Two third tones rule in Mandarin.

An interesting thing happened to me yesterday. For the first time since I started learning Mandarin - and that would include 3 years of demanding studies at our university's Chinese department, 5 years of complete immersion in Taiwan and 10 years of working as an interpreter for the police, judiciary, prosecution.. all in all a daily grind of 17 years..  I managed to 'feel' and not 'know' that a 3-3 tonal combination in Mandarin should be a 2-3 combination. 

In other words, I 'felt' and not 'knew because I had learned the rule', that when there are two third tones in close proximity in Mandarin, that it "can't be like that" and that the first of the two tones must be pronounced as the second tone. (The full rule is a bit more complex, but for the sake of simplicity, this is what I want to go with for now). 

Before that, all that time, the whole 17 years, since I started studying Mandarin, when I spoke Mandarin, I had to pay attention to what tones would follow in my speech, and all that time when a 3-3 combination was approaching, I had to consciously 'initialize' the 3-3 > 2-3 rule and pronounce the combination as 2-3. 

Even after 17 years it was still a bit difficult and a bit tiring in the sense that it cost me my attention, and it put slight pressure on the syntax and the overall sequence of thoughts around the 3-3 point in my speech. 

Yesterday, as a form of practice, I was reading out loud a transcript of a podcast with a native-speaker friend. We've been reading it regularly for about 2 weeks now and suddenly I came to a point in the text where "Alice很努力" appeared and because I was reading too quickly I went on to read it as "Alice hěn nǔlì " and I said... "Wait a second, that can't be." 

Analysis of Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den 施氏食獅史

The following is my short analysis of the famous Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (施氏食獅史) poem. 

About the poem:

"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" (Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ) is a short narrative poem written in Classical Chinese that is composed of about 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced shi ([ʂɻ̩]) when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing.[1]

The poem was written in the 1930s by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao as a linguistic demonstration. The poem is coherent and grammatical in Classical Chinese, but due to the number of Chinese homophones, it becomes difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover all the words of the poem. The poem is more comprehensible—but still not very intelligible—when read in other varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese, in which it has 22 different syllables, or Hokkien Chinese, in which it has 15 different syllables.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

My Analysis

Chinese:

《施氏食獅史》

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

愛 爱 Love Chinese character etymology and structure

A friend of mine, a western native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, who grew up in Taiwan, recently embarked on the journey of learning how to read Chinese. He sent me a few pages of a book that he is reading to help him understand the Chinese writing system better and asked for my opinion. 

A few minutes of reading it turned into a few hours of thinking, writing and research and I thought I would publish my reply to him about one specific section in this book as an article on my blog as it covers a few interesting concepts and recurring themes. 

In the introduction, the author uses the character 愛 as an example to teach his students that quote "100% (not a single exception) of Chinese words is composed of root words. (sic)". The author's writing is a bit difficult to understand, and there was context before and after this sentence that would make it a bit clearer, but what the author essentially tried to say was that with every single Chinese character, it is possible to tell what this or that Character means just by understanding what roots it consists of, which can always be seen clearly in the character itself. A simple example would be looking at the Chinese character 人 and seeing that it is a person. 

The author then proceeds to further demonstrate this with the character 愛 and as we will see, his system unfortunately falls apart. He writes:

愛 (love) is the composite of (sic):

1. Top part of 受 (receiving) which means holding hands (sic)

2. 心 (hearts (sic))

3. Bottom part of 夏 (Summer) which means walking slowly (sic).

So love is that hearts hold hands and walk slowly together (sic).

I think it should be obvious that this is storytelling and not scientific research, and I think it is also important to prove why the author is wrong. 

First of all, arbitrarily deciding that the 愛 character is formed by ripping off the top of 受 and the bottom of 夏 and putting a 心 between them because it fits our explanation is like working with a completely faulty set of equations while solving a math problem and then arbitrarily changing the resulting number after the equal sign to the one we want manually so that it fits our teacher's correct result. 

