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). 

Basic language structures project

Listen to MP3

Podcast transcription:

Hello this is Vladimir, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. It‘s been a very long time since I did a recording for my podcast and it’s been quite a while since I wrote an article as well and so I decided that this has to end that I have to dedicate more time to my blog and my podcast.

There were several reasons for not writing and not doing recordings, mostly because since the last time I wrote an article which was probably sometime in March or April - since then we’ve been having wonderful weather and I just felt bad whenever I spent time inside. And another reason probably is also the fact that it takes me a lot of time to come up with an interesting topic and something that I personally think would be worth writing an article about, let alone to do a recording about and it takes a lot of time to work on the article itself, to work out the details and if it's recording it takes a lot of time to work on the recording so that it looks good and sounds good. So whenever I was out in the beautiful weather and I was thinking that should go back and work on the recordings I just sort of postponed and postponed basically until now.

Kending 墾丁and the National museum of marine biology 國立海洋生物博物館

I've been in Taiwan for almost three years now and although I've tried to be more active in my local travels lately, I've never made it to the famous beaches in the south of the island which are scattered around the small town called Kending (墾丁). In general, beaches in Taiwan are not what you would expect from a tropical island since Taiwan is an island of volcanic origin and the only  postcard-type beaches can be found in the south. 

I left Taipei on a sunny and humid Sunday morning. It wasn't 9 am yet and the temperature was already at 35 degrees. I took the High speed rail at the Taipei main station and after about 90 minutes arrived in Gaoxiong (高雄), which is the second largest city in Taiwan. From there I took a bus called the "Kending express" which after about an hour of a pretty sound ride arrived at the National museum of marine biology (國立海洋生物博物館), which is roughly 20 km away from Kending. 

Hiking in Taiwan - Yangming Mountain biathlon

The Yangming Mountain National park (陽明山國家公園) is a wonderful place to go hiking with several hot springs, waterfalls, great views and most of all fresh air and the whole park is only a half an hour bus drive away from Taipei.

I went to the Yangming mountain (陽明山) several times but always took a bus from the ShiLin MRT station (士林捷運站) to the Yangming mountain tourist center and started the hike at the MiaoPu entrance (苗圃). I bought a bike last month and kept wondering whether there were any bike routes that would lead to the top of the mountain. As it turned out, there were none, because the last 2 km of paths are too steep to bike, but there are plenty of ways to get quite close. I searched the internet for some options and eventually decided to bike to LengShuiKeng (冷水坑), which is only 2.1 km away from the top of the mountain. 

牛奶湖 (Milk lake) at the Lengshuikeng tourist center

Amount of characters and words necessary to read news articles

Abstract

Hello everyone and welcome to my never ending study again. In the last two posts I was trying to count the number of unique Chinese characters and words in Taiwanese news by analyzing 80 news articles from Taiwan over the period of six weeks. In my study I found there there was a total of 2105 unique characters and 5901 unique words in the 80 articles I analyzed which were separated into four sections: 國際 (international), 政治 (domestic politics), 社會 (society) and 財經 (economics), but as I said, 80 articles was not enough and I tried to extend the study. Using the sampled data I did some calculations and tired to predict what the number of unique characters and words in any given number of articles would be. I found that there would be a total of 2174 unique characters and 8424 unique words and a person would thus need to know this many characters and words to recognize 100% of any given number of news articles, if these news articles were from the same 4 news sections I analyzed.

Introduction

The main task was to predict what the evolution of the unique character and word charts would be and at what point on the y-axis they'd stop ascending. The corresponding x-axis value to that point would be the total amount of characters necessary for a person to know in order to recognize 100% of a random news article as long as it would be from one of the 4 sampled news sections. As you can see by looking at the following two charts, both of them have ascending trends with the Word knowledge chart having a sharply ascending ending with seemingly no approximation to any number.

Chinese word frequency list - News

In the last post I analyzed 80 news articles from Taiwan over the period of 6 weeks, provided some basic statistics and tried to come up with a Chinese characters frequency list, by counting the occurrence of unique characters in these articles. In this post I would like to write about the word frequency analysis of these articles. 

Research method

I again analyzed the same 80 articles which were divided into 4 areas: 國際 (international), 政治 (domestic politics), 社會 (society) and 財經 (economics) with 20 articles in each area.

During the whole word frequency analysis process, the biggest problem was to actually separate Mandarin words from each other. Like I mentioned in the previous post, as most of those studying or speaking Chinese know, words are not separated by spaces in Chinese. Counting the occurrence of unique words as opposed to counting the occurrence of unique characters therefore requires much more work, because unless you want to count word frequency with a pen and paper and would like to use a computer program to do the work for you, there has to be something that separates words from one another, in order for the program to know what to count. There are fairly complicated computer programs that can do this sort of indexation for Mandarin automatically, but since I didn't have any of those, I had to do indexation manually.

In order to count the occurrence of unique words in an English article for instance, the process would be much easier, because spaces between words in English texts mark very clearly where a word starts and where a word ends and a computer program can thus use these spaces as index markers to count words and consider everything in between those spaces to be separate word units. In Mandarin this is unfortunately not possible.

Take the following sentence for example:

Chinese character frequency list - News articles

I think a lot of those studying Mandarin Chinese have sooner or later started to wonder how many characters one really needs in order to normally function in a Chinese-only world or what for instance the most frequent 500 Chinese characters are. I personally have heard a lot of numbers and saw several Chinese character frequency lists, but often didn't understand why this or that character made it to the top 500 or why the list said I needed this or that number of characters to read something when I had the feeling the number was either overstated or understated so I decided to try to do a little study on my own. 

I tried to analyze how many characters and words are approximately necessary to read news in Mandarin. I chose four sections of Taiwanese news - politics, international, society and finance, all written in traditional Chinese characters during a 6 week sample period.

If I'm correct, the field of computational linguistics deals with projects of this kind and I'm sure that there are several teams of experts at linguistic departments worldwide that must have done similar researches using much more sophisticated methods than I have and after the amount of effort it took me to analyze these few articles, I have a lot of respect for what they do. 

Efficiency of Chinese characters

Efficiency of Chinese characters

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

A lot of people say that Chinese characters are inefficient, because they are too complicated and there is too may of them. By contrast they say that western alphabetic scripts are much easier to learn, much easier to write and are thus much more efficient.

In this article, I tried to somewhat objectively analyze the situation, which was a bit hard, because I like Chinese characters a lot, but either way I looked at it, I still think that characters are at least as efficient and in some cases even much more efficient than western alphabetic scripts. 

Negatives:

• There’s a lot of them. I don’t like numbers but it is true, that you need to know at least 2500 – 3000 characters to read something.  (Edit 5.5.2012 - strangely enough, after my study I found that you would actually only need about 2180 characters to read the newspaper)
• It’s much more difficult to remember characters compared to the simple 35 or so letters of an alphabetic script
• They are easy to forget
• They are easy to confuse
• You not only need to learn how to recognize them, you need to learn how to write them by hand which doubles your effort
• They are unpractical when you need to look up something in a list (dictionary, telephone list)

Positives: