國音: Not started.
Read 中國文化史: Read 12 pages out of 300.
Read 孔子的部落格: Finished and reviewed.

Vocabulary

Read, understand and take notes from the Chinese Synonyms Usage Dictionary: 50/500 pages
Read, understand and take notes from 漢字說清楚: Not started.
Increase the number of characters I know to 5500: Learnt 400 characters, deck total: 4650.
Keep queues in Anki at zero: Learnt 900 words, deck total: 20299.

Meta and misc

Read, understand and take notes from The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition: Not started.
Read, understand and take notes from The Phonology of Standard Chinese: Read 170 pages out of 350.
Memorise and be able to handwrite 道德經 in classical Chinese: Sort of finished with chapters 1-20 (1/4).
Apply for master’s degree programs, along with associated scholarships (deadline: end of March): I’m working on it. So far, no serious problems have appeared.
Complete my thesis and graduate: This is probably my biggest failure so far. I have written some, but I thought I would be finished by now. I’ll make this priority two (after above-mentioned applications) for the coming weeks.
Take the TOCFL test again, even though I have passed it: Not relevant yet.
Build up a queue of at least 20 articles ready for publication on Hacking Chinese: I have 10 very rough drafts, but I need to spend more time on this.
Write Hacking Chinese book: Not started, at least not outside my head.
Make monthly updated on my progress on the goals in this post: That’s what I’m doing now!

Summary and discussion

As you can see, I’ve spent roughly 8 hours/day, which is what I estimated I would and should spend. However, as you can also see, this is not enough to finish 1/7 of the tasks above (quite far from it actually). The reason for this is that when I estimated the numbers for the above-mentioned goals, I didn’t realise that the meta/misc category would take so much time. If reading, writing and listening alone takes up 6.5 hours per day, it’s simply not realistic to finish the rest of the tasks in the remaining 1.5 hours (remember that this includes completing a thesis, applying for universities and a scholarship, writing around 50 articles for Hacking Chinese, writing an e-book, and so on).

I think that the current pace is possible to maintain, although eight hours/day is a lot more than it sounds. First, this is effective time we’re talking about, I don’t count breaks, transportation or anything that isn’t pure studying. Second, I include every single day, not skipping my birthday, a short trip to go skiing and so on. I guesstimate that I spend 10-12 hours/day, including things people normally include in studying.

As a result, I will decrease all numeric goals with 25%. This means that there are 3.5 hours/day for meta/misc, which should be enough. However, my main goal is to spend 8 hours/day on average, regardless what I’m studying. If I end up failing a number of goals in September, but still have accumulated ~1700 hours of study time, I will be very satisfied indeed.

The biggest change I will make for the coming month is that I will spend more time doing fewer things. I should spend much more time with my thesis to get that out of the way. I should also finish and submit my applications. After that, I can start focusing on other things. Naturally, I can’t work with these two things eight hours a day, so I expect next week’s studying will be varied, just not as much as this month. I also expect the meta/misc category to take up more than 50% of the total time.

Overall, I’m very happy with how this has turned out. I actually do what I want to do and I feel that I’m moving forward at a decent pace again. Of course, the journey is very long, but that’s okay, because the landscape is so beautiful!

in In English | No comments

Happy 28th birthday to me

2012-02-27

Looking back through the annual updates I’ve been written on my birthday since 2007 (that one is in Swedish, the first one in English is from 2008), it’s apparent that I take these annual updates fairly seriously. In my everyday life, I’m usually content focusing on the present and whatever I’m doing at the moment. Sometimes I plan what I will do in the near future or (very rarely) make long-term plans. But I almost never look back.

Except for these annual summaries of my life, that is. I think it’s important to take a step back occasionally, to review where I am now, summarise what I have been doing and also detail some expectations for the coming year. It also serves as a summary for people who don’t read all my articles. I’m sure that if you only read these birthday updates, you’ll get a pretty good grasp of what I’ve been up to during the past five years.

This time I will focus on the previous year, so let’s see what has happened since the day I turned 27. As usual, I will separate this post into several parts.

Personal life
Education
Creativity
General
Epilogue

Personal life

Last time I wrote, there was a huge difference from the previous year; not so this time. I feel that even though important things have happened, there hasn’t been any major changes or developments that I consider important enough to write about here. That isn’t the same as saying that nothing has happened, but rather that the changes aren’t big. I keep on tweaking myself and my life; so far it seems to be going quite well. Since this would be a fairly bad report otherwise, I will include some things that I consider important.

