Anarchoblogs

New live acoustic up on Youtube featuring Loss of Eden!

This time, instead of being naked, we’re trapped in a little TV!

Yup, we live adventurous lives.

Enjoy!

ps -It’s a Chinese version of one of our songs

And no - I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they  referred to torture  - committed by the Chinese - and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture.  The reference was in an obituary for Colonel [...]

I went out to the local Mandarin Meetup tonight, which happens twice per month. Lately i’ve been a bit worried about my ability to speak, but i think this is more of a symptom of my perfectionism. I want to be fluent already, dammit! Anyway, in the past few times i’ve gone to mandarin meetup, i’ve tried to avoid worrying about speaking, and just enjoy the event. I’ve met new people, tried to teach the newbies a bit, and tried to learn some new words from the native speakers.

Tonight i actually felt more comfortable with speaking, however. I can’t purely mark this up to being less worried about it. In the past few weeks i’ve tried to refocus my listening efforts and also practice some speaking on my own. I haven’t actually spoken in conversation with anyone in a long time, except for brief moments at chinese meetup, but i really think my speaking has improved. Really, speaking in conversation isn’t necessarily that great…a lot of times, you just hear a lot of confusing words and struggle to get your intended meaning out. You end up saying a bunch of incorrect things too. Better to just concentrate purely on correct speech, on your own.

Firstly, you need a strong grasp of pronunciation. Lots of listening, and in the early stages you need someone to correct you. Later on, you may have the ability to critique your own pronunciation even if you can’t always say it 100% perfect in practice. This is fine, because it means you can practice on your own. What i’ve been doing is reading out the phrases from my flashcards. When a phrase comes up, i read it, understand it, and carefully turn it over in my head. Then i try to slowly say it completely correctly. Even for me, with months spent in china and in classes, it can be challenging to say a new phrase perfectly the first time. I listen carefully to what i said, and try to figure out the problems. Then i repeat it. Right now, with a phrase that may have some new words in it, it takes me between 3 and 6 repetitions until i’m happy with my production of it.

After purely focusing on pronunciation and getting it right, i then move on to making up a scenario in my head. I try to imagine a conversation in which i might use that particular phrase. I try to imagine myself making a response to someone using the phrase, and then i try to very minorly modify the phrase to convince myself that i’m using it authentically. I don’t want to change it too much, because i don’t want to be practicing an incorrect sentence. Just minor modifications to make the mental scenario seem more real.

I usually notice immediately that these imagined scenarios really help me convey the sentence fluently. My delivery of the phrase goes from “slow, but correct” up to “smooth and effortless”. This is the only way i can hope to verbalize these sentences at the speed of a newscaster. The phrase and all of its parts have to be part of my thoughts, they have to be what i want to say rather than just a mechanical motion of mouth and tongue. Imagining the scenario and imagining my mental state in such a situation, and then coming out with this perfect response…it’s all a sort of act that i put on, but it works. The phrase eventually comes out smoothly at a high speed, just like the newscasters i listen to all the time. This can be really fun when it’s a complicated phrase about the increase in share prices and the effects of oil prices on consumer spending, or whatever phrase i happen to be practicing.

I’m curious to see what further effects this sort of practice will have, since i’ve only been doing it quite recently. I’m sure that after doing this sort of mental acting for several months, my speaking will even more drastically improve. It just feels so good, and has such immediate results when i’m practicing, and now after speaking much more smoothly at the meetup tonight i feel that it has some medium-term effects too.

All of this has to be combined with listening, though. Background listening where i just have chinese news playing all the time, and also intensive listening where i try very hard to hear every single word that the newscasters say, and determine if each word is a word that i know. Words that i don’t know must be heard precisely and written down, and later looked up in the dictionary. Then, after looking up that round of unknown words, i listen to the whole newscast again. When listening intensely the 2nd or 3rd time, those words i looked up really stand out. All of this listening is accustoming me to how people speak at a fast pace. I know what chinese sounds like at a realistic pace, rather than the kid’s chinese that they spoke in all the listening exercises at school. I have to have this real sort of chinese stuck in my head if i’m going to be able to successfully imitate it when i play my little acting game on my own.

