Studying Chinese

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Chinese proficiency report 20

2012-11-24

Even though only little more than a month has passed since the previous report, enough has happened to motivate a new article. The previous post dealt with my Chinese ability in general terms and also more specifically about listening ability. I concluded that my ability in general is probably good enough to survive the master’s degree program I’m currently enrolled in. I also lamented the fact that spoken Chinese is much more context-based than any other language I’ve studied, which makes listening something of a problem sometimes. This time I will talk about pronunciation.

Attitude and pronunciation

I regularly ask people I speak with to offer suggestions for how to improve my pronunciation and I have done so since I first started learning. Often, these questions are met by surprise: “Why do you want to improve your pronunciation, it’s already quite good!” The answer is complex and something I plan to write more about later on Hacking Chinese, but it’s precisely because I have this attitude that I have managed to acquire the pronunciation I have now. If I were content with being better than the average foreigner, I could have stopped focusing on pronunciation years ago. The road to good pronunciation is very long and being complacent certainly doesn’t help. Thus, I still think I need to improve and that’s what this article is be about.

A question of tones

In general, I think my pronunciation of initials, medials and finals is pretty good. I don’t want to say that it’s perfect, but it’s definitely good enough for teaching Chinese to students. Even though I’ve tried, I haven’t found any serious problems in this area for a couple of years, so I don’t think this is something I need to improve much.

Tones are different, though. I don’t think I have much problems when pronouncing them individually or in isolated words, but as soon as words are connected into longer sentences and intonation starts being important, I make several small but significant mistakes. During this semester, I’ve asked a number of people to pay attention to my pronunciation (thanks to those who have helped, you know who you are). I have also recorded my own speaking to analyse myself. The native speakers may have used different words to describe these problems, but in essence, they mostly agree on the below analysis. I do, too.

Second tone, fourth tone and pitch range

In general, my tones are correct insofar as the direction is correct (second tone rises, fourth tone falls), but the distinction isn’t clear enough. Occasionally, both these tones are incomplete and usually too low. There are some other, minor problems, but I would say the main problem is pitch range. Since I seem to speak Chinese with a deeper voice than I speak English or Swedish, the pitch range becomes too narrow.

The suggested solution looks as follows:

Prolong second tones. Since the direction is already correct, making the tone longer will ensure that it goes high enough as well. Once I’m used to that, it should be easier to keep the tone height while decreasing the time it takes to get there. Right now it feels a bit uncomfortable, but I’ve checked with a few people and they think the new, higher version sounds better.
Modifying the onset of the fourth tone. Right now, the general contour is correct (falling), but the fall is a bit abrupt. If I want to speak clearly to allow others to master tones as will, I should mark the beginning of the fourth tone better. See the graphs below.
Paying more attention to the third tone. In theory and most of the time when I speak, I pronounce it correctly, but I sometimes slip. This is probably best remedied through more practice. My best performance here is good enough, so it’s mostly a matter of making sure my normal performance approaches my best performance.

The T4 to the left is from a tone reference chart and is a model T4 (female speaker, which explains the higher pitch in general). The T4 to the right is my own normal T4. Both pitch contours were drawn using Praat. Note that I lack the plateau in the onset (red ellipse).

Proposed line of attack

Changing pronunciation in general is hard, changing pitch range when you speak is several magnitudes harder. People tend to identify themselves with their own voices, so changing something as basic as pitch range requires time and courage. I’ll simply have to accept that this will take some work and time. I don’t doubt that it can be done, though. my plan is roughly as follows, although it isn’t really serial (I won’t wait until step one is entirely completed before attempting step two and so on).

Individual syllables
Disyllabic words
Sentences
Natural speech

The goal is to practice each step until it feels natural. Changing natural speech will be very hard indeed, so I’ll try to build up to it slowly, making sure I’ve implemented the above changes in a controlled environment. I’ll have several native speakers helping me, so I’m sure I will be just fine.

