Learning Cantonese - part II.

I first started listening to Cantonese advanced podcasts, because I thought that since I wanted to listen to the sound of the language and get used to its flow first, any spoken Cantonese would do. It turned out that the knowledge of Mandarin and Classical Chinese would be way too helpful in order to just learn Cantonese as a completely new language and so I switched to newbie and elementary lessons, where I could get into some structure as well. 

I did not try to find out how many tones there were in Cantonese or what their description was. It was really relaxing to say the least. No stress from trying to reproduce the tonal curve I saw in the book, no stress from trying to “mimic a picture”, no stress from trying to reproduce the correct sound pitch and so on. I also didn't have to subconsciously solve problems like: Is the tone high enough? Doesn't it sound strange when I say it like this? How many tones are below this tone I just said? Is this tone different enough from that other tone starting at the same pitch? So many questions every student has to face just trying to produce a simple “Hello” in Cantonese, when he or she learns the tones through descriptions. Now what I mean by feeling no stress is that of course no one is expecting me to get the pronunciation right the first time and naturally I will do mistakes, but the point I'm trying to make is that this way I have much less stress when it comes to the number of things I have to worry about while trying to say one or two simple words. The main difference is that I am concentrating only on the sound. 

Studying Mandarin - part III.

What I think helped me, when it comes to learning Mandarin:

Speaking:

Moving to Taiwan, spending as much time with Taiwanese as possible, memorizing everything I found useful exactly the way Taiwanese said it, asking them to correct my pronunciation whenever possible. I wasn't writing down words or constructions that I found useful. The number of expressions was just too big and so I figured, if the expression would be important for me at the time, it would stick in my brain, if not it'll stick there once it becomes important. As far as pronunciation goes, this is one thing I kept and keep trying to work on almost every day as there are sounds that I still don't get right (j-,zh-,sh-,ch-,ri,-a,-i,b,p,) 

Pronunciation of Mandarin is a big issue really. It’s not only that producing the correct sounds takes a lot of practice, but recalling the correct sounds and recognizing them in fluent speech effortlessly takes a lot of time and is very tiring.

Studying Mandarin - part II.

One of the few things that I am sure of until now, when it comes to learning Chinese is that you should not memorize characters before you've learned how to use the relevant word confidently in real life speech (in other words learn the word without knowing how to write it) and definitely not learn 10000+ characters like a maniac through an SRS system in the beginner/intermediate stage. (Actually even later. I found out that even though I could recall a relatively large amount of words, in real life speech it was very very tiring to use them because I had to recall the correct syllable and tone 3-4 times in every sentence which was devastating and the words didn’t “stick” as well as some of the other words that I learned in natural conversation without the SRS stress). In my opinion it is a complete loss of time and energy. My reasons are that character images are being stored in a completely different part of the brain, there is too much interference between the characters themselves and you will just become overwhelmed with the information as a beginner. Some might argue that this way one can remember the word much better but in my case whenever I thought of a word I had first the character pop up in my mind and not the sound which is insane time loss in real time speech. At the beginning of my learning process I used to color characters in 4 colors according to their tones which is good aid in remembering which tone the syllable actually has but not an aid in remembering the sound itself, which is again terrible time loss and interference, as the sound is much more important than the image. I realized that whenever I wanted to say a word I had the color pop up instead of hearing the correct sound with the correct tone in my head. I realized this way too late and lost too much time, energy and nerves. Goes without saying that the tones should not be learned in isolation and instead should be understood as a permanent component of a syllable and the same syllables in different tones should be considered as completely different sound units and not grouped and learned together. 

Learning Cantonese - part I.

As every good language lover I also have a wish list of languages that I would love to speak one day but sadly as life is short most of these wishes only remain wishes. Cantonese was also one of those languages I wanted to study for a long time but since I had no friends from Hong Kong (or the area) or plans to live there any time soon, it remained only a wish for a possible future date. Last year in November I visited Hong Kong for 10 days and I had so much fun there and the Cantonese language sounded so good that I decided that I really wanted to study the language the first chance I get.

I personally don’t think it is a very good idea to study more than one language at the same time and I also don’t think it is a good idea to try and learn as many languages as one can in the shortest possible time, because in my opinion language learning should not be viewed upon as a sport or a competition so as I study Farsi at the moment, to study a little bit of Cantonese as well would be against my own philosophy. But then again I also think that interest and motivation are extremely important so a bit of Cantonese can do no harm. I only decided to dab a little with the sound system of the language anyway. The only resource that I am using right now is the new cantoneseclass101 podcast. There are currently not that many newbie and beginner lessons available, but it will do fine for now.

Jazz fusion

Back in 1996 my guitar teacher gave me a tape recording of the 1982 Friday night in San Francisco concert by Paco de Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola. I knew little about guitar music and was very lucky to be introduced to these three composers so early on. They had a great impact on me as a music listener and occasional player. Although I am far from being a professional, guitar playing and improvisation alone or in duets is a great source of joy for me. After being introduced to these composers I listened to a lot of works from all three of them and gradually got to know more and more music outside of my traditional musical library, which back then consisted mostly of hip hop (which is not a bad thing either).

