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linghxr · 3 years

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Learning Chinese as a Chinese American

This post will be different from most of my other posts. I’m going to be talking about my experience learning Mandarin Chinese as a Chinese American. It seems to me that most of my followers and other learners I follow are not ethnically Chinese, so I want to share my experience.

Disclaimer: I cannot represent all Chinese Americans. I can only speak for myself and my friends and family.

First, I want to briefly highlight some experiences of Chinese Americans when it comes to Mandarin proficiency that I think are often overlooked. Chinese Americans who are looking to learn or improve their Mandarin come from very diverse backgrounds, from relatively proficient to conversational but illiterate to can understand but not speak to a complete beginner. Those who are not complete beginners (have some level of exposure from childhood) can be called heritage learners.

Many Chinese Americans have no knowledge of Mandarin for a variety of reasons. They might have learned a different Chinese language like Shanghainese or Cantonese from their families. They might have parents who don’t share a common Chinese language and thus used English to communicate. They might come from a family that has been in the US for several generations, so everyone is a monolingual English speaker.

Many Chinese Americans are simply not interested in improving their Mandarin or even learning it to begin with. This is obviously not the case for me, but IT IS VALID!!! No one should feel obligated to learn Mandarin.

Many Chinese Americans speak nonstandard varieties of Mandarin or speak Mandarin with strong regional accents that are considered “improper” because they aren’t biaozhun putonghua.

Many Chinese Americans speak Mandarin with a young child’s vocabulary because their language skills slowed when they began using primarily English at school. Also, their skills may regress when they leave home as a young adult and stop having regular contact with the language.

As for me, I am not a heritage speaker because I didn’t grow up speaking Mandarin. However, I do consider Mandarin to be my heritage language because it is the first language of some of my relatives. For various reasons, almost none of my close family members speak a non-Mandarin Chinese language/fangyan anymore, so I’m really only interested in learning Mandarin.

Even though I didn’t grow up speaking Mandarin at home, I started taking extracurricular Chinese classes (aka Chinese school) at a young age. I’m sure other Chinese Americans will agree with me that it’s very easy to go to Chinese school for years and not actually learn that much. I never felt like I learned that much, but now I realize that my years of Chinese school gave me a really strong foundation in pronunciation that I lacked as a non-heritage speaker. I probably would have learned more if I had paid more attention...I guess I was not a very diligent learner as a child. I also forgot a lot between when I stopped going to Chinese school and when I became more serious about learning Chinese in high school/college.

My Chinese school experience is why I’m pretty much useless at giving advice for beginners--I can’t remember learning the basics, and I probably learned them in a way that won’t work for you. For instance, I never formally learned pinyin or tones. I just picked them up “naturally” from my years of classes. I never realized how much effort is needed to learn these basics until I met Chinese learners with different backgrounds.

One really interesting result of my Chinese learning story and family background is that the Chinese I’ve learned is noticeably different from the Chinese my close relatives speak. They use traditional characters and speak with mostly Southern Chinese/Taiwanese accents and vocabulary. But in all my classes, I’ve learned simplified characters and Beijing-centered vocab. To try to correct for this, I’ve been attempting to get better at reading traditional characters and try to avoid using erhua. I haven’t focused as much on learning Southern and Taiwanese vocabulary yet, but I’m hoping to in the future. I honestly have no intention to learn to write traditional characters--I just want to be comfortable enough with them to read and type. I’ve been writing with simplified characters for two thirds of my life, so that ship has sailed.

To sum everything up, I’ve personally found learning Mandarin as a Chinese American to be a really fulfilling process. Sometimes I do get discouraged, but the joys of learning and connecting with my heritage makes it all worth it. My one regret is that I didn’t take Chinese school seriously when I was younger. As a result, I never got to have a meaningful conversation with my grandparents before they passed. I don’t want anyone else to experience this regret I feel. So please, Chinese Americans who are heritage speakers, treasure your language skills.

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thou-breath-of-autumns-being · 3 years

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Fic Writer Meme

@worriedaboutmyfern said she tagged anyone who wanted to do this, so I did it!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

...why is there a very large font size I can’t fix. tumblr is a website

2. What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

183877

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi, Disney Descendants, glowfic, the Magnus Archives, NBC Hannibal, Cthulhu Mythos, the Alexander Trilogy, the Screwtape Letters, Academia RPF, Mad Max, the Vorkosigan Saga, Sacrifices Arc, Zootopia, DCU, Avatar the Last Airbender, MCU, Star Wars Legends, Star Wars sequel trilogy, Lord of the Rings, British Actor RPF, Disney Animated Canon, Taylor Swift RPF.

I... tend to hop fandoms a lot. Most of these are things I wrote one fic in.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

By far my most popular fic by kudos is You Know What They Say About Foxes (They’ll Break Your Heart). Fucking furries.

My second is my other Zootopia fic, Stretch Yourself, followed by Slicing Free (trans girl Mal from Descendants), An Isolated Outbreak of Virginity (Finnpoe virginity kink porn), and The Most Social of Human Interchanges (Ben loses his virginity by being gangbanged by the Core Four).

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I don’t respond to comments because I didn’t realize this was a thing you were supposed to do, and now I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to most of them. I do read every one and they make my day every time.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

uh good question

I feel like I’m going to have to give the award to “that’s what woods are for”, because I had to put increasingly unambiguous tags about how miserable everyone in this fic is to keep people from posting things complaining about how unhappy the ending is. Now no one posts this but also no one reads it. My genius is unrecognized in its own time.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I don’t usually write crossovers (outside of glowfic) but I am the QUEEN of fusion fanfic. Every time I consume a piece of media I’m like “what if this were mdzs fusion instead.”

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Someone took a whole hell of a lot of offense to Blessed Art Thou Among Women (my fic about how in the Descendantsverse Frollo canonically has a child) and left me an extremely nasty comment about it. It wasn’t clear to me what they were offended by.

There’s also a lot of vagueblogging about An Isolated Outbreak of Virginity being racist which, I promise you, I write this shit in every imaginable fandom. I am not at all reserving it for black dudes.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes.

I write angsty, character-focused, relationship-driven smut; if there’s a choice between hotness and developing the relationship, I pick the relationship every time. One time Grace said about one of my fics “this is the least sexy porn I have ever read” and I felt deeply understood. (That was one of the less angsty ones, actually, it was just K*hneman and Tv*rsky bickering about whether wanting anal sex was a cognitive bias.)

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Nope.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope. :(

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I mean, I’m a glowficcer, so...

A lot of my fics wind up so influenced by grace that even though they’re technically independently written by me they wind up 20% cowritten by grace anyway. It’s less so now because we’re in different fandoms. :( But their fingers are over every inch of hymns.

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

how can anyone answer this question???????

14. What’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

My Screwtape Letters fanfic wound up falling apart, mostly because I lost contact with most of the people who were going to beta it for Christianity accuracy and haven’t found other people who would be equally good.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I’m funny. I do really good characterization and character-driven fics. I’m pretty good at writing angst. I have excellent weirdtopias, particularly related to sex and gender worldbuilding, as well as coherent economics.

smut

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

I sometimes tend to drop into my own voice and lose the character voice. I have a hard time coming up with original characters. Plot is not my strong point when it isn’t character-driven. Weirdly, I have a hard time writing combat, even though it seems like an identical skill to writing smut. I start many many many projects and do not finish them.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’m a monolingual English speaker so I mostly don’t. I tend to go with the “he said in Russian” approach. My glowfic has ever had dialogue which I used Google Translate for, but glowfic tends to be lower effort in this kind of way

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter. (It was really bad Mary Sue fanfic.)

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

mm right now probably ‘only hymns upon your lips’? It’s good. You should read it. I PROMISE I WILL FINISH IT AT SOME POINT BUT MY BRAIN IS ONLY SANGCHENG

no obligation tags: @irrealisms, @wolffyluna, @regicidal-optimism, @another-normal-anomaly, @existentialterror

#westwind.txt #fandom

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rigelmejo · 4 years

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2 more thoughts regarding the massive immersion approach:

Flashcards and Massive Immersion Method

while i’ve seen some people who do it insist that its about moving AWAY from flashcards/srs grinding, and only doing that in order to make it easier to immerse... i am not sure that’s how it ends up in practice. i’ve read comments by some people about how immersion should be where the a lot of the progress is coming from. But on the other hand, from my view, even the immersion eventually involves a lot of sentence mining (you making srs flashcards from immersion, to study). And the creator of the method, Matt, seems to think a good indication this method will work for you is if you have a decent tolerance for flashcard grinding.

Also, on a more practical level, he thinks structured study is very helpful for your learning and is part of what helps you learn faster. He thinks a combination of immersion (both reading and pure listening) starting early on and regularly, with structured study to help you learn first very useful things to you (common words, writing system, grammar patterns, eventually words/grammar in the things you specifically want to understand) helps support your immersion efforts. Structured study in his plan is srs flashcards and sentence mining - although I personally think you could also substitute ‘structured study’ for textbooks, word lists/flashcards/podcasts you pick based on your needs, basically any material where you’re actively studying and reviewing instead of immersing. Now I mainly agree with this point, as much as I don’t like structured study of any kind any more then much anyone else. It really does help make immersion more tolerable, and more effective, at least for me. Structured learning is kind of like scaffolding you put on yourself, or floaties before diving into the deep end. It gives you things you can grab onto more easily when you immerse, and help you remember more effectively the things you pick up as you immerse. It’s probably why most language learners, no matter what structured study methods they use, do more then ONLY listen/read in the language with absolutely nothing else being done (a lot of polyglots on youtube seem fond of making word lists with example sentences which sounds a lot like a more chill non srs sentence mining method, a lot of articles i’ve read of learners going for basic ability to speak/read go for using frequency lists and grammar guides early on as their base to learn from - which is what i tend to do).

