If Zorro can learn Swedish & Norwegian (Norwegish), Anyone can!

The other night I was desperate for a free action movie, so I whipped out my trusty iPad and opened my favorite Chinese Movie app, PPTV, to begin my hunt for a worthy candidate.  My expectations include only the basest of manly virtues, that is, senseless violence.  I tend to watch more medieval action flicks because while heavy in action, they’re primarily low in vulgarity and naked nudes.

After scrolling around for a few minutes, I thought my quest was all for naught, but behold!  Antonio Banderas starring as the 13^th Warrior.  Ahmed ibn Fadlan is banished from…Babel? Baghdad? Whatever, he’s not even from that continent so I don’t care, to the north as an “ambassador”.  Anyway, Zorro is chosen to travel with a band of warriors to save a village from a mysterious evil.  Hard to resist right?  If my wife was there, there’s no way I’d have gotten away with this movie, not since the DragonBall Evolution fiasco…worst…date…ever.  But I liked the movie, just to throw that in there.  But I digress…

Batman has a Batbelt, You have Chinese Language Tools

I’m a hunter, and I hunt for new tech all the friggin’ time that will give me the edge I’m looking for in Chinese.  Here’s the best of what I’ve found…so far…

Internet:

Firefox plugins

Perapera Chinese Popup Dictionary

Vocabulary Highlighter

Chrome plugins:   Zhongwen: A Chinese-English Popup Dictionary

Chinese Subtitles:  Shooter.cn , requires .rar software

Use YouTube clips to learn Chinese: FluentFlix

5 Words a Day, Keeps Crappy Language Away

When I started my internship here in Beijing, my language goals sounded like this: Listen a lot, speak a lot, learn a lot. Boom.

Sounds great right? Well, kind of. I am listening a lot, and speaking a lot, but I think the most satisfying habit I’ve established is my “5-Words or Phrases a day” habit.  This is how I did it…

Sexy Context is Essential

At work, I probably do 2 whole hours of real work each day. The rest of my time is spent bouncing between side projects I have going on. One such project is going through a Chinese grammar wiki my buddy is helping edit for ChinesePod and All Set Learning.

One of the structures I was learning was, “Subj. + isn’t Adjective at all” or “Subj. isn’t the least bit Adjective.” One example included, “You’re not sexy at all,” and “He’s not smart at all!” These structures, along with others are carefully written in my study journal.

Determine My Chinese Reading Level: Part 3

Big news! I just finished book 3 in my series of Chinese graded readers and things are looking up!  Here’s the statistics:

Total Reading Time: 212 minutes = 3 hours 32 min (2 hrs 35 min for Book 2)

Average Time per Page: 1.9 minutes/page (1.26 min/page for Book 2)

Average Characters per Page: ~362 per page; total possible: 442 characters/page, 17 lines x 26 characters/line, but realistically less than 362 characters/page after you take indentations and pictures into account (yes, they’re kids books, so there’s pictures, and dinosaurs…)

Length of Chapters: 4-6 pages (5-8 pages in Book 2)

Chapters in Entire Book: 40,182 = ~362 characters/page x 111 pages (17,324 in Book 2, over double the content!!)

Observations:

Learning Languages & Killing Birds

When learning foreign languages, seemingly sage advice such as ‘Kill two birds with one stone,’ just won’t cut it.
I currently have a goal to figure out my reading level in Chinese by…you guessed it…reading!  Along the way, however, I’ve found myself trying to kill other birds with this one stone, meaning, while reading, I’m trying to boost my vocab, or I’m trying to increase my reading speed, or I’m trying to lengthen my sit-down time while reading.

All these side-missions have made my reading experiment turn into five other mini experiments.  I’m essentially trying to kill ten birds with one stone.

What I need to do, is kill one bird, one chinese reading bird, and kill him good, while using only one stonehenge sized stone to make sure I don’t miss.  (I’m sorry to any bird lovers, this is just a metaphor, no hard feelings against birds, except for the ones that use my car as target practice).

I’ve decided to quit expanding my experiments to try and include outlying elements and just use the experiment the way it is designed, and that is as a tightly controlled experiment with as few variables as possible.

How have you managed to kill your bird?  What are your distractions?  Share!

Language Study Plan 2: Three Fold Path: Right Method, Right Attitude, and Right Materials

From John Fotheringham @ LanguageMastery.com
Quoted from his article in The Polyglot Project

Most people never reach fluency because they spend far too much time learning about the language (reading the manual) and not enough time actually acquiring it (driving the car).

Language Study Plan 1: The Ice Plunge

From Learn Any Language – Barry M. Ferber

1. Choose your target language

2. Gather your tools:

• Basic textbook
• Dictionary
• Phrasebook
• Newspaper or magazine
• Student reader: 6th grade reading level
• Portable listening and/or recording device
• Audio courses: Pimsleur recommended
• Pre-made flash cards
• Blank flash cards
• Sturdikleers: A plastic see-through protector for passports that you can use for your 3×5 flash cards or other size flash cards
• Felt tipped highlighters

3. The Multiple Track Attack

Determine My Chinese Reading Level: Part 2

I finished Book 2 in my series, and the stats are looking good!
Total Reading time: 2 hours 35 minutes (down from 2 hours 45 minutes in previous book)

Total Pages Read: 123 pages (the same as Book 1)

Average time per page:erage time per page: 1.26 minutes (down from 1.3 minutes per page)

Interestingly, there were less characters per page in Book 2 than in Book 1, but the chapters were longer.  This was an interesting shift in energy and time.

Strategies:

• I used my timing strategies learned from Book 1, and I was able to finish the book in fewer sittings.
• I wait until the end of the book to copy useful phrases and vocabulary into my flash cards

Predictions:

• Books 1 and 2 had pinyin (romanization) over each character and my eyes tended to drift their quite often.  Books 3-6 don’t have any pinyin so I think 1) it’ll be quicker to get through the text because my eyes won’t be as distracted and 2) I think it’ll be more difficult to understand the meaning of some words.

Adjusting the Game Plan:

• Other priorities are making it difficult for me to read more than one book a week so this is now my goal (rather than 3 per week).  Reality and Flexibility are a must!

Learning Languages & Rock Climbing

When rock climbing, especially bouldering, there are three ways to approach your ‘problem’ or your goal: (stay with me, see if you can see where I’m going)

 1) On-sight climbing: You start climbing without prior observation, and make climbing decisions en route.  Sounds nuts right?  On-sight climbing is considered bad ace in the climbing world…if you can do it.  This method requires greater endurance, because you use strength experimenting different possibilities, and without coming off the rock, change your mind and go a different way.  It emphasizes path finding, quick thinking and problem solving.

2) Planned climbing: Before you even touch the rock, you sit back, take in the terrain, plan which moves you’ll use where, and you do this all the way until your goal, the top of the rock.  This method requires a realistic understanding of your abilities, otherwise your planning means nothing and you fall off the rock.

3) Beta climbing: This is when you watch someone better than you climb a problem you’re working on.  This way, you observe their moves (getting beta or info) and are better able to solve the problem when it’s your turn.  This method requires humility and a keen eye.  If you don’t have humility, you won’t get any beta because you’ll just see some ace solving your problem and showing you up and stealing your girlfriend…anyway.  Everyone has different strengths and experience, and so different methods on the same problem are also common.