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.

Learning a simple language

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Hello everyone,

as I said many many times, I am very sure that there are people out there who have much more experience with language learning or language tutoring than me and I do not consider myself to be an expert in this field at all. People sometimes ask me, how to start learning a foreign language, but truly, I don't know how to answer and I really don't think that I am the most competent person to do so too. I have not read any book on how people learn or should learn languages, and I have only some teaching experience. The few things that I've read about how we learn languages or new things in general were mostly online and almost everything that I've learned myself I learned by trying and trying until something eventually worked (doing a lot of thinking during the trial and error process of course), so I don't know how many people would be interested in listening to my rants on language learning, since they only might work for me and might not work for the next person.

But, maybe there will be someone out there who might get some new ideas from what I say and I can be only happy about that so I will try to make this small introduction to language learning today, starting with a "how to learn a simple language" podcast. Enjoy.

Continue to Part II.

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

My multilingual recording in 11 languages

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Hello everyone. After a lot of consideration, I have decided to give it a shot and record myself trying to speak in the languages that I have learned. I was a bit afraid to do so, because while in general and in my experience people find polyglottery interesting, to some it might seem that people who do similar recordings or videos are show offs and attention seekers, which really wasn't my intention. I only wanted to join the community of people who have done so before and babble along in the languages that I speak for anyone who'd be interested in listening to my specific language combinations. I was hesitating for a long time and only until there were dozens of people out there with similar blogs, recordings or videos, I decided to give it a shot myself. This way I didn't feel like I was standing out too much and felt like just one of many.

Another reason for doing the recording was, that on my blog I post articles mostly about languages and language learning and doing a recording of this sort seemed like a nice way to let readers decide, whether my articles would be interesting for them to read. I wouldn't be very honest if I'd say that I didn't do the recording to gain some sort recognition, or try to compare myself to others, but I really didn't do it to show off.

My language history

I was born in Kosice in South-east Slovakia, which at the time was Czechoslovakia. As our city is only 20 km away from the Hungarian border, a lot of people living in our city speak Hungarian to some extent and my mother, even though I was of completely Slovak origin, decided to put me into a Hungarian kindergarten to learn the language which I acquired as a secondary native one. Living in Czechoslovakia, we were constantly exposed to the Czech language as well, so by luck or chance, I grew up with three native languages (even though I didn't use Czech actively until I was a student in Prague in 2007). I continued my studies at a Slovak elementary and later a secondary grammar school. At the age of eight I went to USA and at the age of 12 to Austria, learning both German and English almost to a native level of a 15 year old American or Austrian/German kid, which are both levels that I have sadly lost now.  

台灣的藝人

就算是我來台灣不到一年半, 平常我對八卦沒有特別的興趣, 但因為我們早餐店與午餐店的桌子上都放著 «蘋果日報», 而且為了提高我的聽力我每天都看台灣電視,而無法視而不見台灣的藝人. 不知道親愛的讀者會不會覺得這篇文章有一點無聊, 畢竟只是我對一些台灣藝人的看法而已, 但也有可能親愛的讀者會提供我一些意見.  

周杰倫

周杰倫是我第一個知道的台灣藝人. 我還沒有來台灣在剛剛開始學中文的時候在網路上找中文的歌, 有人建議聽周杰倫. 有一些他的歌我真的喜歡, 而且我覺得他很有天分. 他會很厲害地彈鋼琴, 電影演的也不錯, 他所做的音樂常常有一個idea, 他感覺不只是做音樂為了賺錢. 但是我也覺得他非常喜歡愛現, 而我們西方人覺得, 一個成人應該不要那麼喜歡愛現因為那個比較算是小朋友的行為. 然後他說話的時候我常常聽不懂他在說什麼.

狐假虎威

This following text is from the book called 戰國策/楚 – Strategies of the Warring states, Chu state chapter. It is again a simple story with a message related to real historical events. It is a little bit longer than the previous one, but the vocabulary and sentence structure is straightforward and easy to understand.

Text:

狐假虎威

虎求百獸而食之。得狐。狐曰。子無敢食我也。天帝使我長百獸。今子食我。是逆天帝命也。子以我為不信。吾為子先行。子隨我後。觀百獸之見我而敢不走乎。虎以為然。故遂與之行。獸見之皆走。虎不知獸畏己而走也。以為畏狐也。