Anyway... basically, as much as I’d love if massive immersion approach had less flashcards... it doesn’t appear (to me) to have any less flashcards than AJATT or 10k sentences methods. Maybe it does, but once the sentence flashcards go into the thousands it all seems like an Awful Lot to me. On the upside, I would again like to mention there is at least one example of a guy named Chris who did the massive immersion approach for japanese for 18 months and got to a good reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and speaking level, who did the kanji flashcards and 2000ish frequent words in sentences and grammar example sentences in the beginning, then mostly did not sentence mine after. Here’s his interview about it. During, and after those initial flashcards, he immersed, looked up words occasionally (and did not always make flashcards of new words). He tried to switch to a monolingual dictionary halfway through, which seemed to help him. And he didn’t really study/immerse more than 1-3 hrs a day, with the heaviest ‘dedicated’ time in the earlier months when he grinded through the Heisig kanji flashcards. He’s a good example of a ‘less flashcards in the sentence mining’ version of the approach, that seemed to work out fine for him. So burning out on flashcards, and eventually doing less of them and primarily immersion/looking occasional words up, is a possible way to do the massive immersion approach. And I think this might be the way some people are viewing the massive immersion approach who say the flashcards are really just needed to push you to get into immersion easier - perhaps they’re also people who used less flashcards once the immersion part became more comfortable for them.

---

Immersion

A second note: I really do want to reiterate again how much effort I do think this method takes. From an outsider’s perspective, to me it initially looked kind of ridiculous until I actually looked it up. Because all i saw were learners making targeted videos about Only one element of their studies (so it was helpful in a specialized way, but i wrongly thought that video’s tips would be about ALL of studying the language lol). So I kept seeing videos insisting you need to immerse immerse immerse and you’ll learn super fast! But like of course, these learners were also doing studying from sentence mining and grammar example sentences and I just did not know that.

About immersion: it really does help though. At the bare minimum, you should try it some time just because it will REALLY reaffirm your goals in the language. Or it will help you set goals, if you aren’t sure what those goals are. It is also a real fast way to actually check if you’ve 1. made any improvement, 2. are lacking in any areas you’d intended to make improvement (and therefore you need to fix your study plan to address this), 3. what you immerse in might help you realize what you really want to prioritize learning first. It also gives you a dose of reality, to see if you’re worse or better than you thought you were. It gives you chances to PRACTICE what you’ve learned, which will help you remember that info and recall it faster, and get you more comfortable so it’s easier to use that info you know the next time you immerse etc. It puts you into real material you want to eventually be able to engage with, so you can actually see how you’re doing in the language up against more realistic use of the language (versus textbooks and learner made material that is probably on some level tailored to either be easier or focus on some specialties a bit more than the real world which focuses on all kinds of things).

In French, I unintentionally ‘immersed’ in reading from the first few months, and I fully believe that boosted my ability to comprehend the language immensely. I really genuinely did not put that much effort into studying french. I took one well made beginner semester in college, most notably great because our teacher focused on pronunciation, speaking often, learning a ton of regular verbs and conjugations, and learning basic ways of saying past/present/future tense immediately (which broadened what we could talk out in a tremendous way - especially compared to any other beginner course I’ve ever taken). I studied one 300 word list, then sort of studied a 625 and 1000 word list, none of them with flashcards - just looking at and reviewing somewhat regularly. And I read... a lot... especially in the beginning when it was super hard. I read and looked up a handful of words (only ever handfuls, cause I’m lazy). Eventually, I read and rarely looked up words, because I’m lazy and context guesses were enough to me. Eventually, I speed read through a beginners grammar guide in english. Then an intermediate grammar guide in french. My listening suffered cause i rarely ever practiced that, but when i do practice it the skill builds up pretty fast since i generally know most words i run into now. If I went back to french, it’d mostly be a lot of listening/shadowing immersion (shows, and comprehensible input youtube channels), and then having lots of convos to boost my speaking/writing abilities. French... genuinely was SO hard in the beginning. But I think immersing very early got me through the “doing this for more then 5 minutes FRIES my brain its so HARD” stage within a few months.

I think whenever I put off immersion... that just delays when i’m gonna feel that frustration. And its not fun to feel that frustration, but its expected because there will always be some difficulty as you get adjusted to it. And when you’ve studied for over a year? It really sucks to feel like you’ve made progress, only to try to read simple captions on pictures or headlines and website links and understand NOTHING. That’s what happened to me in japanese - I didn’t try to read real stuff for a year, and when I finally did I was pretty crushed that outside of the most basic school/daily life discussions, I couldn’t comprehend anything. Even though in my studies I’d flown through my textbook materials. I should also note, for languages ‘more difficult to learn’ for an english speaker, yes its going to take longer or more study hours to comprehend the same as one could in a ‘less difficult’ language like french. So immersion hurt that much MORE cause I knew even less then after a year of french, even with more hours of study, and immersion was so much harder. It was super demotivating. But in retrospect, I should have just pushed through and planned my goals according to what specifics were making that initial push SO HARD so I could fix them and make my life easier. I eventually did, but I would have loved that kind of clear focus on what I needed to do with my goals BACK THEN.

Because of how my French versus Japanese studies went, when I started Chinese I just immersed right away. A great thing about studying chinese, is at the time I was super into their storytelling and works, and the chinese world has a HUGE amount of incredible works AND a ton of them are easy to access. It’s super easy to immerse in chinese! (I imagine similar is true of english). In French, I only really was invested in french history books, so I didn’t dive into reading much unless it was just those or ‘informational’ stuff like news. (Thankfully french took less effort to improve in). In Japanese, while I’m into some very specific creators and works, I’m actually not really that into anime or manga. And the stuff I am into, I need to grind though goal-focused study to actually finally be able to comprehend enough to immerse in (it took 2.5 years to even scratch the bottom of ‘maybe’ for trying to do that, since I didn’t immerse early on and build my comfort in being able to immerse). I started trying to read in Chinese early, just because I was like “well i did it in month 3 in french so WHY NOT do it with chinese too, it helped my french a ton!” And, well... it did help my chinese a ton, and still does.

It’s also been... way harder every single step of the way then french ever was. And I’m so glad I did it with french first... I built up some tolerance at engaging with materials i only 50% comprehended in french, I built up reading skills with that kind of difficult material, and I had experience seeing that comprehension level noticeably improve every few months. So in chinese, I started with like 20% comprehension and it HURT my brain. But I expected it to be harder than french, and i expected any foreign language to start off well below the comfortable suggestion of ‘98%’ for reading for pleasure. On the upside, it helped me set goals I needed FOR the goal of reading super early. It helped me practice parsing how hard chinese was going to be to comprehend, super early. And I think the difficult comprehension curve for immersing in chinese, compared to romance languages for english speakers, might be why a lot of learners on forums insist reading in chinese took them 2-4 years to even start graded readers. And why many of them say its taking them 20 minutes to read a page, or they ‘pre-study’ with flashcards for like 1 hr a day when they read, etc. While I’m sure those approaches work for them, I think in a way its also kind of a matter of When do YOU want to do those things? When do you want to face that super-intolerable low comprehensibility curve?

Because it will be a few phases: first it will be brutally intolerable, then you’ll get used to seeing a huge amount of incomprehensibility and not getting so bothered by it even though you still don’t understand much, then you start comprehending a bit more each time (possibly aided by some other study methods/reading strategies etc), you feel relieved the comprehension is getting EASIER (even though its only like 60% now that feels WAY less brutally frustrating then 20% did!), and the process continues. You basically first get used to tolerating how brutally incomprehensible it is, how much lower than 98% comprehensible it is. Then every step after feels like achievement and relief because it just keeps getting easier. And by the time you do get to a decently high comprehensibility, it feels fantastic and much easier. No matter when you start immersing, it’s going to progress like this. So if you go from ‘comfortable 98%ish percent comprehensible textbook sentences and flashcards, or podcasts, and comfortable comprehension in your own language mainly’ to ‘dropped into native material in your target language where you just definitely are not 98%, maybe 80-90% at best?’ Its still going to feel brutal.

In a big way I do think it’s partially just a matter of when you want to face the brutal beginning of the comprehensibility curve. Do you want to tackle it early on in the learning stages, in the first couple years? The upsides are, you will only feel like its easier over time, so once you’ve studied more, your immersion also is getting easier. So study progress lines up better with how comprehension progress ‘feels.’ The downside is, of course, you face a brutal challenge that feels insurmountable early on. That could cause you to give up. And because its actual native content in the language - realistically you are NOT going to be able to comprehend as much as you can in your own native language in a year. It’s going to start a low comprehension level, and you aren’t going to be able to just quickly bring it up to comfortable 98%ish comprehension level. It’s still going to take years of study for that. So part of the process genuinely is getting more okay with accepting lower comprehensibility in your target language, and learning to not let that frustrate or demotivate you, learning to not get upset, learning to let go of trying to absolutely always understand everything perfectly, and instead learning to notice milestones in your own personal progress. Learning to appreciate an improvement from 20% comprehended, to 50% comprehended, to 70% comprehended. Instead of super angry you’ve studied for months, only to still be struggling to comprehend - because it will definitely still technically be a struggle at least until you do hit those 90%s in comprehension. So it could be demotivating to think ‘oh yeah, I’m gonna be fluent in a year!’ then you immerse early on, and realize that you may not actually to able to comprehend this target language as easily as your native language in a year. But it definitely grounds to back to reality. On the upside, even if you waited to immerse, you’re probably going to hit this difficult comprehension experience for at least a few months - so you’ll eventually get the reality check. It’s just when do you want to experience it. Early on - so you can use the experiences to both practice and focus your goals on what YOU specifically need?

Or after studying for years - finally getting practice, and now needing to possibly readjust a lot of your long-used study methods because they left some noticeable blank spots that are now impeding your ability to comprehend what you want to comprehend? There are of course benefits to waiting to do immersion until later - you’re less likely to quit studying the language, if you’ve already been studying it for years and are dedicated. Depending on how good your study plan was, you might be starting out at 70-90% comprehension of materials, instead of 20-50%. Which means your difficulty curve might take less time to power through, and be more tolerable depending on if you can handle moderate incomprehensibility more than significant amount incomprehensibility. I don’t know... I tried to do immersion later on with Japanese, and while I definitely won’t give up, it was also such a huge difficulty curve that I had to replan my study methods to fill in all the blanks before I was ready to try immersion properly. I think with chinese, where i started some immersion early on, i would have been SUPER ready to give up and quit, if I didn’t have my french experience telling me ‘just stick with it, it always starts hard and gets easier over time, chinese will just probably take longer to make progress with than french did.’

