溫人之周

I didn’t write any Classical Chinese text analyses for quite a while and I thought I’d analyze this following text from the book 戰國策 – The Warring states, which is called 溫人之周 – A man from the state of Wen went to Zhou. I like the story which if you are a bit familiar with the history of the Warring states has this nice contemporary feel. The grammar can get a bit complicated but still relatively easy compared to some of the more difficult texts in Classical Chinese (the unreadable 易經 for instance).

Text:

溫人之周

溫人之周，周不納客。問之曰：客耶？ 對曰：主人。問其巷而不知也，吏因囚之，君使人問之曰：子非周人也，而自謂非客，何也？對曰：臣少而誦詩。曰：普天之下，莫非王土；率土之濱，莫非王臣。今君天子，則我天子之臣也。豈有為人之臣而又為之客哉？故曰：主人也。君使出之。

Learning a simple language - Part 3

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Hello everyone,

last week I did a recording on how I would learn a simple language (Slovene) and because the recording got a little bit too long, I divided it into two parts. This is the second part of the recording. Enjoy.

1. The reason for doing all of this listening work is to be able to understand 95% of everything that is said before you go to Slovenia. Like I said in the earlier recordings, speaking is something that you can only learn well in the country where the language is spoken (for the most part) and so you eventually will have to go there anyway but this way you will save lots and lots of time and energy.
2. I would continue listening to the newscasts until I get to a point where I would not need a dictionary anymore, because I would understand the words that I hadn’t heard before out of context. And I would just keep listening to the newscasts for the pleasure of listening and information itself and get deeper into the language. Understand how some of the more complicated wordings are used, under what circumstances and so on.

Learning a simple language - Part 2

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I said in the last recording that the language learning process should be natural and no “textbook science” should be used to explain it to the learner as I think language learning is no science just a very natural process that should be expanded to its maximal potential and I think the brain should do most of the work on its own. This doesn’t mean that one should not take the advantage of all the shortcuts to help him understand the language better and learn it faster. These shortcuts – grammar tables, word lists, mnemonics, sound recorder and so on can speed up the process a lot. In this recording I would like expand this thought a little and in order to make it as demonstrative as possible, I would like to talk about how I would go about learning a simple language, because I think explaining something on a specific example is the best thing to do.

1. First of all I would not learn a language just to learn a language. I mean there has to be more to it than just to learn a language for the sake of learning so if I were to start learning a new language I would already have a very good reason to do it like for instance I really liked a song in that language, or the culture of Japanese manga and so on, because correct and lasting motivation is very very important.
2. As we are talking about learning a simple language, let's say I would like to learn Slovenian, because when I was in Slovenia it was fascinating to turn on the Slovene radio and feeling like they were speaking Slovak I just didn’t understand anything. I loved the sound of the language, the signs written in Slovene and so on. I also for instance heard that Slovenian is one of the most conservative Slavic languages in terms of grammar, which all is quite a good motivation to start with. Learning a language for securing a better financial future is not enough.