The great part about all this is that i just need some real recordings of real speech. I don’t use any “easy” stuff, because it isn’t real. I don’t need a “language exchange” partner that encourages me to speak before i’m ready, and i don’t have anyone around to make me feel embarrassed about having to repeat a phrase over and over again to get it right and let it sink into my head. Nothing holds me back, mentally or socially. I just get in some pure practice time without any performance anxiety. I think this is very important in any practice that you do. At this stage, speaking with real people is just a test of where my skills are at, and i don’t have to depend on such conversations as a learning mechanism. On my own, i can intensely fill my head with correct input, and then later it just comes out automatically in my speech.

Ride hard, ride free

This morning i was once again inspired by the latest post over at AJATT. Having Khatsumoto’s advice compressed into a short video talk was quite helpful. He goes over a couple of really important points.

One relates to the common perception of “learning”. Through our experience in the school system, we sometimes come to believe that “learning” involves sitting in front of a boring textbook that explains a bunch of principles. Then we think about those principles, maybe do a few exercises that reinforce the principles, and then we declare that we’ve “learned” the topic. This really excludes the natural way in which the brain adapts to situations and acquires practical knowledge. Really, this description is only valid when we learn about languages, not when we acquire languages. The only way to acquire a language is to be exposed to huge amounts of input, letting the brain naturally adapt to it and become used to it, until it just becomes part of you.

I think this is the big reason why people who take university language courses almost never become fluent through that. These classes typically teach a bunch of grammar rules and phonetic principles, which is really more like linguistics or language appreciation. Ya, it can be interesting, but it usually doesn’t help you speak normally. At best, you can labouriously compose an email or a letter, and haltingly ask where the train station is (but you typically don’t understand the answer if it’s nontrivial). In contrast, when you have acquired a language, you just talk. you don’t need to compose every sentence individually, you just go.

Knowing this distinction doesn’t give you all the answers, though. Lately i’ve been feeling sorta down about my chinese skills, and some of this is due to not being able to exactly see what i’m learning each day. Khatsumoto had some good reminders about this too, though. In the video he reminds us that “for a long time you can’t tell how much you’re getting, so you have to concentrate on how much you’re doing” (ie, how many hours you’re listening and reading…gaining input to feed your hungry brain). “The whole process is a process of sucking, but you’re sucking less each day.” You just have to realize that you’re sucking less each time. Most of the learning is incidental, and nonlinear. Different things stick each time, but you just need to give your brain more and more chances to catch on. Little kids get thousands of hours of listening before they can talk. Same for you. You need to expose yourself to input all the time, and your brain will grasp all sorts of little details each time. Slowly but steadily you will progress toward fluency.

I liked his analogy about skateboarding…if you just read some books and learn *about* skateboarding, but you only spend 10 minutes per week on the actual skateboard, then you’re gonna find skateboarding incredibly hard. Same with languages…if you only listen to small amounts, it’ll be hard. You have to listen lots and lots and lots, and it’ll sink in. The amount of input you get is proportional to the speed of the reduction in your suckage.

Trust your brain. it’s good at picking things up. just give it as many chances as you can, and you’ll suck less each time. And it’s not like chapters in a textbook in class…you can’t assume you’ll be perfect at everything in that “chapter” after you’ve worked on it. Maybe you’ll get some things now, some things later. Don’t try to predict or force which ones you want to “click”, because it doesn’t work like that. Just keep exposing yourself to it and your brain will pick up different pieces each time.

Ride hard, ride free

In the past few weeks, my main strategy for learning chinese has been to saturate myself with input. I’ve been reading books, and going through lots of understandable example sentences on a couple of websites. One of them is dict.cn, which has plenty of example sentences for every word i look up, and [...]

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When learning a new language, one of the most vital things is getting familiar with the sounds of that language. Every language has its own set of sounds that are “normal” for the speakers of that language, and there are usually a couple of them that will trip up people who speak a different language. Some sound difficulties are on the level of vowels and consonants, while other problems might occur with tones or rhythm or other subtleties. These are things that you’ll become familiar with after you’ve listened to hours and hours of native speakers

At the start, though, what you want to do is get those vowels and consonants under control. What i like to do is find a diagram that lists all the possible sounds in that language and find out how they differ from the sounds in English (my native language). You’ll probably find that some sounds are totally different and don’t exist in english, while others are quite similar to your ear but have some subtle difference that you can’t quite figure out yet. This gives you an abstract theoretical overview of what to expect, but it only teaches about the sounds, it doesn’t teach you the sounds themselves.