I only pushed through with immersing in chinese early on, because I KNEW the same study methods worked for me in french so I was going to use them again. And I adamantly tried to just tell myself it wasn’t that hard. I had a chinese teacher in high school, he was great, and one of the things he did was never treat anything as hard. He didn’t act like tones were hard, he just gave us an example and had us repeat him. He didn’t act like hanzi were hard, he just wrote vocab, gave us the pinyin, then told us to write it in our notes - and write only hanzi in tests and homework and classwork. Bam, that’s it. No insistence that we had to use mnemonics to ever learn them (although mnemonics would’ve helped speed it up probably in retrospect). No insistence anything was hard, it was just how the words sounded and were spelled, so we learned. He had a class of 40 kids who were rambunctious and many of whom didn’t pick chinese and just got put into the class, and he still managed to teach well enough that most people passed just fine. That class was fun, and not any harder then any other class. I think one part of the reason was how he treated nothing as overtly difficult or challenging, just another thing to learn. In comparison, I’ve had a japanese class where things WERE taught as very difficult to learn, and i think that intimidated me and demotivated me (along with the myriad of language study tip sites that really hammer home how ‘hard’ japanese is). Realistically, they aren’t necessarily hard, some languages just take more study time then others to cover the same ‘ground’. So anyway, whenever I study chinese, I just remind myself its not any harder then french to learn - it just takes me some extra study time. And I really think this mindset has made tackling both immersion and even just studying vocab much easier to me. I don’t see new words made of characters and freak out, I just think ok ‘this sounds like X, looks like this Y, do I need to do anything extra to remember this?’ Then come up with some mnemonics or examples of it being used etc if it will help me remember it, then move on. With chinese I really... mostly tackled studying the same way I studied French (but BETTER, because I practice speaking, writing, and listening MUCH more in chinese then i ever did in french). But like... I did not study the hanzi with Heisig or anything - and I do think in retrospect, I should, since I think it’ll make new words a bit easier to remember. (I remember new words way easier when I already know each individual character from other words - I don’t need mnemonics for the meaning or the pronunciation when I already know the characters that spell a new word so I can speed up learning it). The only extra thing I did with chinese was listen to tones in the beginning, some tone explanations, and listen to the audio of new words (so i can better remember the tones, so i can have better listening/speaking skills then i did in french). Overall, my progress was not too bad for just diving into chinese with the same overall study method. I managed to learn 1000 words and all the characters in them without heisig etc. (Although, genuinely, shout out to the Tuttle Learn Chinese Characters - 800 characters book, because the mnemonics include pronunciation, help a ton, and I learned probably 500 characters from that book starting out that served as a helpful foundation in studying chinese).

I did not ever try to go the route of ‘study with only pinyin first.’ I know some people think learn to speak first, read/write later, and it is easier. But like? Reading’s always my main goal baby. Everything else is a secondary goal, so there was no point to me putting off characters and real reading. Plus? In chinese??? Knowing how to read helps with shows SO MUCH cause nearly every show has mandarin subtitles!!! If you can read some basic mandarin, picking up words and some phrases from shows gets so much easier! Also, like my chinese teacher did not treat them as overly hard, I don’t want to treat characters as overly hard either. Pinyin is very good to know for typing, and for learning tones/seeing how to pronounce words. But I didn’t want to use it as the only thing i could rely on, any longer then the minimal necessary amount of time I needed to. Also, my lacking listening skills in french really hammered home how important it is to listen to pronunciations ALL THE TIME and especially when learning new words, so I try to make sure a majority of my chinese study and immersion materials have audio I can listen to. I try to learn most new words with audio, since pinyin is not the same as me hearing how to actually say it and recognize it.

#rant #mia #mass immersion approach

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scriptstructure · 4 years

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Hi, although English is my native language, another is my main language now and since I was 7 I have mostly been around speakers, often non native, who learned different dialects or a mix. So mine is a mix too. But I know work should be consistent, so could this cause issues in my stories? And how can fix?

Hey there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing in dialects or in mixed language. ‘Consistency’ means that the text, in itself, should be consistent, ie that unless there is a reason for doing so, the register, language, and tone should ‘fit’ across the whole work, not that you have to be consistent to a standard English.

I am not the best person to ask about bilingual or mixed language writing, as I am extremely monolingual, but there are a lot of stories out there written in mixtures of languages that reflect the author’s linguistic milieu.

There are, of course, examples of this using fictional languages, such as A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat, which is a slang that is a mixture of Cockney English rhyming slang, and Russian. This is something which is widely and commonly read and appreciated by English-reading audiences.

Write your story in the language(s) that feel right to you.

I’m sorry I can’t really give you much specific advice in this case, as it’s outside of my field of knowledge, but I’m sure if you have a search you’ll be able to find examples of stories that use multiple languages. I believe that there are a number of authors writing in Spanish-English especially around South America, so that might be a place to start, and see if you can find writers working within your milieu as well.

#writing #languages #Anonymous

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asymbina · 4 years

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Hi! Do you think there are similarities between lingua franca, pidgin, and creole languages?

Um, I'm not sure why you're asking me; my knowledge of linguistics is mostly in applied domains related to my conlanging habit. That does include some historical linguistics, so I know a bit about this, but there are people who are much better equipped than I am. That said, I'll try my best.

Are there similarities? Socially, yes; they all arise for facilitating communication and trade between groups who otherwise lack a common language. But they have different ontologies and there are different economic and social forces at play.

First of all, "lingua franca" is a term for describing the purpose of a language, at least in modern parlance. Pidgins and creole languages may fill this role, but also major non-creolized and non-pidgin natural languages have done this throughout history into the present. English is the dominant international trade language in the modern world; historically, French was once the courtly language of Europe and it was used for trade as well. Swahili is a widely spoken second language in Africa, and while dialects of Arabic aren't necessarily mutually intelligible, Modern Standard Arabic at least allows speakers of these dialects to communicate that way. The language which gave us the term, the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, was a pidgin based on late Latin as it was spoken around the Levant circa 1000 AD or so, that continued to evolve, as I understand it, for almost a thousand years.

Pidgins arise when people who don't have a language in common have to communicate, and they wind up with a sort of simplified mix of the languages the different people speak. The grammar may be typically based on one of the languages but with, perhaps, reduced inflection (in the morphology sense), maybe a somewhat different word order, and a vocabulary borrowed from multiple languages. Clauses tend to be simple, a lot of phonetic complexity is reduced, that kind of thing. One of the true defining traits of a pidgin is that it's nobody's first language, and it's mostly learned on an as-needed basis.

Creole languages, by contrast, are full languages in their own right, with a population of native speakers (who may or may not be monolingual, of course), grammatical complexity allowing for the full range of human expression in language (so complex clauses), and often become only partially mutually intelligible with their source languages. (For example, as someone who has studied French and speaks it moderately well, I can understand some Haitian Creole, but only some, and the orthography is utterly unlike French.)

So are there similarities? Yes, in that the category "lingua franca" can include both pidgins and creoles, and in that creoles are kinda what happens when a pidgin develops an L1 population; they're connected but I don't know if "similar" is the right framing for their relationships.

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endangeredlanguagechallenge · 6 years

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Endangered language challenge #4: Kusunda language

Kusunda (Kusanda, mihaq) is a language spoken by the Kusunda people in Nepal. It was originally thought to have died in 1985. But 2004, 3 speakers were discovered and most of the documentation we have today results from intense work with them. They belong to the ethnic group of Kusunda or Ban Raja, which is translated as “The Kings of the Forest”. It is an exonym, given by outsiders and not themselves, and it points to the fact that many Kusundas live in the forest. They have no problems with the term “Kusunda” (while in some regions of India it is used as an insult) but they refer to themselves as “mihaq” the peoples. Nowadays, there are only 160 ethnic Kusundas left. Of the 3 remaining speakers, none is monolingual, all of them also use Nepali. They all married outside their ethnic group and no child is raised in this language anymore, making Kusunda a moribund language. While most speakers vary widely in their fluency, Gyani Maiyi Sen is the most famous speaker and the most fluent if not only native one, she often gets referred to as the last speaker. (She is depicted in this video.)

youtube

The interesting thing about Kusunda is, while earlier researchers thought of it as a Tibeto-Burman variety, it is now evident that it is a language isolate, thus, not related to any other known language. It is probably the last remnant of languages that were spoken before the Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Iranian languages came to that region and it is not related to the Munda or Dravidian languages. The groundwork was laid by David Watters 2005 when he published the workings from the intense working with the three remaining speakers in a Kusunda grammar, which offers grammatical, typological and vocabulary insights.

Kusunda Phonology

Kusunda hat some interesting features: - It has six vowels that oppose each other in vowel harmonies, making them phonologically only three phonemes. Normally, only /i, ə, u/ or only /e, a, o/ can be together in one word. Theoretically, one set could be replaced by the other set without changing the meaning. - Kusunda is phonologically very distinct to its surroundings: It has uvular and pharyngealized consonants that don’t appear in neighbouring languages, and while retroflex consonants are prevalent in that region they don’t occur in Kusunda. - While English contrasts sounds by the place of articulation and the articulator, in Kusunda, mostly only the active articulator is of importance. So, it wouldn’t matter where the tip of the tongue (apical consonants) produces a sound, but only that it is done by it. Throughout the words, one would find apical consonants that are dental, alveolar, retroflex and palatal without changing the meaning. Even voicing, like the difference between /p/ and /b/, seems to play a minor role, as does aspiration, and many sounds can be stops here and fricatives there.

Kusunda Grammar

Very strikingly and highly unique among the world’s languages is the way Kusunda distinguishes between marked and unmarked structures. Irrealis would be a marked feature in comparison to the unmarked realis, same goes for negativity versus affirmation and other features. Normally, languages would make use of affixes or other means to denote these structures. Kusunda however, deploys a harmonic autosegmental process (often called mutation) that applies to the whole word. An apical consonant would then shift to a laminal consonant, a velar consonant to a uvular one and the first set of vowels would change to the second one, in order to mark the irrealis in contrast to the realis of the negativity in contrast to the affirmative modus. Here is an example: If you say “I go” you would apply the realis because it is present time. The form would be /ts-əg-ən/, but if you want to say “I will go” you have to use the irrealis and thus change the consonants’ articulator: /tʃ-aɢʕ-an/ - as you see, the velar /g/ of the root becomes uvular /ɢʕ/ (among the other changes) and is thus marking the irrealis by mutation.

Verbs are roughly divided into two groups. Class I gets personal prefixes and numeral suffixes: First persons are indicated by /t-/ or /ts-/, second persons by /n-/ and the third persons by /g-/ or others. The singular is indicated by the suffix /-Vn/ (V stands for a vowel) and the plural by the suffix /-da-/ that comes directly after the root and is followed by /-n/. So, you can distinguish “I eat” (t-əm-ən) from “You eat” (n-əm-ən), or “I eat” (t-əm-ən) from “We eat” (t-əm-da-n). The prefixes also resemble the first consonants of the personal pronouns a lot, which are /tsi/ and /tok/ for the 1. P. Sg. & Pl., /nu/ and /nok/ for the 2. P. Sg. & Pl. and /gina/ for the 3. P. which has no distinction between plural or singular. The verbs from Class I are few in number and highly irregular.