As for the etymology of 愛 I never researched this character before, I convened my little etymology research team consisting of me and my TW friend:) and this is what we found out:

First, let's make the character a bit bigger:

Just by looking at it we cannot really tell what elements/roots/radicals/standalone characters etc. the character 愛 is made of, as the author says. We see 心 xin1 - heart in the middle, we see 夊 sui1 - walk slowly at the bottom. The top however is 爫over 冖 which is clearly a simplification/fusion of something that was there before but we cannot recognise it now. 

Chinese character Zen storytelling

So an innocent question under one of my videos about Chinese character etymology
(https://youtu.be/Svb7rulL5aE) led me to about an hour of research and I wrote a reply to the comment which I thought was worth publishing as an entire article on my blog. Gotta love science :)

The main reason why I thought this comment was worth publishing as an article was (apart from the fact that it was hopefully good research and took some time), that it is absolutely paramount to understand that people should be scientific and very careful not to interpret the structure of Chinese characters purely based on what they see today and resort to or believe Chinese character Zen story telling. I really can't stress this enough.

As Wikipedia teaches us about the Scientific method: "It (the Scientific method) involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation."

This could not be more true when it comes to Chinese characters.

The character I analyzed 黎 (which is today pronounced lí and today means 'many, numerous') is today structurally made up of 禾 (grain) 人 (person) 水 (water) and a mysterious 勹 + 丿

I could come up with 20 different Zen combinations as to how grain + person + water + (勹 + 丿)  could mean 'many, numerous'. Try it yourself before you read the rest of the article and compare it to what I wrote. Just for the fun of it and just off the top of my head:

黎 character

Modern meaning: many, numerous
Modern pronunciation: lí

Structural composition today:

禾 (grain)
人 (person)
水 (water)
and a mysterious 勹 + 丿

Top of head, seemingly cool interpretation:

'It's a person having to endure the burden of a lot of work because he has to irrigate a lot of grain with a lot of water'. All pointing to the meaning 'many, numerous'.

Let's pretend the 勹 + 丿 is not even there.

It took me, as someone who has spent a lot of time researching Chinese characters, about 30-60 minutes of research with a lot of modern tools to really understand the structure of this character and there still are blind spots in the analysis as you will see. What I'm trying to say is that if someone gives you a cool, funny, mysterious, 'Zen' interpretation of a character (like: 'It's a person having to endure the burden of a lot of work because he has to irrigate a lot of grain with a lot of water' in the case of 黎), please be very skeptical. There usually is much much more to it. Based on the difficulty of researching only this one character hopefully you will be able to appreciate why being scientific is a good thing.

A basic roadmap to learning Mandarin Chinese

Of the popular languages, Mandarin Chinese is one of the most difficult ones for Westerners to learn and extremely difficult to reach a high level of proficiency in. Learning languages like Spanish is relatively easy for those of us who speak English because of how closely related the two languages are in terms of grammar, vocabulary and even within the cultures there are lots of similarities to be found. This means that English speakers learning Spanish for instance already have a significant head start. However, when it comes to learning Mandarin Chinese, the situation is different. The grammar, vocabulary, syntax or the logic of Mandarin is nothing like English. Many of the typical language learning strategies are often inapplicable with Mandarin, which is why even the most experienced language learners would find it a challenge.

I’m not saying I found the key to learning high-level Mandarin efficiently, but after almost 12 years of studies and having worked as a Mandarin interpreter for the past 4 years I believe that, by trial and error, I have devised general guidelines that will hopefully save you some time.

It would be difficult to explain in detail what it is that makes Mandarin so hard, but in short, the four pillars of Mandarin difficulty are:

• Pronunciation
• Vast and unfamiliar vocabulary
• Sentence structure and sentence patterns
• Different cultural norms

Resources for learning Mandarin Chinese

Here is the list of resources I use or have used when learning or maintaining Mandarin Chinese. I tried to list them all so if something is not on this list, it means I didn't use it or used it and didn't like it. When it comes to resources, I try to look for efficiency, i.e. why have 15 pretty good ones if a few very good resources will do the job? :)

Dictionaries:

1. Dianhua dictionary (for iOS only)
• https://goo.gl/ZA5sp5
• An electronic dictionary for offline smartphone usage.
• Very powerful in conjunction with character handwriting input.
• Allows you to search characters by pinyin and automatically looks up all characters or words with the pronunciation you are looking for. This is very convenient since frequently you only know the pronunciation and not the characters of the word you are looking for.
2. Google translate
• https://translate.google.com/
• Contrary to what many people say, it is the most powerful dictionary out there if you use it correctly.
• Good for online copy-paste translations.
• Offers the feature to scan characters with your phone’s camera.
• Very advanced speech recognition.
• Very good for contextual search (expressions and sentences), less preferable for non-contextual search (individual words).
3. Zhongwen pop-up dictionary plugin for your browser
• https://goo.gl/e5eRGV
• Move the cursor over a character on your screen and a translation will pop up.
• Very useful when reading texts online

Some thoughts on the reliability of 說文解字

Disclaimer: This article will be very technical and very probably very uninteresting if you are not

familiar with Chinese character etymology. My apologies in advance. 

I got into a debate with someone online under one of my videos recently. The video was about the 辡 character phonetic series. In the beginning of the video I argued that 辡 was a character formed by two 辛 characters. According to my sources, 辡  means 'litigation' and one of the older meanings of 辛 was 'criminal' and that 辡 'litigation' is a semantic compound character with one 辛 'criminal' and another 辛 'criminal' pointing to its meaning (two criminals litigating in front of a court).

Since 辛  doesn't mean 'criminal' today, someone correctly asked in the comments, what my sources were.

I wrote:

(I am) Inferring (that 辛 had the meaning of criminal) from the following:

《說文》《辡部》辡：辠人相與訟也。从二辛。凡辡之屬皆从辡。

And the existence and ancient interpretation of characters like 宰 辠 and 辜

《說文》《宀部》宰：辠人在屋下執事者。从宀从辛。辛，辠也。
《說文》《辛部》辠：犯法也。从辛从自，言辠人蹙鼻苦辛之憂。秦以辠似皇字，改為罪。
《說文》《辛部》辜：辠也。从辛古聲。

To which the person argued, that the 說文解字 dictionary is not a reliable source and that it regularly misinterprets characters, among other things also because it uses an extremely limited data set and that not a single entry in the entire work makes use of 甲骨文 data (due to it being unavailable).

A debate ensued which went on ad infinitum and produced enough material to be published as a small article:

Pictograms

Pictograms are Chinese characters which really look like pictures of what they represent. 人 'person' for instance, is a picture of a person, 女 'woman' is a picture of a woman and 月 'moon' is a picture of a moon.

Woman

The problem with pictograms is, that since they consist of only a couple of strokes, at first glance it isn't always clear what they represent. The reason for that is, that they were created a long time ago (2500+ years ago) and they changed visually very much. When they were created, these characters resembled what they represented much more. 

Chinese character types

Chinese characters look the same to us Westerners in the sense that they all seem equally complicated, but when we look closer, we find that there are actually many structurally different types of Chinese characters. Some of them are really pictures of whatever they represent, so for instance 人 'person' is really a picture of a person and 女 'woman' is really a picture of a woman. 

Then there are other types of Chinese characters, much more abstract and much more complicated, with fancy names like the phono-semantic compounds or derived characters and I would like to introduce them to you one by one. 

This series of articles will be an end result of a project which I have been working on for over three and a half years. I will be publishing a book on Chinese characters and wanted to give you a glimpse of what will be inside as well ask you for any comments or suggestions you might have to make the book as enjoyable and useful as possible. 

In line with my philosophy of minimalism and effectivisim, the book will be very clean and easy to use, combining the absolutely best modern Chinese character research with the best learner experience. 

A lot of time and effort has been put into transforming the complicated research data into easy to understand 'look once, understand immediately' chunks. No clutter, or lumping of information onto the reader. Just an enjoyable learning experience.

For more information and regular updates about this and my other projects feel free to subscribe to my mailing list. 

Learn more about:
Pictograms
Compound pictograms

How to type in Chinese

A video explaining how to input Chinese characters on your computer and phone.

How do Chinese type on computers and phones? What is pinyin? How to use it? How to type in Chinese? People have asked me these questions several times and I posted a short video explaining just that on my youtube channel. Feel free to comment, like, share or subscribe. 

Pinyin confusions

Pinyin is a system, which is used to transcribe the sounds of Mandarin Chinese into the Roman alphabet. It is used wherever a transcription of Chinese is needed (city names - Beijing, Shanghai, people’s names - Xi Jinping, Wen Jiabao etc.) and also but not exclusively as an input method for Chinese in computers and other devices.

Since the pronunciation of Roman letters in the many languages that use them differs from language to language, when Pinyin was created, it wasn't possible to design a system that would be universal for every language that uses Roman letters. This means, that the letters used in Pinyin are not always pronounced as they would be in your language. In other words, in Pinyin, a j is not a j and an x is not an x.

Furthermore, pinyin is also confusing because of another thing. Sometimes two different Roman letters represent the same sound and sometimes two different sounds are represented by the same one Roman letter (see below). This is confusing, because students might not initially realize that syllables like wo, shuo and po for instance share exactly the same sound.  

Sounds that are written in a different way, but represent the same sound*:

New Youtube channel

Hello everyone, 

I have launched a new Youtube channel as a supplement to my blog, where I would like to share some ideas about langauge learning. I'm currently working on the How to write Chinese characters playlist in which you can find videos explanaining in detail how to write Chinese characters. In each video I explain how to write these characters, explain what writing rules apply to them and what details to look out for when writing them in order to write them correctly and give a little background about their structure and history. The characters for these videos were selected based on my character frequency research starting from the most frequent one. You can find more information about my character frequency study here.

In the future, I would like to do more videos like this on Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and other langauges as well. I would also like to record interviews with other fellow language learners and post them on my channel.

Hope you enjoy the channel and if you the videos useful, feel free to subscribe.

Vladimir

Mandarin Chinese tones – sound only approach

Mandarin Chinese tones – sound only approach

By Vladimir Skultety M.A., B.A.

I would try to talk about and build on a concept I wrote about in my earlier posts – to try to develop a system, in which students would remember Mandarin words without consciously knowing what tones or tonal combinations are in them and pronounce them correctly using less effort.

As the topic is quite complex, I would first like to go back to 2 earlier articles I wrote about tones and develop the thought from there.

Post from 11.30.2011 (edited):

When I first came to Taiwan, I remember being tired after even a 10-15 minute Mandarin conversation. I was unable to use the words I had learned before effortlessly even after I’ve used them a hundred times in conversation practice. Each time I wanted to use these words I had to make at least some effort in recalling them and constantly think of the tones, which was very tiring.

How to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese

Hello all,

some of my friends have been asking me to provide a more detailed explanation on how to learn Mandarin Chinese but at the time I didn’t feel competent enough to give any advice because I wasn’t fluent enough myself and I had to wait to find out what actually worked for me and what didn’t.

There is unfortunately no step-by-step manual on how to become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but I will try to write down in brief what I think worked for me. Goes without saying that what worked for me might not work for the next person and this is really only my personal opinion based on my own experience and the experience of other students I know.

Without any specific order of importance, these are the key points that helped me learn Mandarin Chinese to Advanced fluency:

Mandarin studies review after having changed my approach - 1 year

It's been quite a while, since I made a language related entry into my blog and since it's been around a year since I changed my approach to my Mandarin studies so I thought it might be a good time to review a little and see where I stand with Mandarin at this point in time.

It's almost unbelievable that I can say this, but I feel my Mandarin is finally getting somewhere! It's been more than a year and a half since I've been in Taiwan and more than a year since I've completely changed my approach and I think it has definitely paid off. When I speak Mandarin now, I am not tired at all, I don't think about pronunciation and often I can choose from more than a couple of ways of how to say the same thing. The sentences that I produce - since I repeat what I hear around me, are structurally Mandarin-spot on and after such a long time, I finally start getting the gist of the logic of Mandarin and can improvise in situations where I haven't heard or said similar sentences/sentence structures before. I finished reading a 12 book series of 死亡筆記本 and towards the end of the series (book 10,11,12), when I got used to the vocabulary I was reading it almost at natural speed, which made me incredibly happy. Now I'm reading a fat 400 page detective story (黑暗的回聲) and try to keep a pace of 40 pages a day without a dictionary. Well, see how that goes. I usually understand every word when it comes to direct speech dialogues in these books. When it comes to descriptive sections, sometimes I understand every word, sometimes just enough to get the gist and sometimes I don't get the entire sentence.