At this point, it’d be helpful if you knew the meanings of the linguistic terms used to describe the way these sounds are made. I’m still learning these terms myself, but i know some of them. They can be quite helpful for figuring out the subtle differences. Knowing where your tongue goes to make certain sounds is key. You probably don’t actually know where your tongue is going when you make sounds in your native language, so you should spend some time just talking to yourself while you pay detailed attention to your tongue positions.

Next you want to find some samples to listen to over and over and over again. You need to get them stuck in your brain, like certain other things. Years ago, my saxophone teacher used to say that i wasn’t allowed to try to play certain songs on my saxophone until i could accurately sing them to him. He did this to make sure that the song was stuck in my head before i was going to try to make it come out on the saxophone. The same is true with languages, you need to find some things that you can get stuck in there to use as reference. When i first started learning chinese, i had no trouble remembering the tones of certain words because i’d heard them a million times in one of my Pimsleur lessons. If i needed to remember it, i could just mentally replay the sentence from Pimsleur that had that word in it, and then i’d be able to say it properly.

Using this combination of learning about the sounds, and then actually hearing the sounds over and over again, you should be able to start deciphering things. It will also be helpful if you can find the same things said by different speakers. It’s much easier to figure out what makes a certain sound unique when you’ve heard two or more different people saying the same sequence of sounds.

If you know some native speakers of the target language, try to playing this game with them: pair up so that one native speaker is with you, and another native speaker is with another student. Then have the native speakers have a once-removed conversation with each other where they tell you what to say, and you have to say it; the two students will be having a conversation with each other, but they’ll be told exactly what to say by the native speakers. You don’t have to understand what you’re saying, you just have to try to mimic it exactly. Hilarity will ensue. You’ll hear the mistakes that your fellow student makes when she tries to repeat her half of the conversation, and she’ll hear yours. The native speakers will find the results hilarious and will probably love helping you get closer to the real thing. For extra fun, trying combining it with drinking shots of 白酒

Next you’ll want to focus on hearing where the word boundaries lie. This usually requires some basic vocab so that you can recognize a couple of the words that you hear, but a lot of it is still just awareness of sounds and general familiarity with the language. Something that helps a lot is finding hours and hours of your target language, and then keeping it on as background noise while you do other things. Find some online radio shows or podcasts or something, making sure that they’re purely in the target language with no english, and then put them on your mp3 player. Have it on whenever you walk to the store, do the dishes, tend the garden, go to work, whatever. You want to totally saturate your brain with it.

I did this with fantastic results in the summer. When i got back from china at the beginning of the year, i wasn’t so keen on studying chinese for a while, so i took a break. When i wanted to get back into it i had some catching up to do, so i found some radio shows from Radio Canada International’s chinese program and put them on my ipod. I listened to them for about 8 hours per day for two weeks. At the beginning, i didn’t understand a thing. This annoyed me because i’d already spent a good year studying chinese pretty hard, but the radio host spoke soooo fast and used lots of advanced vocab that tripped me up. But after two weeks, i found that i could actually understand quite a lot of it. I had become used to the sound of the language again, and became used to the speed at which these radio hosts spoke.

After you’ve got some beginner’s knowledge of the language, what you really want is some audio that you have transcripts for. Then you can listen to it while reading it, and you’ll get a better sense for the words that you’re reading. You don’t want to spend a long time reading a language that you don’t know how to pronounce, because you’ll probably be practicing these bad pronunciations in your head as you read. It’s better to have a firm grasp of pronunciation right away before you do a lot of reading. If you have a recording device, try recording some of your native speaker friends reading the sentences from your books, and then listen to these recordings while you study.

Of course, all of this should be adjusted for your personal interests. Keep things fun. Try finding a dubbing of some fun cartoons…i’m currently looking for a copy of the Batman animated series in chinese, which i’ve heard exists. That’s certainly something i could sit down and watch over and over. What i’m really wishing for is mandarin-dubbed Star Trek: The Next Generation, but i don’t think it exists. If anyone finds mandarin sci-fi, let me know!