Since there is a great number of jazz fusion artists and since some of the readers maybe have never listened to Jazz fusion, I will try to introduce some of the players that I have been listening to over the years and the kind reader has to rely on my musical taste which he/she of course may or may not like. I am not an expert on jazz fusion or music in general, but I do like to listen to beautiful musical melodies and nice harmonies that have deeper ideas and I hope that some readers who don't know jazz fusion or have never heard of Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia or John McLaughlin might come to love their music just as I did.

Language learning resources

Chinese (Cantonese):

Voice of America Cantonese service podcast. Two hour daily news service.:

http://www.voacantonese.com/podcast/?count=20&zoneId=2067

A nice podcast to learn Cantonese:
http://www.cantoneseclass101.com/wp/wp-feed-audio-video.php

Chinese (Mandarin):

NHK Japan Mandarin News service podcast, updated several times per day. Very professional: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/chinese.xml

Chinesepod.com podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinesepod/TfVV

Radio Taiwan international. News podcast, uptated 2-3 times a week:
http://mediafile.rti.org.tw:8080/podcast/PodCasting/rti_taiwanview.aspx

Australian SBS radio Mandarin service podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiomandarin

United nations radio Mandarin Chinese news podcast.:
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/chinese/index.php?feed=itunes

Voice of America Chinese service podcast. Two hour daily news service.:
http://www.voachinese.com/podcast/?count=20&zoneId=2966

Thesaurus linguae sericae
A huge on-line archive of Classical Chinese texts, Classical Chinese text analyses, translations, Classical Chinese dictionary, thesaurus ect.

Chinese text project
Another huge database of Classical Chinese texts with a possibility to search in multiple Chinese dictionaries (說文解字, 康熙字典, 爾雅, 廣韻 ect.)

Chinese etymology
Oracle bone script, Bronze inscriptions, Seal script database.

Czech:

Czech national radio podcast:

Website:

http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/iradio/?defaultNavigation=+generic2:^%22%C4%8CRo+1+-+Radio%C5%BEurn%C3%A1l%22$

Podcast link:

http://www2.rozhlas.cz/podcast/cro1.rss

Dutch:

Dutch news podcast. Daily news in Dutch.:
http://download.omroep.nl/rnw/smac/podcast/xml/nl_nieuwslijn.xml

 

French:

Radio l'Europe 1 News podcast, updated daily:
http://www.europe1.fr/podcasts/actu.xml

Very nice interviews on a vast variety of topics. Radio l'Europe podcast:
http://www.europe1.fr/podcasts/interview-8h20.xml

Farsi:

News in Persian from NHK Japan, updated several times per day. NHK Japan Persian news service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/persian.xml

Australian SBS radio Persian service podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/persianfarsi

BBC Persian, one hour long newscast updated daily:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/jjn/rss.xml

German:

ZDF news podcast, updated daily:
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/podcast/222736?view=podcast

WDR podcast. Interviews usually concerning German, European and World politics:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/redezeit.xml

WDR podcast. A wonderful podcast about popular science:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/leonardo.xml

WDR podcast. Round table political talk shows:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/presseclubwdr5.xml

Hungarian:

Hungarian political talk show podcast, updated daily:
http://inforadio.hu/podcasting/arena/

SBS radio Australia Hungarian podcast, updated weekly:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/hungarian

Hungarian digital library
A large collection of free audiobooks.

Italian:

Podcast of La Repubblica, updated daily. Very good debates on a variety of topics:
http://tv.repubblica.it/xml/podcast.php

Il Sole 24 ore podcast. As much as I loved La Repubblica, this podcast beats it in terms or organization and quality. It is updated several times a day with shows that are up to 90 minutes long. Spoken word only, interviews on a large variety of topics - all in all a great podcast:
http://www.radio24.ilsole24ore.com/podcast/radio24.xml

Polish:

Very good political debates. Polish Radio 3 podcast:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/Podcast/6e8788c0-1d6e-4cce-b04b-765a80ac52e0

Portuguese:

News in Portuguese, updated daily. NHK Japan Portuguese news service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/portuguese.xml

Romanian:

SBS radio Australia Romanian podcast, updated weekly:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/romanian

Russian:

Russian news podcast, updated daily:
http://www.svobodanews.ru/podcast/?count=50&zoneId=205 

Podcast of Радио Эхо Москвы:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/echomsk

Slovak:

Slovak national radio:
Website:

http://www.rozhlas.sk/radio-slovensko/web-archiv?rel=379

Podcast (unfortunately discontinued for the moment):

http://www.rozhlas.sk/inetportal/web/podcast/index.php?id=425

Spanish:

News in Spanish, updated daily. NHK Japan Spanish service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/spanish.xml

News in Spanish from the United nations. UN radio Spanish service podcast:
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/spanish/rss/itunes.xml

For those who do not know what a podcast is or how to subscribe to them, here's a short video introduction.

My interview on www.foreign-languages-guide.com

Not that I am such a narcissist that I would enjoy posting things other people wrote about me on my own blog, but since this is the only time ever anyone interviewed me and my first and only interview, I though maybe this situation is a little different :)

FLG: How many languages do you know and what are they?