Benchmarking

Before I started analysing the problem(s) in detail, I did a recording with me reading an article. It’s roughly three minutes long and even if it isn’t the best I can do (I speak much better than I read), I still think it’s fairly representative of my pronunciation in general. I’ll leave that article alone for at least a month or two until I feel that I have actually achieved something. Then I’ll read it again and see if I have really achieved something or not. I used Praat to check some passages of that article, but tones in connected speech are so complex that I think that seeing the pitch contour doesn’t help much. In this case, I’ll rely on competent native speakers instead.

Please help

Changing pronunciation like this is difficult in many ways, but one of the hardest parts is staying focused. Naturally, I can’t spend all my energy thinking about tones, because that will make communication awkward. However, it would be very nice indeed if people who speak with me regularly remind me of this. As you well know, I don’t mind being corrected, indeed, it’s an essential part of learning. With your help, I should be able to correct these problems!

in In English | 3 comments

Tags: Chinese proficiency report, Hacking Chinese, Studying Chinese

Chinese proficiency report 19

2012-10-11

I’m now five weeks into the Teaching Chinese as a Second Language MA program at NTNU in Taipei. This post is mostly about my own language learning, but will not follow the stricter style of the previous proficiency reports (scroll down). Since I left Taiwan last time in 2010, my goal has been to learn Chinese to a level where I can survive a master’s degree about Chinese taught in Chinese. Since this is exactly what I’m doing at the moment, even though I might not be in a position to say anything with certainty, I can still comment on the current situation and my progress towards that goal. In short, is my Chinese good enough?

The academic setting

The short answer is “yes”. I can read most textbooks we have without using a dictionary and I can follow along lectures without too much trouble. It requires some effort to produce formally correct Chinese and I still need help with that, but I very seldom encounter situations where I can’t express what I want. I feel confident enough to speak up in class, ask questions and discuss. This was quite nervous at first, considering that two thirds of of the class consists of native speakers.

Written Chinese is as yet an unknown area since I haven’t handed in any written reports yet. However, I’m confident that this will not be a big problem considering that my reading and writing has always been stronger than my listening and speaking. I will need help, I will need corrections and I will need lots of time to think, draft and revise, but I’m sure I can produce acceptable, formal Chinese. Writing a complete master thesis is another matter, but I still have at least a year before I need to start thinking about that and I have lots of opportunities to learn before then.

The social setting

Speaking has stopped being a problem entirely, at least subjectively and in comparison with other areas. I can talk with someone for hours without feeling tired or without stumbling too much. Sure, I might not get all collocations right and I still make other types of mistakes now and then, but I’m usually able to correct myself. This is what spoken Chinese has felt like for some time now, so that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

Instead, I’m going to talk about context. I’ve known for a long time that context is important in Chinese, but it has only recently dawned on me how immensely important context is for understanding spoken Chinese. At first, I thought my experience might just be due to the fact that I was less familiar with Chinese than Swedish, English or French, but I’m now convinced that this is not the case. Understanding spoken Chinese is extremely dependent on context because of the vast number of homonyms or near-homonyms (words that are pronounced the same way or almost the same way).

The dreaded one-line question

This has lead to some serious frustration recently. Let me give you an example. As I said above, I can listen to a three-hour lecture about Chinese phonetics and understand 100% of what’s being said (although I might not know all individual words, I can extrapolate what I miss). However, when a friend asks me if we have midnight sun in Sweden, for instance, I sometimes need to hear it twice before I understand.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know these words. I do. I have known them for many years. It’s not a question of vocabulary. Instead, it’s the complete lack of context. Perhaps we’re having dinner with a few other people and people are talking about some other topic when someone suddenly thinks about something else they’d like to ask me. If it’s a short question and there is no context, I often fail to understand the first time. This almost never happens in English or even French (I should point out that in general, my Chinese is much better than my French). Also, as soon as I know the topic, I have no problem understanding much more complex sentences about that or related topics. Also, I would consider these questions trivial if put in writing.