Ride hard, ride free

I had a question the other day from someone who wants to start learning mandarin chinese, and wants to continue studying french. It really got me thinking, because all of my learning strategies lately have been focused on moving myself from “advanced beginner” to “intermediate” stages, but it’s been a long time since i’ve thought about what to do from the absolute total beginner level. I learned a lot last year about classroom learning by doing the chinese immersion program both here in canada and in china, and this year i’ve learned a lot about self-directed learning, so in this post i’m gonna try to put those together and come up with something useful. This should help me too, since i hope to restart on spanish in january or so, alongside my chinese study.

I think the most general principle i can suggest is that you just need to keep yourself consistently moving forward bit by bit. 语言学习好比走路，是一步一步前进的 (”studying languages is like walking; you improve one step at a time”). The big challenge in language-learning is not the particulars of whatever concept you happen to be learning in any given moment, it’s the problem of keeping yourself on-track toward your future goals which may be many months away.

Language study is a motivation game. I think just about everybody will experience a moment when they think “fuck, this takes a long time, i’m never going to get fluent”, or “dammit, why can’t i just READ this book! i want to read a page in like 5 seconds like i do in english instead of 10 minutes in this language”. These moments are all opportunities to fail by giving up. You have to be prepared for them so you can bust through to the other side on your way to awesome. Remember that you CAN become fluent in other languages. If you’re dedicated and you keep having fun with it, you could be fluent in 10 languages some day. So if that’s what’s possible, then why let this one little language get you down? Don’t worry, you’ll get there.

If you write a todo list, just having “Learn Chinese” on the list is not helpful. That’s not really a task that you can just sit and do in an afternoon or something. What you need is a mental conception of what “becoming fluent” looks like on a day-to-day basis. You need to figure out what you’re going to do each and every day that is related to your language of interest. You may only spend 20 minutes on it if you’re really busy, and other days you may get all keen and spend several hours before you look up at the clock and see how late it is. But what you need to know is that “becoming fluent” looks like “i think i’m gonna sit down and read a bit of this book” or “i think i’ll flip through this dictionary and pick out some crazy new words that i don’t know” or “i’m gonna go have coffee with some people who speak chinese”. Those little short-term things are the stuff of magic. Added all together, they are what will make you fluent. That’s it. If every day you add something to your knowledge, you will get there.

To keep yourself on track, you need to find stuff that’s fun. As Khatsumoto says, There is no such thing as something being “boring but effective”. If it’s not fun, don’t do it because you’ll just kill your desire. Usually i try to find at least 4 or 5 different ways to work on the language. Then, when i have some time set aside to do something, i can lay out a bunch of books on the table, load up a few websites, and then just jump into whichever one strikes my fancy. Maybe i’ll switch after 20 minutes if i get bored, or maybe i’ll do it for hooouurrrs without noticing. It differs daily, but i can tell you with certainty that if you only have 1 book that you’re using, you’ll get bored of it at some point and then you won’t have anything to fall back on.

In a practical sense, there are a few things that i always want when studying a new language. number 1 is beginner audio lessons. Check out Pimsleur or Michel Thomas. Some people like them, some people think they have too much english instruction in them and not enough native speaking, but you should at least give them a try because they exist for many languages and they usually have some good content, especially for beginners or those who haven’t spent a lot of time learning any other languages before.

Another thing i like to have is a simple book. Maybe a kid’s book, maybe some sort of graded reader for beginners, anything you can find that’s on the easy side of things. If you’re an absolute beginner, even “easy” stuff will be hard to comprehend, but just about anything will do. What you want is a nice source of content in that language. It’ll also serve as a goal, since you know that at some point in your studies you’ll be able to read the whole thing easily, which will be quite satisfying.

Without expecting to understand everything, take a browse through it. Try to understand a few sentences, using dictionaries or websites or whatever. If you come upon something interesting, write it down. If you have one of those “aha” moments when you figure out something, write it down. I like just picking away at something and trying to pull out anything that i can. Pretend that you’re an archaeologist studying agent egyptian in a dusty pyramid somewhere and you’re decoding a language that no one else knows. It’s a puzzle, and it’s way more addictive than Sudoku. Piece by piece you’re going to pull tidbits out of it that you start to understand.