Vladimir: When posed with this question, I always have a problem giving a good and objective answer and a one that doesn’t get boring after 20 seconds of explanation.

Unfortunately in order to be accurate, it is difficult to say how many languages one knows and what it means to actually know a language.

For someone knowing a few simple sentences or being able to conduct a simple conversation in a language means "knowing a language" and some people say that no matter how hard or how long you study, you can simply never know a foreign language well enough, since there is always space for improvement.

It is also difficult to say how well one speaks the language itself and there is no impartial way to determine that. Some people are great with language tests but fail when it comes to real life discussions, some speak with native accents but cannot read books or they commit frequent grammar errors and have limited vocabulary and expressions.

守株待兔

I enjoyed the courses on Classical Chinese I had taken in our Chinese department very much and thought that every now and then it might be a good idea to post some of the texts with grammar and vocabulary explanations here. I spent so much time with those texts and feel sorry that they fade away and so does my knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary so I thought I would post one short text once in a while, analyzing the structures just like we had done during our courses for other enthusiasts, or anyone interested.

Chinese is not the most popular language for western students and Classical Chinese even less so, so I imagine that there will not be a lot of people reading this, but I think it could still be a very interesting read for anyone. You don't need to speak any modern Chinese language to be able to read Classical Chinese. For me personally it is great pleasure, to be able to read something that has been written 2500 plus years ago in its original form, just like it was written yesterday and I'm sure many people find it fascinating as well.

Apart from the artistic/philosophical element, Classical Chinese also helped me read modern texts. It's not only because of the 成語 or vocabulary, but also because of the grammar patterns that pop up here and there in books or newspaper articles.

Studying Mandarin - part I.

At the language site I used to post my entries, I also held a Mandarin journal, where I tracked my progress, but I eventually stopped writing it because of several issues, the main reason probably being the fact, that often during the course of learning Chinese I came to a point, where I thought I had come up with a brilliant theory on how to learn this language correctly, thought I had found a suitable technique or had figured out a rule, that I thought I had interpreted correctly (be it phonetics, or just an overall learning strategy) and about a week later I realized I was completely wrong. Then came up with a new brilliant theory that I changed a week later again. I decided that until I would personally be satisfied with the way I speak, understand, read and write Chinese, I would stop making any further conclusions not to mention give people advice on how to learn Chinese because I didn't know how to learn it myself. This post is sort of a summary of my techniques. I am also writing this post now as a record entry to see what I was thinking about Chinese at this point and maybe a read for anyone who would be interested to read about one man's never ending struggles. This is my attempt at speaking Chinese on 20.10.2010:

偏見

你聽到'西方人'這三個字,你心裡第一件想到的事情是什麼?

對我們西方人來說,亞洲人長的一模一樣. 即使我在台灣待了一年多,我如果沒有先聽到他們說話, 我還是無法分辨出韓國人,日本人或是華人. 我聽說, 對台灣人而言, 我們西方人也長得差不多., 無論我們是來自俄羅斯, 義大利或者澳洲.

我本人來自一個很小的歐盟國家叫做斯洛伐克. 我的母語是斯洛伐克話, 而我們斯洛伐克人跟台灣人一樣要上課學英文. 斯洛伐克話與英文差別大概跟泰語與中文的差別一樣, 美國離斯洛伐克的距離是七千多公里, 我連一句話都還沒說台灣人還是會認為我是美國人, 因此也認為我應該跟美國人一樣很有錢喜歡吃麥當勞等等.

無論怎麼樣我猜種族偏見對每個人來說是種很自然的感覺. 大部分西方人也認為有亞洲臉孔的人都是中國人. 我比較小心地來判斷人, 因為我怕誤會, 但連我昨天一聽到’在台灣留的外國人’這句話,馬上就想到西方人,而忘記在台灣也有很多日本或越南人,而且有很大的可能性,在台灣這些人比我們西方人還要多.這個時候, 偏見也沒有什麼大不了, 但它有時候會害人,這樣子偏見對被害的人會變成問題.

Learning Farsi

Hello everyone,

After a lot of thinking, postponing and excuse finding I finally realized that it’s time to give Farsi my best shot. The sound of this language, the whole region and music has intrigued me for a long time and I was willing to learn Farsi for a long time as well, even dabbed with it once or twice before, but never actually persisted. Now finally I have time and most of all the will and interest to do so, so I will try to do what I can.

A very important reason for me to do so is, that I have only very scarce knowledge of the Muslim world, which is a shame and I feel that I have this huge cultural gap in my mind ranging from Morocco to Xinjiang and Kazakhstan to Sudan which is embarrassing to say the least and now that I look at the map, Iran is almost in the middle of that region. Another reason why I want to learn Farsi is that should I ever want to learn Arabic, knowledge of Farsi will provide sort of a vocabulary bridge between the two.

I don’t know why, but for the past 3-4 years, I kept experiencing this terrible lack of interest to learn anything, especially languages. I realized that I was spending much more time reading/writing about learning languages, than actually learning languages themselves.