Most verbs are in Class II, which differ in a lot of features from Class I verbs. If the verb is transitive, the conjugated forms of “I made, we made, you made, etc.” come after the verb root. So, if you want to put the verb “to buy” /dza/ in the first person singular you add /a-t-n̩/ which simply means “I made” > dza-a-t-n̩ (I made buying). If the verb is intransitive, you simply add the personal pronoun after the root and add a /-n/. From “to enter” /sip/ you would simply come to “I enter” by adding /tsi/ and /-n/ > /sip-tsi-n/.

That is just a peek into the grammar, there are a lot of very interesting and unique features that Kusunda has to offer and it is definitely worth a further look into the grammar David Watters wrote.

Kusunda Phrases

The Australian National University in Canberra has some very good resources on Kusunda on their website. If you want to hear the sound files to the following phrases or other sentences or even texts, visit this website.

Sodzaq! - Greetings! (hello or goodbye) Tsi gidzi Gyani Maiya - My name is Gyani Maiya Tsi tugun - I've come (I'm here) Nəti? - Who (is it)? Nu wee? - Are you well? Nətn nitn? - What did you say? Hampena nugun? - Where have you come from? Ni whi hampe? - Where is your house? Tsi whi Kulmor - My house is in Kulmore Garaw əni - It's hot Idang ugun - I'm hungry Pəwhəiran əni - I'm tired Aw təgəi! - Let's go! Hana nyhaan? - Where are you going? Kafera muitsidaq - We'll meet again

Gyani Maiya’s words about the language loss: Ta gepən mi: əndzi - This language is going to be lost. Nətima gepən ədu - There is none to talk with. Mjaqa tsi toqdu ta qau nətn ba - I am alone and if I died, then there is nothing. Ləmbə ədi ta nəti ləmbə əgəndzi - Though I am ready to teach, is there anyone to learn? Toqdu bela ənin jiodze gepən əgu ta ləmbə əgu ta we: da - It would be better if they learnt since I am very old now.

Kusunda sources

See for further linguistic material the link to Glottolog and check the links under the Wikipedia article or the Links page of the ANU Kusunda Linguistics article.

Ethnologue: Kusunda language Glottolog: Kusunda language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunda_language Kusunda grammar, David Watters (2006) Kusunda Linguistics, information, texts, audio (Australian National University)

#Kusunda #Kusanda #Ban Raja #mihaq #endangered language challenge #endangered languages #linguistics #Nepal #Nepalese #language isolate #moribund #reverse language shift #languages

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kingofthewilderwest · 7 years

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Voltron Paladins’ Native Languages

So, I’m not like 100% sold on the idea, but I guess it would make most sense that Earth has developed a full-blown universal translator by the time VLD events transpire? Not going to get into the linguistics of where universal translators are problematic, but it’s still the most plausible thing I think could be going on in Voltron.

The Galaxy Garrison is likely an international organization. Now, the global lingua franca (ex: English) could be the official language of the school, and the students they accept might have to pass language proficiency tests. That’s a possibility. But it’s sort of odd that all the Voltron characters have American English accents despite their diverse origins. The United States of course does have people of all backgrounds in the country, but I always felt that the writers were intentionally diversifying the Voltron characters to represent the world... and thus they’d actually be BORN in Cuba, BORN in Samoa, BORN in Japan, BORN in Italy. And yet not a single human has a hint of a non-native American English speaker accent on the Voltron team... not even an American dialect with stigmatized regional features can be heard.

Then there’s the talking-to-aliens aspect we need to consider. The Alteans are capable of visually modifying themselves to help interact with different species, but I don’t think that includes suddenly being able to speak other languages. Not to mention every species that the Voltron team meets can be immediately understood. How are they understanding the Galra or the Balmerans? A universal translator again, avoiding scientific problems of this device would be the trick.

It also explains why Pidge can understand anything Allura says but cannot read Altean. It explains why the only words that don’t translate from Coran or Allura are the words which have no direct translation. So. It could be the case that there’s something like a universal translator each Voltron character has that analyzes audio of a species and translates the audio to the Voltron characters. Why they’re always wearing it and why it’s not seen... uh... let’s not get into it.

But anyway! What’s so great about the universal translator idea is that it opens up a world of amusing speculations. There are all sorts of fun headcanon questions to answer like what languages are the Voltron team actually speaking?

My headcanons, more or less:

(I don’t like the idea of everyone having this much English exposure, but the language is currently a global lingua franca and is an L1 or L2 of 20% of the world’s current population. So I did have to rationalize the language into this).

Lance is a full-blown bilingual. He knows English and Spanish completely fluently, grew up speaking both languages, and prattles in both of them with ease. He’d be great at picking up more languages if he had the motivation to do so - he’s a natural!

When he’s hanging out with the Voltron crew, he’s usually speaking English because English was the accepted international language used in the Garrison’s written reports. So since he first meets Keith, Pidge, Lance, and Shiro at the Garrison, that’s the language Lance defaults on with them. Hearing Allura speak in something that sounds like a British dialect is going to subconsciously keep Lance using English too while they’re in space. But there are times he’s switching between both languages. He definitely speaks both around the crew.

Pidge is somewhat monolingual with decent exposure to several other languages. My emotional heart says that Pidge speaks only Italian I really don’t like the idea of the Voltron crew having a common language and I want that to be my headcanon, but I realize that’s not realistic at all.

She lives close to the Garrison, obvious in that she’s able to just hop in and break their security. Since the Holts live close to the Garrison, this means that the Garrison is either in Italy or she knows the local language where the Garrison is located. Between those two scenarios I’d say it’s more likely the Garrison is not in Italy... especially given as the news report for the Kerberos’ failed mission is in English. And I would imagine her father has been working with the Garrison for a while, so that disproves the idea of her growing up mostly in Italy and then moving close to the Garrison only within the last few years.

So Pidge knows Italian and whatever-local-language-is-around, and if the local language isn’t English, then also a decent amount of English. English would be useful for programming languages, after all! So she’s got no problem programming and reading in English. However, since her exposure to English is mostly text, she’s not competent at all in a conversation, either listening or speaking in English.

If my heartcanon for Pidge being a monolingual Italian speaker had made sense, then I’d love for there to be this moment that her universal translator glitches maybe the idea still slightly works if the Garrison isn’t in an English speaking nation. Suddenly she can’t understand anybody except for sort-of Lance when he speaks Spanish. The two languages are borderline mutually intelligible, after all. So Lance tries to help her out with Spanish while she’s speaking Italian, they’re somewhat making it halfway function (Lance’s slang is not helping), but she breathes this enormous sigh of relief when she gets the tech fixed.

Keith is monolingual. He knows American English and that’s it. Given as his father seems to speak in one of the Southern United States English dialects, I like to headcanon that little boy Keith lived in the South for about eight years and spoke a Southern dialect. Then he and his father moved northwest, Keith dropped that dialect through lack of exposure before adolescence, and picked up an Upper Midwestern American English accent in place (what we hear him speak on screen). Keith could still speak in a Southern accent if he wanted to, but no one’s ever heard him do it. And no one ever will.

Shiro is essentially monolingual. He’s only fluent in Japanese. He was taught Mandarin Chinese and English in school for many years, but despite being a good student, he was always bad at foreign language. The result is he’s highly limited in both. He’s more than alright reading Mandarin but not so good in conversation. Regarding English, Shiro can understand the language just fine when he hears it (since he’s heard it spoken enough), but he’s never been good at returning a response. If Shiro tries to talk in English, he’s got noticeably slow, broken, ungrammatical English and a reaaaally thick Japanese accent. He demonstrates his limited Chinese and English speaking abilities to the team at one time. They think it’s adorable.

Hunk knows Samoan. Again my heartcanon says it’s Samoan alone, but my head points out that Samoan + English makes sense (depending on where he grew up). Those are the two official languages in the country (with more L2 Samoan speakers than L1), and other Samoan populations are in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and Australia. So it’s just likely Hunk has been heavily exposed to both languages since he was young. But! That said... he’s terrible at English spelling. Downright terrible.

As for Allura and Coran... we don’t know anything about Altean languages and dialects outside of the few words Pidge hears in the training (the Alteans have clicks! woot!). My headcanon says that Allura and Coran don’t speak the same dialect (since the voice actors don’t speak the same English dialect) but they do speak the same language. Allura speaks the most sociolinguistically prestigious dialect of Altea. Coran’s dialect is noticeably different but doesn’t have too much negative sociolinguistic status to it. His speech sounds just as ridiculous to Allura as it does to the Paladins because he uses a lot of his regional slang.

So if everyone’s universal translators broke at once... Hunk, Lance, and and Keith would be able to converse just fine. Coran and Allura are able to talk to each other. Lance and Pidge could get some things to work if they speak slowly and avoid slang. With everyone else Pidge would be shrugging. And there’d be poor Shiro stuck, capable of communicating with absolutely no one beyond gestures, pained facial expressions, and the occasional grammatically incorrect English sentence.

And during the event of a Lion/Voltron fight with said translator glitch:

Shiro: Make... [forgets word for “sword” in English] ...stick???

Pidge: Che palle! Merda! Lance: Con esa boca comes? Keith: Wait, what are you saying? Lance: I didn’t catch it all, but I’m not translating! Hunk: Whoa. You saying Pidge has a potty mouth?

Keith: They’ve got the tactical advantage here. If we’re not careful, they’re going to outflank us. We’ve got to outmaneuver them before they outmaneuver us. Pidge: I don’t understand. Can you explain me in simple English? Lance: Explain me? No, no, Pidge, you mean “Explain to me.” Keith: Fewer grammar lessons, more fighting!

Shiro: Etou... robotto? Make-oo? Keith: What?!?!? Lance: Hey Shiro, we need that in English! Shiro: Ro... no... make-oo robotto. Lance: English! Shiro: Make-oo robotto! Pidge: That is his English! Hunk: What is he saying? Keith: “Make... robot?” Everyone else: Ohhhh! “Form Voltron!”

(P.S. I checked with a friend who speaks Italian for Pidge, and I speak a decent amount of Spanish, but I am only a native speaker of English so I apologize if I made mistakes!)