Next is getting an SRS - Spaced Repetition System (my favourite is Anki). This is a vital learning tool that has been mostly neglected by educators everywhere. I’ve already ranted about SRSes elsewhere, so i’ll spare you most of it this time. Simply put, an SRS is a piece of computer software that is made to program your brain to remember things. It makes you familiar with something over time by repeating it to you at the right time. In science fiction, people of the future program computers in their brains to remember stuff for them, but right now we already know the truth is the other way around: computers can program US to remember anything, and the way to do this is with an SRS.

It goes like this. I pick up a book, like the chinese translation of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (which i got from the local library 2 weeks ago), and i struggle through a few sentences in it. I’m curious about how one of those sentences is phrased, so i write it down on my notepad. I pick some portion of that sentence and look it up online, maybe on dict.cn and find a bunch more example sentences that have similar words in them. If any of these are interesting, i write them down.

At the end of my little exploration session, i put down my book and flip open my laptop, loading up Anki. I create flashcards from the stuff that i wrote down. This is the crucial step, because if all i ever did was write shit down, i’d forget it all by the next day, or even 2 hours from then. This is what i mistakenly did when i was in China…i’d sit down for like 2 or 3 hours every afternoon and crawl through all sorts of interesting books and dictionaries, write a bunch of neat stuff down, and then forget like 90% of it by that evening. I was spinning my wheels because i wasn’t actually retaining much of what i was figuring out. If you’re not reviewing the old material, it’s like you’re that famous archaeologist in the dusty pyramid and every day you take your notes and chuck them in the trash. NO, you want to retain all that stuff (hopefully with the least amount of effort possible), so you need your SRS.

So, with an SRS like Anki i can spend a few minutes every morning and evening reviewing older stuff and keeping it fresh in my mind. By getting reminded after a few hours, then after a day, then after 3 days, after a week, etc, i can turn that short term stuff into long term familiarity. This is true advancement in a language. You can be confident that whatever interesting tidbits you write down on your notepad will not be thrown down the memory hole…you can just assume that you’ll be able to remember those, because Anki is going to program them into your long term memory for you. You’re going to be intimately familiar with them. In a few weeks, you’ll look at all the really complicated stuff you were writing down a month previous, and it’ll appear stupidly simple to you. It won’t even seem worth keeping because it’ll be so obvious. This is familiarity. When you’re fluent in a language, you’re just really really familiar with it.

Ok, i notice that this post is starting to ramble on forever, which i tend to do when i’m excited about something, so let me try to sum things up. Like any long-term project, learning a language involves doing something every day consistently for a long period of time. If you keep it up, you’ll be surprised at your progress. I believe that by working enthusiastically on it and having some good people to consult, you can make much more progress much faster than if you took a course and just passively did what the teacher said.

Don’t worry about leaving some other stuff behind if you have to move in a different direction to find the fun stuff. You can always come back to the other things you were working on. It’ll still be there later, just keep pursuing the fun things. Keep searching for ways to get comprehensible input. You want lots and lots of interesting input. Saturate your brain with input, and things will fall into place. This is what brains are good at.

I’ll probably elaborate on some parts of what i wrote here, but i think i need some more time to mull it over.

Ride hard, ride free

I was having dinner with some friends of mine the other day, and they’re all chinese exchange students. We were talking about sushi in Vancouver, since the sushi is quite good here (supposedly some of the best, outside japan). My friends asked me what the “green stuff” was called, but when i said “wasabi” they all laughed. It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, “wasabi” sounds a lot like “wo sha bi”, except maybe said with a bit of a southern chinese accent, “wo sa bi”. In chinese, this is “我傻逼” which is something like “i’m an asshole”, or maybe “i’m fucking stupid”. I really have to start learning all these words they never taught us in school!

My current favourite study method is reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. I checked out both the english version of the novel, and the chinese translation, which both happened to be at the local library when i was there. I read as much as i can of the chinese version, and then flip over to the english one when i get stuck. I’m getting all sorts of interesting vocabulary this way, and i don’t have to endure the tedium of flipping through the dictionary to get it. I’m eager to find out how they translate things like “sleep with the fishes” ;)

Ride hard, ride free