Starting in early January, I have used a new system to keep track of productivity. This could be related to both studying and creativity, too, but since I consider it to be part of the solution to the personal problem of self-discipline, I’ve chosen to talk about it here. It’s nothing terribly fancy, just a well-designed system to keep track of what I want to do and how much, and then use a physical (as in analogue, non-digital) system to count progress. It’s been working well for more than a month now, which is more than I can say about most previous attempts at designing such a system. As you might imagine, I will write more about this shortly. The important thing is that I feel that I’m actually doing what I want to do at the moment, both in a long-term and short-term perspective.

A related topic is food and nutrition. Two weeks ago (February 14th) I decided to quit cookies (and I included anything else that might serve the exact same purpose as cookies, such as candy or snacks). This is not an attempt to lose weight (I don’t need to do that), neither is it the manifestation of a wish to live more healthily (even though that’s of course a bonus). Instead, it’s the same old disciplinary problem I’ve always found so interesting. I don’t like that I seem to be the kind of person who’s mind is easily bent by something as insignificant as cookies. I’m also tired of negotiating with myself whether or not to buy cookies and if so, how much. Better then to skip them altogether, so cookies no more. Perhaps I will loosen the restriction later when I’ve learnt moderation.

Apart from this, I have also written a few personal articles. Previous years, I’ve had to select the most important articles, but this year, there are only important articles (I’ve significantly raised the threshold for writing articles):

Towards a more personal website
Taiwan and the Black Box
To inspire and to be inspired
Zen, smart phones and the now
Internal discourse and operational languages

Education

I’m happy to report that most of what I talked about last spring have turned out well. I now only need to finish my thesis to graduate. Since I have already done most of the empirical work for the thesis, what remains now is simply a matter of putting everything together in a neatly written report. The reason I say “simply” is that this shouldn’t take too long and the only reason it hasn’t been done already is that I’ve had other things to think about recently. Two of the more important ones will make up most of the rest of this part of the post: Hacking Chinese and my plans to go back to Taiwan for a master’s degree in teaching Chinese.

Hacking Chinese was launched last summer and has been received much more favourably than I hoped. I don’t want to talk about exact numbers, but let it suffice to say that I passed the 5000 unique visitors/month last year, roughly six months after launching the website and that numbers are still climbing rapidly. It feels good to know that I’m not the only one who thinks I have good ideas about studying. I have spent quite a lot of time on the project and intend to spend even more in the near future. This time will be spent on maintaining the website (articles, social media, reading) as well as expanding and writing an e-book. Please see this post for some more ideas about the future of Hacking Chinese.

The second thing that has kept me busy recently is my plan to go back to Taiwan for a master’s degree. This involves applying for universities in Taiwan, as well as a scholarship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (yes, the same institution that granted me financial support to go to Taiwan the first time). Providing my applications are successful, I will leave Sweden for Taiwan in August or September this year. I want a master’s degree in what’s called 華語文教學 (commonly translated as Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language). This is a program mostly for native speakers, so it will probably require a lot of effort, but I think something like this is essential both for my own sake and if I want to teach Chinese properly.

I have made fairly detailed plans for how to prepare myself as much as I can, see this post for more details. I have been studying according to this plan for a month now and a report will be published within a few days. Stay tuned!

Creativity

When it comes to creativity, there is one event that eclipses everything else: the publication of Magneter och mirakel last spring. This is the final product of many, many years of work, and even though most of the creative part of the work was done much earlier, this is still an important milestone. If you want to support me by voting for the game as best game of the year, see this post for more information both about the voting and the game itself.

Apart from this, I’m very close to finishing a draft of a novel I’ve been working on for quite some time. The problem is that creative writing is not part of my daily routine, so I tend to get huge amounts of writing done in very limited amounts of time, and then stop completely for months. Last time I had such a burst of creative output was last summer, so nothing has been happening recently. It would take perhaps 10 hours to finish the draft and then perhaps 20 hours to go through it, but even so, I’m still much closer to something finished than I’ve ever been before. My goal is to at least finish the draft before the end of the summer, although a final version will probably have to wait much longer than that.

I have realised that new projects isn’t really what I need, though. Sure, we are working on a new version of Nostalgia but even if it’s awesome, it doesn’t really count as a new project. This game will also be finished, at least as far as content goes, before I leave Sweden. I have lots of ideas and plans, but I doubt that I will start anything serious in the coming year. I want to finish what I’ve started and anything else related to creativity will have to be completely guilt-free and easy, such as casual role-playing with friends. The project closest to hand is a novel about my stay in Taiwan, but I’m not sure how to deal with that. I will certainly not be able to write it before I leave, so perhaps I’d better leave it for now. On the other hand, that almost certainly means that I will never write the book. Tricky.

General

This is the general category where I put anything else that have happened, but which doesn’t count as either personal life, education or creativity. I’ll do this chronologically, so first out is The Wall concert in Stockholm 2011. I’ve always loved Pink Floyd and seeing The Wall live is without doubt my best live performance memory ever.

I’ve also spent some time writing about gymnastics and strength training. This isn’t new, but I feel that I gradually find better and better ways to improve and that my routines are fairly solid. Even though I don’t follow what I’ve written in these posts, the following is still a summary of what I’ve written recently. I’ve sorted them in order of importance.

Timeboxing physical workout
Summer vacation gymnastics
Back flip and muscle-up to handstand on rings
Becoming more ninja

Onwards, towards a brighter future

I remain as optimistic as ever. I feel that I’m doing what I want to do and that my life is developing in the direction I want it to. I feel confident that I will be able to write something similar next year and I hope that my next birthday will be spent in Taiwan. I feel motivated to keep on learning Chinese, but I hope that I will still have time to be creative and generally awesome in other areas as well.

So, happy birthday to me!

in Blog, Chinese, Creativity, Education, In English, Magneter och mirakel, Personal, Physical, Taiwan | 2 comments

Martin Ackerfors on 2012-02-27 at 17:23

“This game will also be finished, at least as far as content goes, before I leave Sweden.” Nice. :P

Reply
Slacker on 2012-02-27 at 18:53

I think you should have one about physical aswell ;P.

Good writing though, been recommending hacking chinese to some people =).

Reply

in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Internal discourse and operational languages

2012-02-16

A while ago, I wrote a summary of some ideas I had about an upcoming setting, either for for fiction or role-playing (it’s about a world where the Artilleryman’s delusions in The War of the Worlds were actually true) . Then a friend of mine asked me why I wrote the summary in English, and I replied that I thought it likely that I would write the game in English as well. This might not sound very interesting, but there are two things I should point out which make it important enough for me to write an article about it.

First, my native language is Swedish. I’ve never lived in an English-speaking environment and most of the English I know I either learnt in school or on my own, mostly from reading novels. Writing something creative in English is probably not the default choice for someone with my background, which is why my summary in English generated the comment it did.

Second, I made the decision to write about the setting in English without thinking about it too much; it was the obvious choice. If we step back from this article for a while and review what I’ve been writing in general, we can see that I started writing regularly in English in 2007 and have written a total of 629 articles in English. I know for a fact that it felt quite awkward in the beginning.

Now, almost five years later, I seem to have reached a point where English hasn’t only conquered this website,, but where the language is largely dominating my internal discourse as well. How did this come to happen?
The ascendency of English

I think my two years in Taiwan are key to understanding this shift towards using English as the default language. Naturally, I spent lots of time studying Chinese in Taiwan and I left the translate-in-my-head stage of language learning fairly quickly. Still, most of what I read about Chinese was written in English, including textbooks and dictionaries. I’ve learnt Chinese using English, not Swedish.

If the internal dialogue is going to run smoothly, I need a language I’m very good at; Chinese was far from enough back then. It’s starting to get close to where it’s genuinely useful now, but more about that later. But why didn’t I continue using my native language?

The point is that I almost never thought in Swedish during my two years in Taiwan. If I didn’t speak Chinese, I spoke English. Everything I wrote on my website was in English. The only Swedish I spoke was during occasional conversations with friends or family back home. After I returned to Sweden in 2010, I suppose the habit has just refused to go away. I still think mostly in English, not Swedish.
Three languages, one internal discourse

Naturally, it depends on what I’m doing and how conscious I am of what I’m doing, but generally speaking, my thoughts are usually in English, Swedish or Chinese. Let’s see how I use these three languages I have at my disposal. To start with, I only refer to situations where I’m not speaking, because if I’m speaking English, Swedish or Chinese, of course I also think in the same language I sue to speak.

