END OF THE WORLD

Eye-grabbing headline, huh?  But, if we let “Internet” equal “World” for just a few seconds, it could be true, thanks to the Yankee governance.

It’s potentially disastrous news for us language learners because all kinds of material that we use (songs and other media on Youtube, for example) might become inaccessible if SOPA and PIPA are passed.  This would not just affect America.  [See this Wiki link.]

So to all you readers in America out there – get in contact with the people who are supposed to represent your interests and tell them where they can cram it.

Peace.

Current French Method AND Language is a Video-Game

1. Binge on TV, radio, songs, text-heavy games and newspaper articles in French.
2. When it’s getting hard to work out words from context frequently, binge on adding sentence cards to Anki, supported by dictionary definitions.
3. When you’re producing sentences that are almost grammatically correct, read up and practice French grammar on that area.
4. Rinse and repeat.

As you can probably guess, most of my time learning French is just spent cruising – I’ve picked up an awful lot of vocab and grammar from context.  When the going gets tough though, a couple of hours of hard graft vacuuming up words and patterns that can’t be determined from context opens up whole new sections of the language for exploration.

Personally, I like to analogise [real word?] my situation to a Metroid game.  You struggle through the early stages with crappy weapons, and every so often, after a boss fight, you unlock a new power-up that lets you go to lots of places you couldn’t previously access.  Sure, there’s some backtracking involved (read: going over material you couldn’t understand fully before), but there are also juicy rewards to be found there, so it’s worth the effort.

Eventually, of course, you can just kick the ass of every monster-alien in the game and finish with 100%, and that’s fluency… but only as long as you keep playing.

You Like What You’re Used To…

…so doing something is the same as enjoying it, which is also the same as getting good at it.

That is all.

Streamlining

Longish post this time (it was meant to be short), covering how far I’ve come on the various projects that I’ve been working on over the last year or so…

Reading Chinese

So… I finished reading my second full-length Chinese novel while I was flying back to the UK.  From start to finish, I think it took about twenty days, although it was interrupted by some entirely unrelated work on Mandarin which meant that I finished it much slower than necessary.

Anyway, although my Chinese reading speed is now pretty fast, there’s still a lot of room for improvement (compared to my English reading speed, for example), and that’s something I intend to work on in the future.

New characters often go straight into Anki, and I’ve reached the stage now where it takes virtually no effort to learn them.

Cantonese

I guess I understand most of what’s being said if I concentrate now; I think the biggest improvement here is being able to understand weird accents from mainlanders.  Sometimes I can understand novel words from context, sometimes not.

The game of Cantonese will be won though, I think, after another year or so of intensive listening to podcasts, watching TV shows and talking to people.

Mandarin

I can now hold a conversation in Mandarin and achieve basic communication, although I have a helluva hard time listening to what people are saying.  I’d like to work on the Mandarin more but I’ve not got round to finding interesting material to study with.

French

I’ve done quite a lot more with the French recently, because it seems like total R&R compared to Asian languages, what with the vast number of cognates it shares with English.  Plus, it’s a way of chalking up something I love to do (playing computer games) as being educational.

I’ve been playing through Phoenix Wright, Pokemon, Golden Sun and Animal Crossing on my DS, whilst occasionally looking through Le Monde for articles on American politics (something I have a weird fetish for).  Sometimes I understand entire sections of text; sometimes it’s all a mystery.

Occasionally I add stuff to Anki, but usually only for words that have no resemblance to anything in English, because it’s way too much hard work to put in the accents.

Flute, Sax

These have totally fallen by the wayside, save for a wind band that I do every Friday.  I think I wrote a while ago that I was planning on doing grade 8 in one of them sometime soon, but that’s sadly going to have to be relegated to the far distant future.

The Plan

You may be able to tell from the number of projects listed above that I’ve bitten off rather more than I can chew.  And so, I’m about to streamline it all…

The next three months are going to be taken up with French, in the style of Magnificent Matt.  It’ll be a case of “mostly French, most of the time” – as in, 80% of the time I have to spend on such language learning projects.

The goal is to get to intermediate fluency so that I can communicate reasonably well with other French speakers and understand most/all off what they’re saying.  Also, I figure it’ll make playing French Nintendo games have a much higher ROI if I can consistently understand the majority of what’s going on*.

Thereafter, it’ll be a return to blitzing Cantonese the oral language, together with a smattering of extra reading – the emphasis is totally going to be on speaking and listening.  As noted, this process is expected, all in all, to take another year, before reaching the unquestionably native-level standard I’m aiming for.

Finally, Mandarin will steal the spotlight.  I’m unsure of how wise this is, or how long it’ll take, but I’m planning to convert/extend my knowledge of reading Chinese from using Cantonese readings to Mandarin ones.  This will go hand-in-hand with a massive push in listening to Mandarin, too, with the intended culmination of being able to speak, read and write at a native level.

Thereafter, (and should only be two or three years down the line), I’m going to call a halt to the language learning, except possibly for improving the French further and certainly for maintaining the English, Cantonese and Mandarin at their native levels…

…thereby leaving open the way for a return to the music!  Just gotta be patient in the meantime, I guess.

* If you don’t understand much, you can’t learn much without heavy reliance on a dictionary; if you understand most things, new items can be picked up easily from context.

Opinions about Language Learning

Note: I kinda regret publishing this post since, as a commenter noted, it’s weak… while I could hold up my hands and plead irony, I don’t think that would be very convincing even if it was the original intention.

Also, the punchline “it’s my opinion and is therefore valid” was not what I meant when typing things out at 2AM, because obviously everyone’s entitled to their own opinions (within reason).  It should in fact have read “even my opinions which are in direct contradiction of logic/objective fact are valid”, which really is disingenuous.

Such sloppiness should not happen again!

Language learning is a branch of psychology.  Psychology is a scientific subject.  Therefore, we can analyse language learning scientifically.

We can analyse things like “how is learning time affected by L2′s similarity to L1?”.  We can use logic to determine that languages with more things to learn take longer to learn.  We can use our brains to work out the most efficient way of studying languages.

This means that there’s not much room for opinion.  Opinion is largely redundant in a scientific context.  “But I think light moves at the speed of treacle!” is not considered by scientists as a theory because, even though it’s an opinion, it’s demonstrably false.  We no longer entertain the once-believed idea that a child deprived of contact with language would spontaneously become fluent in Hebrew, because it’s trivially disprovable.  Unless you happen to be living in Nazi Germany, if you tried to present “as a valid opinion” your ideas about massacring Jews and gays and how it’d improve the world, you’d be lynched: the world would not become a better place and it’s obvious to everyone.

Opinion, therefore, is largely limited to overarching theories: string theory, the theory of evolution and theories of language acquisition.  At this level, there are so many variables that there’s some space for different ideas to compete.

But that still doesn’t leave space for treacle-speed light.  The Hebrew kids are left out in the cold.  And people were trying to kill Hitler for a long time before he committed suicide.

Similarly, ideas about language that do not hold up to simple tests of logic can be instantly discarded.  They are not valid opinions: they are simply wrong, and it doesn’t matter how loudly you shout.

“Cantonese literacy and fluency is just as easy as Mandarin” is not a valid opinion.  We can show it to be a false premise using logic.

Sure, there might be good reason for you going ahead and learning Cantonese anyway, and yes, it’s certainly possible – but that’s probably not best for all learners of Chinese.  Starting with a Chinese dialect is much harder than starting with Mandarin, and people thinking about starting with a dialect should certainly consider how much time and what resources they have available.

So there you have it – please folks, don’t go round disguising your agenda(s) with “even my opinions which are in direct contradiction of logic/objective fact are valid”, because it’s disingenuous.  It might give some people who don’t have the ability to think critically the wrong idea.

And that just makes the world a slightly shittier place to live in.

Mandarin or Dialect?

I think it’s safe to assume that there’s a generally held opinion that learning Mandarin is easier than other Chinese dialects.

Some people might perhaps hold that this is simply incorrect received wisdom; that all languages are equal in difficultly, that all languages should take the same amount of time to learn.  That Mandarin, specifically, is no harder than any other dialect of Chinese, and that to say anything to the contrary is mere opinion.

In the scenario where you’re learning both spoken dialect and written Chinese to native level fluency, I’m going to show that this is demonstrably false premise.

The Proof

In fact, considering only Chinese dialects, it’s very simple.

Since we don’t have to worry much about English cognates (there aren’t very many), we can assume a linear fit between the number of words to learn per dialect and the time required to learn them.  In other words, the more words there are to learn, the more time you need to spend to learn them.  So far, so obvious, right?

Additionally, we can assume that the more grammatical structures there are per dialect, the more time we need to invest learning and practising them.

Now, we mustn’t forget that 99%+ of modern Chinese is written using a special language based on Mandarin.  Even if you learn a dialect, you must also learn written Chinese (remember the original conditions) and so we’re effectively learning two languages.

Here’s a table comparing Mandarin and Cantonese.

Language	Similarity to Written Chinese	Time required
Mandarin	Spoken and written language is 99% the same, both grammatically and lexically.	~1.01
Cantonese	Cantonese vocabulary is ~60% similar to Written Chinese; grammar is 80% similar.	~1.6

[I'm only familiar with stats for Cantonese, but I assume they're comparable for other dialects; as for the source, I'm not sure where I read about the various percentages, but if I ever find it out I'll let you guys know.]

The last column is a somewhat arbitrary multiplier of the amount of time it takes to learn Written Chinese completely using any set of dialect readings.  Cantonese has a higher multiplier than Mandarin because you’re learning two sets of partially overlapping grammar and vocabulary.  In other words, it should theoretically take about 60% longer to learn Cantonese to fluency than Mandarin.

Why 60% longer and not less?  When you speak Mandarin, you practice written patterns and vice versa.  When you speak Cantonese, it does almost nothing for your reading or writing – and vice versa.

There are other things too – no such thing as Cantonese subtitles out there, so looking up Canto-specific vocab from TV shows is harder than for Mandarin.  What does this mean?  More time is needed.

So is it impossible to learn another dialect without Mandarin?

Obviously not.  Anyone can see that it’s possible, but takes longer. Hey, even I can speak Cantonese and can read at a 中學 level, and I am far from the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

The Catch

You just have to look at what’s available to you and work with that.  If you can’t find a native to help you with the dialect you want to learn?  Maybe Mandarin would be a better initial investment of time because speakers are easier to find.  Only Mandarin textbooks available?  Ditto.

If you have a legitimate reason for learning a Chinese dialect and you have the resources available to learn it, go ahead.  Otherwise, don’t try to do hard or impossible things for the sake of doing them.

It’s your own time you’re wasting.

P.S. Something else I forgot to mention: learning a dialect after Mandarin is, I think, probably faster overall than doing it the other way round for 外国人, because of the already-mentioned strong link between Mandarin and Written Chinese.  Just something else to consider~