#non-dragons #vld #Voltron #long post #Voltron: Legendary Defender #Voltron Legendary Defender #analysis #my analysis #Paladins #the... creators haven't talked about this have they? right? I'm not out of the loop?#also I know there are several things that wouldn't work with the universal translator idea #even beyond the complexity of creating one #for instance #the sound effects wouldn't make much sense to be said the way they are if everyone's in their own language #a universal translator isn't going to translate onomatopoeia quite like that?#also the whole thing with Lance mistaking a repeated yup as language #and Slav recognizing what the problem is #an alien species with a totally different language and likely different manner of verbalizing #would not hear 'yup' the same way #BUT ANYWAY #......maybe I just need to write a drabble off of the universal translator glitch #since apparently it's already writing itself

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tr-swears · 7 years

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Indy ESL Observations

As most of you know, I moved to Indianapolis from a small town in Illinois. I was sort of a “big fish in a little pond”. I was definitely the only one I knew of that was interested in Linguistics and TESOL, and was definitely looked at differently because I wanted to travel and teach and meet people from all over the world.

In my old town, everyone is a monolingual speaker. Mostly, anyway. I studied Arabic for a bit in college, but lost most of it as a result of not using it.

Now that I am in Indy, it’s exactly the opposite. I am the only monolingual person. I am not fearful of this, but super excited to get a chance to really practice my language skills more than I ever did before. I have so many students from all over the place, and some that don’t speak a lick of English.

Teaching to people that have no experience in English is super difficult, but ultimately I am excited to see how they progress through the semester. I am hopeful that with my help, they will be able to get the basics down.

As for Indy itself, I have no idea how I feel about it yet. I’ve not done anything and don’t really know anyone here. So..that’s a whole new adventure too.

#personal #tesol #tesol jobs #indy #esl

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magistralucis · 7 years

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I don't know if you're the same person, but I think I came across your old DeviantArt account. The reason why I bring this up is because I found your translations of Till Lindemann's poems, and in them you mentioned that you were just a beginner when it came to the German language. As someone who is trying to learn German myself, I was wonder if you had any tips on how to learn the language. I'm finding it quite difficult to get the hang of. Again, please ignore this if I have the wrong person.

Hi, it’s the same anon who asked you advice about learning German. It’s a bit off topic from my last ask, but the reason why I want to learn is mostly due to becoming a huge fan of Rammstein. Mutter is my favorite album, it’s so good!

Hello anon. I am definitely the person you’re looking for. I was working on this message when I initially received it and it was beginning to get rather out of hand - then I received the second one, and so I’ll meld the two responses into one and cross my fingers and hope for the best!

I started learning German about six years ago, when I first got into R+ and Till’s poetry. The motivation you have is pretty much the same one I had (same favourite album too! High five) and this is how I went about it. Apart from the standard ‘take it slow and steady, practice often’ advice that applies to every language, I’ve also added some German-specific advice beneath the cut:

1. If you can attend a beginner’s class, try to attend at least a year’s worth, especially if German is your first attempted foreign language. If you’re not used to learning languages, this is probably the most helpful advice I can give, because languages are by definition social constructs and you need people to speak it to and keep it alive with; this is also the place where they’ll teach you the basics of grammar, enough for you to begin navigating textbooks and be able to pick out the advice that works for you.

This applies regardless of whether you want to learn ‘fully’ (in all capacities) or more ‘academically’ (reading + writing + information gathering prioritized) or if you literally want to be able to ‘speak’ it (listening + speaking prioritized). I may or may not be against the advice of langblr when I say this, but there is absolutely a limit to self-study, especially if you have no one else to talk in German with. I’d be hesitant to advise that going to classes for the entirety of your German learning will be helpful, because those things differ and there are very real concerns like money to consider, but they do make for an invaluable foundation.

2. If you are committed to self-studying for whatever reason, research your resources thoroughly. I’d recommend finding a textbook that works for you and sticking with it, because some grammar terms can and will differ across media. This isn’t a fix for knowing the correct grammatical terminology in all cases, because there are multiple ways to refer to a concept, but knowing what process is involved in what you’re referring to and being able to refer to it by a consistent name will help when you’re looking up resources elsewhere.

This is an example of what I mean: the ’Subjunctive II’ in German used to be called ‘past subjunctive’ as an interchangeable term, when in fact the Subjunctive II is a class of subjunctives that utilize simple past/imperfect, pluperfect, and conditional tense forms to form themselves - they are not merely subjunctives that are only meant to be used in past tense sentences, as the term ‘past subjunctive’ can imply. I mean, simple past/imperfect subjunctives are meant for unreal events taking place in the present or future.

Took me a while to wrap my head around that.

The books in my arsenal are Essential German Grammar by Martin Durrell, Katrin Kohl and Gudrun Loftus (very grammar-oriented and strict, but helpful), a verb conjugation book of the 500 most common German verbs (useful for reference), a German dictionary, a translation theory book (you won’t need this, necessarily, if your focus isn’t on translation), and some textbooks with translation segments in them. When I was going to classes, I used the Wilkommen! series of books by Paul Coggle and Heiner Schenke, and I have a GCSE German textbook from CGP Books for when I tutor German to younger students (because that’s also a thing I do, haha). I gathered all of this in the UK, so this list may or may not be helpful to you; but in the end, the language isn’t going anywhere, so some research will help you make the right choice.

3. Brush up on your grammar terminology. If the above Subjunctive II example induced in you a case of math_lady.jpg, the problem you’ll first run into isn’t a German problem - it’ll be a problem of what you understand of the grammar of your native language, or at the very least, the language your resources are written in. Even if you are a bilingual or residing in multilingual territory already (e.g. you are from somewhere like Canada where monolingualism isn’t standard, already know some foreign languages, etc.) it’s worth brushing up on the grammar. Terms such as ‘copula’, ‘adjective’, ‘preposition’, ‘gender-based inflection’, ‘accusative case’, ‘indirect object’, and ‘adverbials’ absolutely need to make sense to you in order for you to understand your resources.

I mean, I have to be honest. You don’t really need grammarspeak in order to be fluent in a language, because you also pick those things up via immersion; but if you are using textbooks and learning at a later stage of life, you are going to come across heavy use of grammar terminology at some point. And German grammar is painful, I won’t lie. When I tutored German from scratch, it took a full year just to get the fundamental grammar down. German is very logical, save for when there are exceptions - and there are always exceptions, thousands of them - and when the underlying structure of the language hasn’t begun to make sense yet. To my experience, you sort of break eventually and accept it. It’s, uh… always best to be prepared. If you’re adept in grammarspeak already you may ignore this section, save for the bit about German grammar being hard, because that is absolutely true.

4. Practice, practice, practice. I can’t stress this enough. I actually have no one method to recommend, because I had only a very specific goal in mind when I was first learning German: I was going to finish translating Messer. My practice involved translating German texts into English (not the reverse!), regardless of what they were, and listening to German music and radio. This will not work for everyone. What matters regardless of what you do is consistency - 10 mins every single day revising is far better than two hours of revision weekly. Don’t let the stigma of being a beginner get you down. You want to have a go at a German poem, but it’s too ambitious-seeming for you? You won’t know it unless you try. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. You will make a boatload of mistakes and embarrass yourself constantly, and this is a sign that your learning is going well - patience and tenacity is the key here.

5. Penpals and Tandem/speaking partners can be helpful. This may not be immediately applicable advice, because it can be intimidating for a beginner to write to or talk to native speakers, but once you reach a certain point in your studies it’s important for you to be acquainted to the way native speakers do things. It’s how you pick up slang and other quirks of the language, for one. Same for total immersion.

6. Don’t trust Till’s ‘r’ when it comes to the German ‘r’ sound. The strong rolled ‘r’ is a feature of sung German and has nothing to do with the rhotic, throaty ‘r’ of German and French. Please ignore this section if you’re already familiar with the rhotic ‘r’.

7. In fact, look up proper pronunciations for everything. Sung German is its own territory, and not the best thing to refer to when you’re learning Standard German. The two ‘ch’s especially - they’re their own sounds, not just e.g. ‘ich’ -> ‘ish’ and e.g. ‘ach’ -> ‘ack’. The former is closer to ‘i-hh’ sounded at the front of the mouth, while the other ‘ch’ is pronounced like the ‘ch’ of the Scottish ‘Loch’ (make ‘hh-’ sound with the back of your tongue touching or near to the soft palate). Again, please ignore if you have the pronunciation down pat already.

8. When you learn words, make sure that you learn the article that comes with them. ‘Das Mädchen’, ‘Der Tisch’, etc. It is absolutely more work, but if you are not acquainted to grammatical gender, knowing the appropriate ‘der/die/das’ that comes with a noun is extremely useful. There are three main grammatical genders in German - this may not be the case for you even if you already speak a gendered foreign language (like French - no neuter gender), so this is absolutely vital advice I plead with you not to ignore.

9. Don’t shy away from compound nouns. I unironically love this feature about German and have never had problems with it personally, but I know sometimes it can be intimidating to be faced with a huge string of words that pop out at you from nowhere.

I tend to break them down to their components to figure out what the singular word means, approaching them like a puzzle rather than a singular concept to just know firsthand: ‘Fallschirmspringen’ means ‘to parachute’, but its components literally boil down to ‘fall-umbrella-jumping’, for one; compound nouns are rather whimsical concepts, and also very literary, and I think there’s a real beauty in them! Take it slow and listen to what the compound noun is trying to tell you.

10. Verb conjugation tables are your friends. Especially for the strong verbs. I got nothing else to add to this.

11. Like in every other language, beware of false friends. These are words that look alike to those in your native language, but do not mean what you think they mean. ‘Also’ in German does not mean ‘also’ in English. (It’s closer in meaning to ‘so’ in English.) The German ‘bald’ means ‘soon’, while the English ‘bald’ is ‘kahl’ in German. ‘Kritik’ in German is referring to the act of criticism, not the ‘critic’. It is because of this that you must resist the temptation to do literal translations from English/[insert your native language here] to German, unless you know what you’re doing.

12. Read up on grammatical cases. German has four, which is one more than English, and the four cases are nigh universally called the nominative, accusative, dative, and the genitive. There are none of the ‘subjective/objective/possessive’ stuff that English uses, or worse, the ‘I-me-mine’ relation that doesn’t name anything helpful.