Here are some cases where I use the different languages and how much I use them (this only includes internal dialogue):

English (~60%)

Making complex decisions
Brainstorming
Maths and physics
Education
Internal chatter

Swedish (~20%)

Household chores
Diving, gymnastics
Family, childhood
Some creative tasks
Internal chatter

Chinese (~20%)

When I consciously decide to do so
When I read, listen or write in Chinese
For a while after doing the above

Internal and external language use

What about output, then? Below, I have included a rough estimate of how much of my actual output (writing, speaking) is for each given language (measured in time, not words). I haven’t really tried to count, so these are nothing but very rough guesses:

English: Writing ~70%, speaking ~5%
Swedish: Writing ~5%, speaking ~55%
Chinese: Writing ~25%, speaking ~40%

As we can see, English and Chinese both beat Swedish. In the case of Chinese, this is because I deliberately try to use as much Chinese as I can, but in the case of English, this isn’t the result of a conscious choice, it feels more like the inevitable outcome of the shift in internal discourse discussed above.

I write everything on both on this website and on Hacking Chinese in English. I write most of my personal texts in English as well (notes, memos, brainstorming). I do this naturally, without thinking about it.
Chinese, a pretender to the throne?

What I want to do is make Chinese my operational language. I don’t think the current position of Chinese is weak because of lacking proficiency, it might just be the result of little effort to change the situation. If I really tried to use Chinese, I think it would work fairly well for most situations.

Naturally, I would need to use English or Swedish in some cases, but that will always be true, what I’m talking about here is the default operational language, not the only one. There will always be at least three languages vying for position, it’s just a matter of which one comes out on top a majority of the time.

I’m not going to force this shift by imposing immersion, however. I have lots of things I enjoy doing and that can’t be done in Chinese (such as writing articles like this one or maintaining Hacking Chinese). Also, I have lots of friends who don’t speak Chinese and I’m not crazy enough to ignore them while I still live in Sweden. However, I do plan to go back to Taiwan for a master’s degree in the near future. That looks like an excellent opportunity to help Chinese topple the English hegemony.

Let’s return to this topic again in a couple of years and see what I have to say about it then!

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Chinese proficiency report 14

2012-01-28

This proficiency report won’t actually be a traditional proficiency report, but since it deals with my Chinese learning in much the same way, I’m going to put this among the rest of the progress reports to make things more coherent. If you want to read an update of my Chinese studies, you could look at the post from September last year. I have of course improved since then, but not in any significant way that merits a new progress report. Instead, this time I want to talk about this spring and what I intend to do. For once, I have lots of time on my hands and I need to invest it wisely. Before I start going into details, let us remind ourselves of my overall goal at the moment:

Overall learning goal: I want to take my Chinese to a level where I can manage an MA in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, taught in Chinese for Chinese-speaking students. Without dying. This mostly involves being able to swallow academic literature at a reasonable pace, being able to understand fast-paced, formal spoken Chinese, as well as being able to write formal Chinese with more fluency. If things go according to my plans, I might be required to do this starting from September 2012, so this is the deadline for most of the goals mentioned here.

What I’m going to do below is detail in fairly specific terms what I’m going to do this spring in order to achieve the above-mentioned goal. As usual, I’ve divided the goals and tasks into the four standard categories of speaking, listening, reading and writing. I have also added vocabulary.

Please note: These are my long-term goals. They aren’t the goals I will work towards on a daily basis. I won’t sit down thinking that now I’m going to practise listening for two hours. It doesn’t work like that. Long-term goals are broken down into manageable chunks and short-term goals, but I won’t discuss them because it would take too much time. Read more about goals here. All tasks mention below overlap if possible, so spending X hours reading book Y will also count against the read-a-total-number-of-Z-hours goal.

Please also note: This article is updated regularly to show how things are going. I find this to be much more efficient than copying the goals and commenting on them for each month. Thus, the numbers here are typically update once a month and linked to from the summary for that month. Here are the summaries published so far:

懸樑刺股 – This Chinese idiom (成語) means “to study diligently”, but how diligently? If translated literally, it means to tie one’s hair to the rafters (so as to not fall asleep) and jab one’s thigh (in order to stay awake). In this way, the student can study more. Perhaps I won’t study that diligently, but I still like the story.

Speaking

In general, I don’t feel that speaking is a big problem. That doesn’t mean that I have nothing to learn and that my pronunciation is perfect, it just means that I think that I could survive with the language level I have now. Sure, I would probably need to adjust and start using more formal language, but I feel that this is very difficult to practise on my own. Also, this problem is connected to writing, since focusing on improving writing will at least give me the tools to speak more formally as well. Once I start a master’s degree program, I’m sure I can convert my writing skill into more formal speaking. I’m not saying that it will be easy, but I do think it’s the least of my problems right now. Let’s move on to more interesting areas.