Interview for Kosice Today about language learning

Polyglot Vladimir Skultety: Motivation is the key

He listens to news broadcasts in foreign languages daily and simultaneously translates them into Slovak or other languages for practice.

He is 31 years old, was born and grew up in Kosice, Slovakia, has lived in several countries and for the last five years in Taiwan. Vladimir Skultety has a Master’s degree in International relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies. He currently works as a translator and interpreter of Chinese, English and Slovak. Czech not included, he can speak 10-11 foreign languages. Polyglot (Greek polys – many, a lot; glotta – language) – a person speaking several languages.

‘It is difficult to express the number of languages I speak with a number, because I speak some of them better and some of them not so well. If you are familiar with the A1-C2 language proficiency scale (A1 basic conversational abilities – C2 near native speaker abilities), in my life I have spoken about 8 – 9 languages at a C1-C2 level’ says Vladimir Skultety.

When it comes to individual languages he can speak, he has provided us with a list starting with the ones he speaks best: Slovak (Czech), English, Chinese (Mandarin), German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese and Farsi (Iranian, Persian).

Derived characters

While I was still at the Chinese department, during our lectures on Chinese writing, our professors taught us about 6 Chinese character types: pictograms (象形字), simple indicatives (指事字), semantic compounds (會意字), phono-semantic compounds (形聲字), phonetic loans (假借字) and derived characters (轉注字). (For further reading on Chinese character types see this post).

While they explained the first 5 quite in detail, when talking about the last sixth category, we were told that these still require further research and that no one really understands them well. Or so they said.

望 wang4 'hope, expect' is a derived character. Let's look at its definition from the 說文解字 (100 CE) dictionary first:

Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series

First lecture in the hopefully longer series on Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series. In this lecture I try to explain what phono-semantic compound characters (形聲字) are, explain the 才 phonetic series and etymology of all characters in it.

Characters in this video:

才 cai2 - talent, material. Leading phonetic character of the group.

財 cai2 - money, wealth
材 cai2 - material
在 zai4 - to be located at
載 zai4 - to give someone a ride
裁 cai2 - to cut
戴 dai4 - to wear (clothes), to put on

Understanding Chinese Characters

Introduction

Chinese characters are a very complex system of recording the Chinese language into writing. Most of what seems to be a mix of illegible symbols is part of a logical but complex writing system that has been gradually developed around 2300 - 3000 years ago, with oldest confirmed characters dating back to around 1200 - 1050 BC. In this article I will try to briefly explain what one needs to know in order to understand Chinese characters and what you should know before you start studying them

Some basic facts:

• The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions on oracle bones (cattle bones and turtle shells used in divination and fortune telling ceremonies) from the late Shang dynasty (1200-1050 BC) - Wikipedia
• According to some studies (including my own), you need to know only about 2500 characters to read the newspaper.
• About 80% of all characters are made up of two elements - one telling you how to read it and the other one telling you what it means. This is good news, because based on these two elements you should know how to pronounce and understand the meaning of 4 out of 5 Chinese characters. 80% is a huge number and if you learn how to read this type of characters and understand their system, your learning progress will be much faster. 

Benchmarks in character evolution

Oracle bone script

Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast. My guest today is a very special person. I’m sure a lot of you know him from his presence online, he was born in Sierra Leone, spent most of his life in London and currently lives in Spain. He is a lover of knowledge and a very knowledgable person, has his own website and a youtube channel, is the awe inspiring, the super positive, the one and only David Mansaray.

Some of you might  know, that a couple of months ago, David interviewed me for his website and I've always had the thought of interviewing him for my blog in the back of my mind as well, I just couldn't come up with a suitable topic.

There were several things that I was considering, but because David is a fantastic, talented learner in many different fields and it so happens that he has decided to start learning foreign languages, I thought we could discuss something related to language learning in general.

David has read lots and lots of materials on the subject and talked to a lot of people and I always wanted to ask him what his own personal observations and opinions were, so I thought it would be great if he could share some of that wealth of knowledge with us. Hope you enjoy.

Vladimir

Download

Chinese character frequency list - news articles, interview articles

Chinese word frequency list - news articles

Chinese character frequency list - interview articles only

English Italian verb list

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*:

My 5 language learning tips

There have been several popular articles and books written about the importance of Motivation in Language learning, Best Language learning techniques, Top 10 most important reasons for learning a foreign language or ways of becoming a successful language learner. On my blog, I usually write articles that are quite specific and are often aimed only at a fairly narrow audience. I usually talk about various different aspects of Mandarin Chinese and other languages, which might not be that interesting to everyone, so I thought I could try to work a bit on topics that are more general just to make my blog more diverse.

I tried to keep things as simple as possible and asked myself the following question: If I had to choose only five things that would sum up all of my language learning strategies and have these five things in mind during my language studies, what would they be?  As you can imagine, this was quite a complicated question and even after giving it a lot of thought I realized that naming only five was still very challenging. 

I had to turn the question around a little bit. In the end I came to the conclusion that in my experience whenever something was going wrong in my language learning process, I was neglecting one of the following:

Motivation

Input

Output

Consistency

Review

Motivation

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

Chinese character frequency list - Interview articles

Abstract

In this study I tried to analyze the Chinese character composition of about 60  interview articles in two Taiwanese online magazines,  evaluate the data, produce a character frequency chart, character knowledge vs text recognition chart, do absolute character prediction calculations and compare the data with previous analyses that I have done. I sampled a total of 45 235 characters and found that there was a total of 1865 unique characters in this sample. Based on my calculations I also found that in order to recognize 100% (using the word 'to recognize' and not 'to understand' on purpose throughout the article) of any given number of interview articles, one needs to know 2084 unique Chinese characters. When comparing this data to my previous news character analyses I found, that the interview character frequency list contains much more direct speech elements than the news article character frequency one does and I've mathematically proven, that interview articles are easier to read for beginner and intermediate students of Mandarin Chinese than news articles are.

Introduction


In the past posts I was trying to analyze the frequency of words and characters based on the data that I sampled over the period of 6 weeks from 4 section of Taiwanese news (please see the Character frequency analysis, Word frequency analysis and Character prediction analysis articles for more information).