These four are also true grammatical cases, which means that full inflection of nouns, pronouns, and noun phrase elements (e.g. adjectives/numerals…) need to be learnt in German. At its extreme, this can mean learning up to 48 adjectival endings for each adjective - accounting for gender, number, case, and strong/weak/mixed endings. All because case inflection is a thing.I make that sound a lot more intimidating than it actually is, because said endings usually follow a pattern and sometimes don’t even change that often. Inflections are just things that you get used to. If cases are already your bread and butter because you’re familiar with a language with true cases, you can go ahead and ignore all of this; let us be thankful that German only has four. We could be… like… talking about Russian or something.

13. You are learning a new way of thought, not a new way to put words together. This is applicable to every language you might wish to learn. This is why you ought to look up words in both directions to verify the exact sense that you need, and why you can’t rely on [native language] -> [target language] translations forever in order to become familiar with the target language. The old way of thought will absolutely cling on and try to impede your progress; language learning is about unlearning this process as much as it is about learning new things.

I’m six years gone, and if you stuck me in Germany I’d still be stammering and blushing and nonfunctional. We don’t consider eight-year-olds who’ve grown up speaking a language all their life ‘fluent speakers’ of that language; it can be easily another eight years for you, too. You’re in for the very long haul, and that means you can take as much time as you need. Don’t be down if you don’t get it right soon enough, or if it’s taking a very long time.

14. [SHAMELESS SELF-PROMO] I also tutor German. Contact me if you wish clarification on certain things or if you feel that you may require actual tuition. [/SHAMELESS SELF-PROMO]

I don’t post so much about R+ anymore, but German remains a very strong and integral part of my life. I am glad that my attempts at contributing to the fandom have led you to the same interest I developed all those years ago. I hope that the advice above is helpful, but if it is not, I would love to hear feedback from you on what parts of German you are struggling with so I am able to give more specific advice. My inbox is open whenever you want to ask me questions; I wish you luck on your journey and would love to hear from you, wherever you may be in your pursuits!

#Anonymous #long post #reference #recommendations #german #advice #languages #rammstein #so long... i'm sorry... ugh

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sctlinguistics-blog · 6 years

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Sentence Processing Speeds for Ambiguous Readings

Abstract

The experiment will be done through the scope of an experiment hosted on a web page. The experiment will include a sample of three. I am one of the three participants and I am mostly a monolingual speaker that half speaks Japanese. The second person is a natural bilingual English/Spanish speaker. The third person doing this will an entirely monolingual speaker. We are reviewing the experimental conditions and how the self-paced reading tasks show how we parse structure. This experiment is going to read over preferred and dispreferred readings. This is measured through timing.

Sentence Processing Experiment

The self-reading tasks that have been administered were done through a word-by-word click. A phrase was given, and the participant would self-pace themselves for what was comfortable with their reading speed. The idea of the task is to see how good people are at disambiguating ambiguous words or sentences. We measure these processes through reading times. This is demonstrated by faster button clicking. Obviously, some issues may arise in this formatting such an overly confident reader clicking through much faster than someone as capable as reading fast but doesn’t necessarily trust themselves to be able to do so. This experiment can’t measure how fast a person processes these sentences and parses through them even if they are ambiguous. The sentences used as an example in their additional information section is A. “James knew that kids like Hannah because she enjoys playing with other children.”

B. “James knew that kids like Hannah enjoyed playing with other children.”

This sentence was selected to demonstrate how we process ambiguous words like, like. We see that in sentence A like is being used as a verb but in sentence B like is be used in the preposition slot. This slotting is a more common reading than sentence A according to a corpus database. This implies we will read sentence A slower than B because it takes us longer to process this sentence due to the nature of the word like. These results are successfully extrapolated for other sentences when comparing preferred and dispreferred readings. A dispreferred reading is the reading of a word and an interpretation or syntactic slotting that typically does not take place. The following figure on their own site shows how much faster we interpret preferred readings compared to dispreferred readings.

As you can see the reading speed for the preferred readings are done 40 milliseconds faster than the dispreferred readings. These results match my own experiences and my participants experiences with taking the sentence processing test.

My own results for preferred sentences was 10/12 as well as 10/12 for the dispreferred sentences. In my preferred readings the times I achieved for the “critical words” were 201.7, 200, and 208.8 milliseconds. In my dispreferred readings they were 208.8, 249.3, and 204.3 milliseconds. The self-paced reading times were sufficient for measuring this because it is able to show how long it takes for us to register the word at hand. While observing one of my participants for this exam I saw him slow down on the word like however, I never saw them slow down on a word like Hannah and I didn’t either. There is nothing ambiguous about the word Hannah. When we read ‘like’ we read it as a preposition, but there is still a potential for a verb interpretation. After the word Hannah the chart shows amb+1 and amb+2 and our expected reading times for these. Despite the words lacking ambiguity after Hannah the reading times are still markedly different. This didn’t show true for me on the third word but showed true on the other words. As for the other participants it did show true. It shows if we use an unfamiliar slotting of a familiar word it will take us longer to process the words within the area of ambiguity. Our reading times are faster in the preferred reading section.

When us, the readers, see the word like we began to analyze it as a prepositional phrase first because that’s most of the usage. As we continue reading the sentence we need to slow down and reanalyze the word like. We made the initial interpretation of the word as a preposition and when given new information to show that it is being used as a verb we begin to slow down. We recontextualized the word. That’s why the preferred readings have faster button clicks in the sentences generally speaking.

#linguistics psycholinguistics ling sentenceprocessing brainfunctions prepositions

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rigelmejo · 4 years

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Some real dumb phrases I want to remember lol:

你觉得这个怎么样？what do you think about this? (You can replace 这个 with something, another common version might be 你觉得想法怎么样？ - what do you think of it/what do you think of this idea?, or 你觉得怎么样？- what’d you think/how’d you like it).

我希望你干我。I want you to fuck me (cause why not know how to say that lol). Also. 干他，and related variations mean something similar to “do him/her/me/you.” I learned this phrase from a weilan au derivate fan video so take it with a grain of salt, but it seemed to mean both “do him” like do him in/take care of him (beat him up/kill him/shut him up kind of nuance), or fuck him (which “do” also means in English sometimes lol). Since I’ve mostly seen it used sexually, I’m not sure if itd be really awkward to say about someone you hate and want to get rid of...

Semi related note: I use Baidu Translate as one of the main translation apps on my phone, and it’s really good for phrases/sentences (whereas google translate never gives detailed translations and alternate definitions, and pleco doesn’t do sentences and sometimes doesn’t do slang). I also like Baidu translate because I can speak the phrase to it, and I think it’s a bit better at interpreting than google translate. Baidu Translate also provides pinyin, characters, audio of what you’re translating (so if you pronounced it wrong, you can hear a correct pronunciation to correct yourself), and it provides both English definitions and chinese-chinese definitions at the bottom (if you’re trying to eventually switch to monolingually engaging with the language that might be a feature you like, I like that it usually gives me synonyms). I am guessing the app is primarily for chinese speakers, since it has other website features in chinese. But the translation part is fully usable in English and it’s my favorite phrase/sentence translator. The website version of Baidu translate also has a really cool feature where you can put in a website url and it will translate the entire website (in many languages, but I like using it to translate English to chinese, and chinese to English). Let’s say... you are reading a whole Chinese webpage and want an English version to reference, then then this feature helps a lot. I think it’s translations of full webpages are a bit better than Google translate’s.

#rant #phrases #vocabulary

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ptxpat · 7 years

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Peace, Love, and Comprehension

Whenever a train or bus or tram is delayed here, the announcement always ends with, Danke für Ihr verständnis. “Thank you for your understanding,” or so I thought. Google says it’s, “Thank you for your comprehension.”

The verb “to understand” is verstehen, and I frequently employ the phrase Ich verstehe nicht when I don’t comprehend what’s being said. I had a moment of panic recently that perhaps I’ve been using this incorrectly all along and I’m actually saying, “I am not at all amendable to what you’re telling me.” Understanding or comprehension or both or either?

In English, when we say, “Thanks for understanding,” we almost always mean the former: patience, flexibility, tolerance. But couldn’t it also mean the latter? Thank you for catching my meaning.

Increasingly, I associate this phrase with such gratitude for—and also disbelief at—others’ ability to make sense of what I’m saying: Thank you for understanding [my broken German. I don’t know how you did that!]. Or else gratitude that they speak enough English that we don’t have to suffer through my attempts at German: Thank you for understanding [that we are both gonna have an easier time with your English than my German].

Sometimes English isn’t an option at all, as with our current garage door repair. I think the repairman knows a few words. Sometimes I will drop in some English to see if it makes my mess of an explanation or question any clearer. Usually not. (That’s some wishful thinking, that supplementing a language I speak poorly with a language he doesn’t speak at all would in any way improve our mutual understanding.) He did know the English word for hand, and was able to mime what we’d need to do to the door with said hand until the door was repaired. For the time being, the defect was addressed with a crowbar and some wire cutters. A little less conversation, a lot more brute force. Whatever works.

Neither is speaking English a foolproof solution, though. I’ve been seeing a dermatologist to ensure my fair freckly skin isn’t going rogue on me, and she speaks enough English that we get by with only the occasional German equivalencies. She put me on an antibiotic, though between breastfeeding considerations and my penicillin sensitivity, the options were limited. When I went back to see her last week, she wanted to prescribe a topical antibiotic, so the process of elimination began yet again, finding something that was nursing-compatible but wouldn’t turn me into six feet of hives. “You’re pregnant,” she said. A statement. And coming from a doctor. My first thought was, “Oh, shit. I am?!?” And then I realized she either misremembered the specific details of my situation (nursing, not gestating) or else she hadn’t caught that nuance in the first place. Whatever the reason for the miscommunication, it impressed upon me how much I take for granted that non-native English speakers are understanding what *I* am saying. When the tables are turned and I am the non-native speaker, lord knows I do a lot of smiling and nodding and very little comprehending at all. I probably tell people they are pregnant all the time.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from Mira’s daycare madly typing phrases into my phone, trying to figure out what the hell I said back there (wenn in when but wer is who and wo is where) and translating what was said to me. Details, questions, information, instructions about my child, whose fragile little life rests in my uncomprehending care. I’m frantic, thinking I’ve missed so much meaning in these conversations about her.

A dear friend, an Australian, told me that when she and her husband moved to Zurich a decade ago and her kids were 5 and 8 years old, she made a promise to herself that she would never make them responsible for her communication. It’s one she has largely kept, and one I’d love to make to myself and to Mira as well.

In no time at all, Mira will be speaking English and Swiss German and High German with ease, while I am still struggling along in my current state: playing charades with handymen, Google translating every email that comes home from Kinderkrippe, MacGyvering my way through conversations.

What method of language learning is going to succeed where three courses with Berlitz and one with Swissing, hours on Duolingo, and almost four and a half years of real-life practice–including surgery, home-buying, and having a baby–have failed? And where might we find the time for another class or tutor or brain transplant? Maybe we have a few hours a week lurking in the cellar behind the cat carrier.

I have no solutions as of yet–do you?–only the time-tested, most potent motivator there is: pure fear. Fear that I’ll keep missing treasured details about Mira’s time at daycare, or information critical to her care, that I’ll break that promise and make Mira our intermediary after all, that she’ll resent us and our dunderheaded monolinguism.

Thing is… nobody in Zurich wants to speak High German anyway. It’s taught in schools and widely read but many adults will tell you they’d rather speak English than High German. One joke I often get when I say Mein Deutsch ist so schlecht (My German is so bad): Mein auch. (Mine, too.) I refer you to a former blog post for more on High German’s peculiar place in Swiss society.

I wish I had an answer. But if I’m wishing for things, I might as well wish for my younger brain’s ability to soak up languages so that I could be conversant in both German and Swiss German. And while I am at it, how about world peace and nice legs?

I kid. Mostly.

I’ve heard from parents with native-born children that their own language-learning accelerated dramatically once their children started speaking. How tidy, if this problem I fear the most–having a child that can speak the local tongue while I cannot–is itself a solution. In addition to teaching Mira how to feed herself, how to pull up and eventually walk and pet the cat gently and wave, we will also work on the abstract concept of leniency, that she will learn to forgive our many shortcomings (linguistic and otherwise).

In that future that I fear, the one where I am still saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t comprehend,” she’ll pat me on my back and say, “It’s okay, I understand.”

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rigelmejo · 4 years

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i really do mean this, if you’re a native english speaker and you’re the type to try being a polyglot, or you just would like to learn multiple languages, and ESPECIALLY if French is a language you want to learn:

it really IS one of the easier ‘commonly studied’ languages for a native english speaker to learn. (Theoretically, Spanish is too, so you may consider that instead if it’s the language you really want to learn).

A couple years ago, I took a french class in college. I took it because in high school I’d tried to take classes and/or study the following languages independently: Spanish (1 class, learned nothing), German (2 years of classes, learned some verbs and standard conjugations, basically learned A1 kind of stuff), Chinese (1 year learning the basics and the teacher was great but I promptly forgot almost all of it), Japanese (independent study, I learned the kana and some simple words). I basically learned nothing significant - not enough to USE any of the languages in the ways I wanted to even minimally use them. I figured I was bad at learning languages.

So in college, I picked a french class to explore 2 things: 1. To see if I could even learn a language at all, by trying again with a new language I had absolutely zero experience with. 2. Because I liked the idea of studying languages, and wanted to see if I got to choose to study it on purpose if I’d do better (compared to many college classes I was required to take and hated, compared to language classes being required therefore ‘disliked’ by me in high school).

So mainly, I picked French because I had no experience studying it and thought it would be a good test of if I could learn anything substantial. I had some reasons for learning French, but none really motivated me: I figured since I live by Canada French might be useful, I figured if I ever work for the UN I could use French as one of my languages for it. So basically, the usual ‘not passionate’ reasons.

Now I do actually think passion helped me to actually learn French. So I encourage you, whatever language you are studying, to find something in that language or to do with that language that drives you and makes you passionately CARE. For me, I found a couple books. I was in a thrift store, and found 2 French graded readers from the 1930s. One was a French history book, and I found it fascinating that it was how French people from the 1930s viewed their culture and history. The other book contained letters from a 19 year old french schoolteacher as her life was more and more effected by world war 2 ramping up and then eventually occurring and changing her life. I am very interested in history, and I am even MORE personally interested in how specific people view their positions within their own perspectives. Because every person’s perspective is different - how a French person from the 1930s views their country is different than how a French person in 2020 probably would, and how we see WW2 is very different than that 19 year old woman in France in the 1930s saw it starting in her own world.

She wrote that she was shocked and impressed America had elected its first congresswoman, when in France women had no voting rights yet - and those small lines changed my whole view of what her life must’ve been like! Along with just... the idea this girl younger than me, a 19 year old, was a teacher of a classroom writing to another girl teacher at University of Michigan! For some people these details might be boring, but to me they reveal so much about what life might have been seen as back then, in those places in those perspectives. Those books are what made me WANT to learn french, CARE about learning French, get MOTIVATED to learn. For me, wanting to read French perspectives in their own language, directly from the source, is what made me care about French. I definitely think if you are studying a language (or probably anything), you will have an easier time if you can find something to care about and motivate you to study and improve. As a bonus, this interest driving your passion can help you come up with tangible actual goals you wish to accomplish.

For example, the goal of ‘I want to be fluent in French/German/whatever’ is fine. But how do you test that? With a CEFR test? I hope so, or something like that, or else you might struggle to come up with a real goal to aim toward. If you’re learning for a test, like a certificate that will allow you to work in a certain country - well that’s a real goal to envision and that you can plan for, and that goal can motivate you. But if it’s just ‘learn to C1 level fluency’ but you don’t ever plan anything measurable or tangible, how will you know you’re making progress? Get specific. If your goal is ‘fluency’ and it’s not for a test/certificate, then what do you want to DO with fluency? Talk to native speakers? Read books? Write articles in the language for a company? Translate? Travel to a location and speak with the locals about their city and culture? Decide. Decide what you want to do with that language. That’s where you’ll find your passion. That’s also where you’ll be able to figure out what real goals you’re aiming for.

For me, the real goal was “I want to read these books.” That allowed me to realize I needed plans to improve my reading ability - plans to learn words, study grammar, learn the most common words, etc. And allowed me to study according to my needs for my goals. I really suggest finding your passion, then making goals and study plans from there.

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Okay, back to: why French is a good language to try learning, if you planned to study it anyway, and aren’t sure how to learn a language (at least in my experience).

French REALLY IS a ton like english. I can’t stress that enough. It has a huge number of cognates and that’s really the biggest reason French is approachable. So many words, at least written, look so similar to english you can guess them. The grammar is a bit different, but it is generally pretty regular so if you study it then it will be manageable. The grammar is also, while a bit different, very understandable from an english native perspective. Even when it’s different, it usually makes sense to a native english speaker. And - in reverse - if you speak French and mess up and use English grammar patterns instead of the correct french ones, often you’ll still at least be understood. The pronunciation is also quite regular and once you get used to it, sounding out new words is pretty easy (I had to learn some Russian at one point in my life and... French pronunciation/listening is such a cakewalk compared to Russian...)

When studying a language, you need a study plan. If its your first time making one, you’ll likely run into a lot of suggestions on the ‘best approach’ and a lot of different methods you can use. Look into them, try them out, and when you find what works for you, be CONSISTENT and stick with it. French is a nice language to do this experimenting on study approaches, because improvement is generally quite rapid when you find an approach that works for you. (Compared to a language very different from English - for example, it took me 2-3 months to start reading French articles online and French books and at least comprehending short sentences and skimming for some main points in simple texts like news articles/informational books. Japanese, it took me 6 months to be able to look at titles and short tweets and do the same thing, and 1 year to be able to look at simple comics aimed for preteens-teens and be able to skim those comics for main ideas - I still can’t approach an actual news article in japanese!). So a language like French, or anything more similar to English, is going to allow you to see if your study plan is working FASTER. Especially if it’s your first time trying to learn a language.

I have found, that a lot of the techniques I use to study Japanese and Chinese, I actually used successfully with French first. So now, even though my progress is much slower when I use them for Japanese and Chinese, I already know that I DO know how to do those study approaches and I DO know they give me progress over time.

One technique is to ‘switch to monolingual engagement with a language as soon as possible.’ With Japanese or Chinese, as you can imagine, it takes longer to attempt to do this because learning to read in these languages is difficult. With French? What I had to do to make this leap was: learn basic past/present/future tense (just look up “French Grammar Guide” on google and read a free one), look up a 500 most common word list (also easy to find on google), study those for a few months. Once I did that, I could start reading French materials and just occasionally looking up new words that kept appearing and confusing me. At that point, I still occasionally relied on bilingual dictionaries and grammar books. So at about month 6, I looked up French grammar guides IN FRENCH. Then I just started reading them, and that’s how I learned a lot of my more advanced grammar in French. At that point, I just continued reading french/watching french, studying French grammar in French. I still occassionally use bilingual word lookups for frustrating new unfamiliar words, but mostly I’m so lazy I prefer to guess the meaning from the context of the sentences. And if I wanted to, I know enough words to just switch to a monolingual dictionary. After about 1 year, I got comfortable enough that I can navigate french sites, french wikipedia, french books, relatively fine. I’ve had my Google account set to French since probably month 3, and so all my computers and devices always give french sites/results first, french wikipedia, french definitions, so I just got more comfortable with french over time. If I had to compare it to my english, my French now at about 2 years (only the first year actively ‘studying’ in the sense of reading vocab lists and grammar guides), is a reading level around where I was at age 12-13. Enough that I can pick up whatever and read it, its just that more complicated reading material may be a bit of a slog (like adult level fictional novels). I started practicing from month 2-3 with instructive non-fiction books, so my reading level for history books and linguistic/science books in French is a bit higher. Basically, it took me 2 years to get to where I wanted to be in French (which is incredible to me!). And when I did it, part of my study plan ended up resembling the method of ‘switching to monolingual engagement of the language’ quite a lot. My experience studying french showed me that, yes, it does work. And its very helpful for me as a study method, since I learn most happily when learning from monolingual context in the media I’m consuming.

I am well aware of where I fall short in French - listening (and pronunciation as a result of that), and writing. I can write, but the active vocabulary I can recall is very low since I haven’t spoken/written in a while and it takes a few hours of me ‘warming up’ to remember how to say the words I can read. I can write, but the grammar I can write is much WORSE than what I can read, since I didn’t do grammar drills and NEED TO eventually when improving my writing becomes a goal. Reading was always the goal, so reading is the main thing I studied for. I can text/write with french speakers, but I’m not grammatically smooth. My listening is weak, because again - I rarely practiced, it was not a goal of mine. I didn’t care about French videos or audio content, or speaking to french speakers. If that’s a goal I desire, I’ll study for it and work on those areas.