Learning a difficult language – Part 2.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin, Part 2.

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

Listen to MP3
For more information see Part 1

Pronunciation

Mandarin pronunciation is difficult and important at the same time. Mandarin is a syllabic language. Every syllable is a morpheme, so simply put every syllable has a meaning (please see typology of Chinese for further info). But what makes Mandarin pronunciation so difficult and important? It is difficult, because almost every sound in Mandarin within the syllables is different from the sounds we have in our European languages so you have to learn how to pronounce and recognize a whole deal of new sounds. Some sounds differ only slightly, some I cannot get down until the present day. And why is pronunciation important? Because as I mentioned since every syllable in Mandarin is a bearer of information and words usually consist of only one or two syllables, even a slight change in sound that you might not notice as a beginner might make others not understand you. It is not the problem of not being able to get your point across, it is the problem of not being understood at all. If you mumble a word in a western language or mispronounce a great deal of it, because of the fact, that western language words are usually pretty long and not every syllable is a bearer of information, you have a very high chance of being understood, but since Mandarin words are so short, every sound counts.

Vast unknown vocabulary

Learning a difficult language – Part 1.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

Listen to MP3

Table of contents

Introduction

General reasons

The difference of Mandarin

Inner logic of Mandarin

Specific reasons

Sounds

Tones

Pronunciation

Vast unknown vocabulary

Grammar

Writing system
Memorizing characters
Hand-writing characters

Conclusion

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. First of all I’d like to apologize, for the fact, that it took me a while to upload this article, but there are a number of reasons for that. I originally wanted to continue my recordings with the “Learning intermediate languages” series, but didn’t have that much inspiration in the past few weeks and had much better ideas for a recording about difficult languages instead, so in the following series I would like to talk about learning difficult languages. Unfortunately since Mandarin is the only difficult language I’ve learned, these episodes will be about Mandarin only and will relate to learning difficult languages as a whole only to a certain extent. Another reason for publishing my recording so late is, that I didn’t want to record an episode only for the sake of putting something online and as it takes me some time to write a presentable article, it took me almost 3 weeks to publish this one. In this first episode of the Learning a difficult language series, I will try to talk a little about what I personally think makes a language difficult and why I consider Mandarin to be a difficult language. In the episodes to come, if possible, I will try to look back at my studies and step by step develop a learning strategy for us westerners on how to learn Mandarin from scratch which will be based on listening and speaking only.

Phonetic typology of the Chinese language

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Typology

- comparison of languages based on their formal structure
- no historical connections
- only the analysis of the present state of the language

Types of typology: syntactic, phonetic..

Phonological typology

Syllabic language - every syllable is a morpheme

Morpheme - shortest sound which still has a meaning

Phonetic typology:

Tonal language

Tone  - a melody of the voice, in which a syllable is pronounced and which has the same importance as any letter of the syllable

Historical division of Chinese

Old Chinese

1000 B.C. – 3rd/4th cen A.D.

- probably no tones – they developed form suffixes

- probably not a syllabic language

The Chinese script

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Hello everyone.

Since there is a fairly large amount of youtube channels, blogs or podcasts, where people can get very good information on language learning or anything related to this field, I thought that I might be talking about things that have been said many times before and decided to try to do this recording in a more academic way. I’d like to discuss a rather specific topic, but a one that still might be interesting to listeners not so familiar with the subject – the Chinese script.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and wish you a belated Happy New Year.

Chinese script

-         writing is a form in which you can express language units

Characteristics of the Chinese scritp:

1. morphemographic
2. syllabic

 Characters:

Han dynasty reform

8 strokes:

永

                                    Yong3

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.