A difference between languages

Someone (can’t remember who) made an excellent point illustrating this dependence on context. If you walk up to someone in an English-speaking country and, without warning, say the name of a technical term or chemical substance, the person is very likely to hear what you say, provided he knows what the word means in the first place. This isn’t necessarily true in Chinese, not even for native speakers, provided that the word is a fairly short compound. Again, this is because Chinese has very few syllables compared to English. I have no actual proof for that this causes the language to be more context-based, but it seems the natural conclusion to draw and also matches experience. As far as I know, there have been no scientific experiments conducted on no-context utterances, but let me know if you know of any.

Naturally, this doesn’t meant that native speakers can’t handle the basic communication situations I described above. The reason I fail to understand sometimes is partly due to external factors (noise, music, distance), but it’s also because of a lack of listening speed. In short, I don’t associate sounds with words quickly enough (see this article on Hacking Chinese for more about this). This might seem odd considering that I have heard many of these words hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times and can use them fluently in my sleep, but I still think it is the reason I don’t understand what’s being said. There is a significant difference between “very fast” and “native” in this case.

I’m not complaining, but I do feel frustrated sometimes

Unfortunately, this means that there isn’t much I can do apart from listening to more Chinese, which seems to be the remedy for most language problems I have. Still, this is okay, because all things considered, this is a very minor problem. I can still communicate without too much trouble with most people I meet. I can read and understand textbooks about linguistics, phonetics and teaching methods with some degree of confidence. I can talk about these topics and I can understand when others discuss them. I don’t complain, but I do feel frustrated sometimes.

Perhaps it’s partially a matter of pride. Not understanding a very basic question will lead people to believe that I can’t speak Chinese or at least can’t speak it very well. Considering that I’ve spent some serious time learning to speak Chinese and consider the endeavour to be a success on the whole, this feels a bit bad. However, it’s also just a matter of frustration arising from the fact that I know that this problem raises a barrier between me and some native speakers. Of course, people who know me know that they can mostly treat me as a native speaker in dialogue about a specific topic, but realising that takes much longer if basic communication sometimes fails.

In short, this will lead people to underestimate my language ability, which is about more than just hurt pride since it does influence interaction with these people.

in Chinese, Education, In English, Taiwan | 6 comments

Tags: Chinese proficiency report, Hacking Chinese, Studying Chinese

Chinese proficiency report 18

2012-06-20

I have now striven for the goals I set up in January for almost five months. Even though I intended to study according to those goals until September, two things have made me change my mind:

I don’t feel like keeping track of how much I study in such detail
There is no way I will accomplish all the goals, some winnowing is needed

I will revise the goals and limit them to things that I can actually accomplish before the summer is over. If I don’t revise the goals, I run the risk of missing some goals that I deem more important than others. Because to be honest, even if I can improve my individual character knowledge from 4675 to over 5000 by spending a dozen hours or so, there are other things which are more important.

What I have done

Goals are dynamic, living creatures that need to adapt or face extinction. This is one of the major insights I’ve had into goal management over the years. No system is perfect and each system needs to either change or collapse. Sticking to goals that are no longer valid or relevant isn’t only stubborn, it’s stupid as well. I haven’t reached all the goals I set for myself, but I’ll show you briefly what those goals helped me achieve from February to the beginning of June:

Vocabulary work: 157 hours (~1.3 hour per day)
Writing practice: 128 hours (~1.1 hour per day)
Hand-writing: 20 hours
Reading: 93 hours (~0.8 hours per day)
Listening: 193 hours (~1.6 hours per day)
Other studying: 151 hours (~1.3 hours per day)
Hacking Chinese: 178 hours (~1.5 hours per day)
Learning 道德經: 18 hours
Administration: 62 hours (~0.5 hours per day)
Total: 1000 hours (~8.4 hours per day)

One thousand hours in little more than four months can’t be considered a failure. Sure, I spent time with other things than I thought I would and i haven’t completed even half the goals I specified, but I have still studied and learnt a lot. Note also that some aspects of learning haven’t been included, such as speaking and background listening. Anyway, the point here was to show that even if I now will abandon most of the goals, I don’t want to give people the impression that I consider these goals to be failures. They have served their purpose and it’s time to move on.

New goals to be achieved before September

This list of goals is much more limited and contains several items I consider very important (or essential) if I’m going to survive a master’s program taught entirely in Chinese. Therefore, these goals aren’t just guidelines, some of them are indeed necessary. I need to spend time with Hacking Chinese now if I intend to be able to post articles even if I have no time to write new articles during by first semester, for instance – 未雨綢繆. The goals are as follows:

Spend 60 hours practising handwriting (I need this, badly)
Spend 120 hours reading any material (for speed and vocabulary)
Memorize 道經 (that’s the first half of 道德經)
Study 漢語語法 (a comprehensive grammar handbook, mainly for vocabulary and reading practice)
Study The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (I need a broader base)
Write 27 articles for Hacking Chinese (these will last until Christmas or thereabout)
Write some kind of Hacking Chinese book (type yet undetermined)

Why count time for the first two goals? Because I don’t write anything by hand if I don’t force myself to. It’s not that I dislike it, it’s just that I don’t do it. Counting how much time I have spent and see the accumulated hours rising (I use poker chips to represent hours) is good for motivation. I read even if not prompted, but much less than two hours per day. Note that this goal overlaps with the grammar reading.

Hacking Chinese means quite a lot to me and I don’t want the project to die simply because my mind is otherwise occupied. My plan is to write enough articles to allow me to last until January next year. Of course, I don’t think I will be so busy that I can’t write anything at all, but I don’t want to feel the pressure to have to write articles. The same goes for the book , which is okay to write now when I have time, but might be trickier to write later.

That’s about it, really, time to get started!

in Chinese, Education | 1 comment

Tags: Chinese proficiency report, Hacking Chinese, Studying Chinese

Chinese Proficiency Report 17

2012-06-01

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 May:

Number of hours spent practising various aspects of the Chinese language in May, 2012. The total number of hours is 289 which gives an average of 9 hours and 20 minutes per day, including weekends, holidays and so on. “Studying” means anything that I consider to be studying Chinese, but which isn’t covered by the other areas (speaking practise, thesis writing, reading books about Chinese in English etc.). Administration means things necessary for studying, but which isn’t studying in itself (finding suitable audio material, writing this article).

Things that went well in May

As you can see, I spent quite a lot of time studying, mostly because I found proper routines for listening and writing. I wrote a total of 32 articles on Lang-8 in May, not all of them very long (usually a few paragraphs), but this feels incredibly good. I wrote much in April too, because of the course in modern Chinese literature I took earlier this year, but this month’s writing is in a way worth much more, because it was the result of my own determination and not externally applied pressure. I’ve been lazy with 道德經 before, but during this month I finally picked it up again and reviewed the first 20 chapters. I now feel ready to move on.

Things I need to improve in June

In general, I’m quite satisfied with how things are going, but there are some things that need to be improved:

Read more. Much more. I hardly opened a book in Chinese last month. For June, I plan to spend at least three hours per day reading. It doesn’t really matter what it is and I plan to split the time between reading grammar (漢語語法), junior high school textbooks (國文), news and novels. I need this both to improve speed and to consolidate vocabulary.
Spend less time on Hacking Chinese maintenance. Right now I spend quite a lot of time with Hacking Chinese. I think the minimum maintenance (writing one article per week, maintaining a stream of tweets, writing newsletters and reading relevant new articles) could be managed in about 7 hours/week.
Spend more time writing articles and books. I have many things I want to write, some of them related to Hacking Chinese (note that I wrote “maintenance” above). I have spare time to invest now and during the summer, so it would be a pity to waste this opportunity.
Resume vocabulary acquisition. Since I haven’t read much and haven’t dedicated much time to learn vocabulary, my Anki deck is still around the 21000 mark (21118 more precisely). I have some 400 individual characters queued up for learning, along with roughly as many new words. I should have reached 22000 before the end of June.

That’s it for the time being. Next month, I will provide a more detailed update on how I’m doing with the individual goals specified in January. See you then!

in Chinese, Education | 1 comment

Tags: Chinese proficiency report, Studying Chinese

Chinese proficiency report 16

2012-05-02

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

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.