If using any kinds of study methods, I do think French is similar enough to English, that you will notice in a reasonable amount of time if your method is working for you and giving you progress. If it is, be consistent. There’s good weeks, and bad weeks where you’ll feel lost and incompetent.

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When studying Japanese I noticed, on a much longer timeline, similar progress being made from similar methods I used. Japanese had some unique challenges for me - the biggest simply being that I have to work harder to memorize new words since they’re not cognates to english like much of French’s vocabulary is. But my methods do work for me. So if you plan to study multiple languages, from my experience... French is definitely a good ‘testing waters.’

I had to crash learn some Russian to talk to some Russian people in my life for a while, and read Russian texts etc. And the study methods and goal setting skills I picked up when studying French helped me with that too.

My basic plan was:

1. Figure out your specific goals, plan accordingly. If you don’t care about learning certain areas within speaking, listening, reading, writing - then don’t make them the priority. If you do consider some or all of these areas priorities, then make specific plans for studying each area. 2. My goals have generally always included being able to read. So the following has always helped greatly:

look up the 300-1000 most common words in the language. These are the most important vocabulary to focus on learning first. The tumblr 300 word list, and the 625 word list floating around online, are my favorite starting places. Some nice lists on Memrise of common words are also good starting places. I can learn other additional words I look up, but these common words will help me improve fastest so they’re my priority.

look up “Language X Grammar Guide.” There are free ones for pretty much any language. Find one for the language I’m studying, and focus on the basic grammar points first - specifically verb and adjective conjugations, particles if the language has any (or that thing Russian has going on etc), genders, and simple ways the language does past/present/future tense. Basically, try to read the basic grammar points first, then also skim or read over more complicated grammar points as desired just to get an overview of things I’ll eventually want to notice later. My goal here is to get used to the patterns of the language, so when I look at sentences FULL of unknown words, I can at least try to identify which words are verbs/adjectives/nouns and other kinds of words that help explain what’s going on (like/the/and/or/for/to/with/’s). The quicker I can recognize at least the basics of what’s going on in sentences, the quicker I can figure out where words end in languages with no spaces between words. The quicker I can figure out which words are vital to the understanding of some sentences (if you know which words are nouns, and are reading News, then locating verbs helps next - to figure out whats Happening to the nouns). Knowing all this helps me prioritize which words I’ll NEED to look up when I’m trying to understand native content without me looking up every single word. Also, if writing/speaking is one of my goals, it helps me quickly learn some BASIC ways to express myself (simple past/present/future tense so I can communicate any idea basically with the help of a dictionary if i need to use a new word).

After that, make engaging with native content regularly a priority. If I want to learn to read, then make myself try to read native content as practice, and use graded readers as stepping stones etc. If listening is a priority, engage with listening materials regularly (and shadow what I hear, if I want to practice pronunciation). Basically - whatever your eventual usage goal is, regularly attempt to do it NOW (even though you aren’t fully capable yet). You will learn a little more each time, and improve specifically in that area you’re aiming to be able to eventually do. And you will have a nice gauge on your progress and what areas you’re falling short and need to adjust your study plan for. With French - from months 2-3 I started reading native content. It was a SLOG to read news articles and wikipedia. Eventually that was okay, but it was still a SLOG to read my own graded readers! Eventually I got decent, but it was still a SLOG to read french fanfictions! Eventually, that got decent, but it was still a SLOG to read french fiction novels for adults. Etc. I improved, but I didn’t start out perfectly able to do it - and I didn’t WAIT until I could do it, to start TRYING to do it. A lot of my improvement in reading... came from me practicing reading, looking up words over time until I learned them, until I got good enough to learn words from context, and still SLOGGING. But I wanted to read, so I kept trying to do it. I improved. It works that way with listening too, etc.

Finally, figure out what areas are not progressing toward my goal, and come up with additional study plans for those specific areas. If I need more grammar help or to do writing drills to improve my writing, maybe I need a textbook. If I want to speak to native speakers, maybe I need to find a group/people to speak to. If my listening comprehension is atrocious but its a GOAL, maybe I need to add listening study materials like podcasts/audio lessons/LISTEN to all new words when I look them up and add audio to my study flashcards. If I need to learn more words, maybe its time for me to update the vocabulary lists I’m using, maybe use SRS flashcards, Memrise, etc.

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A lot of that study plan I came up with for French, I ended up using when I started learning Chinese. And overall, it’s been a huge help. It’s still mostly what I stuck to. Hanzi and lack of cognates, mean that I do a lot more vocabulary flashcard grinding in the ‘knowing absolutely zero words’ stage. But the overall study plan is the same.

One thing I DID start doing for chinese, that I didn’t do before for other languages, was LISTENING from day one. I listened to Chinese shows, chinese youtube videos, chinese songs, and when I looked up most new words I looked up audio too. It wasn’t a goal for French so I don’t care too much that I never did it. But I can definitely say it helped me learn Chinese a lot EASIER than if I wasn’t doing it. I have a much better sense of listening to chinese and guessing the spelling, than I do for French. I have a much better ability to hear a word, and recognize it later when reading. Vice versa, in Chinese I’m much better at only reading a word and guessing its pronunciation based on pinyin, and it being close enough that when i HEAR a new word later I recognize it as one I’ve already read. These are simple skills but they’re super underdeveloped in my French - I struggle to do all these things in French. Now, my Chinese tone production is kind of shit - mostly because I need to do more tone drills, need to practice FULL SENTENCES more. But at least I can listen/read and link those two things in my head, and recognize them. I am certain it’s because I actively listened to Chinese from day 1 of learning, and kept doing so.

I also think, at least with chinese, the chinese subtitles that chinese content tends to have is immensely helpful. Seeing chinese subtitles especially in the early stages of study, helped me link the new sounds and words to the characters. And since I studied a grammar guide early on, seeing the chinese subtitles helps me make out the separation of words I hear, and helps me figure out which words I’m hearing are adjectives/nouns/verbs/grammar constructions etc. And, because I’m lazy, I’ll say that the DUAL english/chinese subtitles also helped me a fair bit. Again, because they helped me link the chinese sounds to the characters to the english words. When I knew no words, to even now that I know 1000+ solidly, they help me to learn new words constantly. In the very beginning, they helped a lot with me learning words/phrases that mean a few different things/have different nuance than in english. Like ‘ba le’ ‘suan le’ ‘xiang’ ‘kankan’ ‘meishi’ ‘meiguanshi’ ‘danxin’ ‘ni fangxin’ ‘bubi’ ‘xiaoxin’ ‘xing le’ ‘mingbai’ ‘dong’... just, so many super common words that have a few different english translations depending on the context of a situation and the translator’s choices.

If I go back to French and try to improve my listening comprehension, I’ll definitely be doing all these methods with French.

#rant #language learning

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rigelmejo · 4 years

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Yet another article from Learn Chinese the Hard Way that I really appreciate: How Long Does it Take to Learn Chinese

Their article first summarizes what they’d consider as successfully having “learned” chinese - a summary I pretty much agree with. I think if a person is aiming for being able to use the language overall in most contexts and aiming to be able to rely on only monolingual dictionaries/explanations for things they don’t fully comprehend/need to improve, then yes this article’s definition of what it means to “learn” chinese is pretty spot on.

The article goes onto say that: “Based on my own personal experience, and also on that of others I know (or know of) who have reached that level, I would say that if you are able to devote yourself full-time or almost full-time to your Chinese language studies, and if you work hard and have a good study methodology, then you are probably looking at around 2-3 years to reach this point. If you are unable to commit to full-time study, or if you go at a slower pace, then maybe it will take 4-5 years. If Chinese is just a casual hobby, and you only study on and off, you might not reach that level even after 10 years.”

I’d say, that for me as a native english speaker, that this estimate of how long it will take is pretty spot on. I’ve been studying somewhere between intensively and part time, depending on how busy the rest of my life is at any time. It’s taken me just under a year to reach the beginning of HSK 4 level sort of stuff. This is the level where I am just starting to be able to dive into comprehending reasonably general-topic focused shows, and lower level writing - like graded readers, some light web novels, comics. So I would estimate that into the future, yes I think it would be realistic that it’ll be between another 2-4 years before I can read more adult-level reading material I would like to read, and also around that long before I can start watching more specialized topics shows or shows without chinese subtitles and actually pick up on more than the gist.

I think 2 more years, if I’m intensively studying the whole time, is a reasonable estimate. I got into HSK 4 material in a year, so getting to HSK 6 in another year would be intense but probably doable. Then another intensive year to work past that. Or 4 more years, if I’m going at a consistent but less intense pace. 4-5 more years is what I personally estimated for myself to eventually be able to do what I’d like in the language mostly comfortably.

And 4-5 years, really not that bad. I’d say, as long as you’re consistently studying (so no dropping your studies for several months at a time), then it’s probably okay even if you’re only studying a few days a week/moderately. You’ll still eventually hit your goals, even if it takes closer to 6-10 years. The only real thing to avoid, is dabbling then dropping your studies, and repeatedly doing that. If you do that... then yeah, after 10 years you STILL might not be where you want to be.

In short, I think 5 years is a very fair estimate. If you are setting out to learn chinese, and studying consistently each week, then 5 years is a good timeline to aim for.

(And if you accomplish your goals in 3 years? Let me know how you did it! That’s amazing!)

(My ONLY hope about a timeline like that... is that if I ever go back to japanese, that it only takes me 3 more years of studying it to get to reading/listening what I want to. Last time I studied japanese, I studied for 2.5 years then had to take a break. I was very much in the beginner stage, probably around N4 level in terms of what I knew/could do in the language, learning some N3 level stuff. Toward the end I had a MUCH better study plan that was causing much faster improvement. So if I ever go back to studying japanese, I plan to pick up that study plan again and see how far it gets me. A very small upside to learning chinese has been that my japanese reading ability has improved somewhat as a side effect. So hopefully if I do ever go back to studying japanese, that benefit will be of some use.)

#article #chinese the hard way #timeline #studyblr #i generally think even at 5 yrs i'll be using a dictionary #but i do think hopefully i'll be able to skim without one decently by then #anyway i liked this article #cause like i mentioned earlier this week #i saw a LOT of language learners on forums lately #who kept implying chinese/japanese #take either 24 immersion #or else take 10+ years to learn #and i felt both extremes were... a tad out of touch from reality tbh...

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