“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources”

– Eldon

Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK!

白卜庭議長: 要派Jedi{絕地}去救Jabba{賈霸}個仔
baak buk ting yi jeung: yiu paai Jedi {jyut dei} heui gau Jabba {ga ba} go jai
[We] need to send Jedi Knights to rescue Jabba’s son

魅使·雲度: 嗯 其實我真係 好唔想同呢個壞蛋打交道
mei si wan dou: ng kei sat ngo jan hai hou m seung tung ni go waai daan da gaau dou
Hmmm…I’d really rather not deal with that ruffian.

• Audio

Note: I’ve never seen Star Wars: Clone Wars in English, so…I don’t know what the original lines were. These are my re-translation back into English from Cantonese.

Keep in mind that this is just what I do right now. Yes, I am the Great Khatzumoto, but you know what? Really I’m just a 27-year-old boy who drinks peppermint tea and plays with his cats. I don’t know jack about jack. This is just what was most fun and least annoying for me. You’re bound to have a better idea and I’d love to hear about it if you’d like to share .

Put another way: a lot of AJATT strategic principles are universal, I think. But the tactical stuff is totally a matter of “what works for you”. I mean, we might not even be running the same OS, so…you know. Anyway, here we go!

The Steps

1. Have a song that you love, love, love and wish you could sing along to
2. If at any point in this process you get bored…stop. The worst thing you could do for your Chinese/Japanese/any language is start to associate it with boredom. That there is the gateway to failure. Having fun with and in the language is the name of the game.
3. Get an mp3 file of the song.
4. Split the file into 10~30-second clips with ~5 seconds of backward overlap
   • I add a 5-second backward overlap because a split on strict time boundaries is bound to be imperfect in that it’ll cut right in the middle of something good.
     • Adding the overlap provides a way to automatically compensate for this without going through the psychological and computational heck of attempting to split on something like silence-points.
   • I use EZSoftMagic’s MP3 Splitter & Joiner for this automated splitting
     • They’re not paying me for this endorsement, but they should
     • If you know of any other software that does a good job at this, feel free to share in comments.
   • The reason we split the file and not just throw the whole thing into the SRS is because we are trying to do what the SRS does best – optimize the management and memorization of discrete chunks of information. Throwing the entire song in there is (1) boring and (2) defeats the purpose of even having an SRS.
5. Get the lyrics of the song
6. Put the audio clip into the SRS on the back of the card
7. Put one line or less of the lyrics on the front of the card
   • i.e. the lyrics of a segment of the 10~30-second clip, not of the whole clip
8. Put the lyrics of the whole 10~30-second clip, or of the entire song, on the back of the card.
   • I prefer putting the lyrics of just the whole clip because it’s easier to read
   • But sticking the lyrics of the entire song on the back could save you a lot of fiddling
9. Do your reps.
   • The task is to read aloud or sing the line/segment of the line of the song
   • Check your “answer” against the actual song clip
10. Final note: if any of this feels like too much work, then stop. Abort. Delete. Whatever. Because you obviously don’t like the song enough. You may like the song, just not enough, not that much. And that’s fine. Remember, the idea is to be like Soviet Russia: let the media motivate you — that’s its job.  All you have to do is put yourself in the path of the media.

Sample Card

FRONT

男兒當自強

[Youtube]

BACK

[media: naam yi dong ji keung- 007.mp3]

廣闊浩氣揚　既是男兒當自強 昂步挺胸

jìshì【既是】
…であるからには．…である以上．

gei si naam yi dong ji keung

Benefits of this method

• Over time, with very little effort, you learn the entire song
• As per SRS principles, the parts of the song that give you the most trouble – and that therefore need the most practice – will get seen the most
  • Ever notice how almost everyone knows the chorus of a song no matter how complex the vocabulary? (I remember being about 6 years old and singing Bobby Brown’s “it’s my prerogative!”). That’s because the chorus gets repeated so much. SRSing the song turns the entire song into a “chorus”, in that all the parts of the song will get repeated to the degree necessary to ensure their memorization.
• No need to fiddle with carrying lyric sheets in your bag or on your computer – it’s not like you can ever get them out on time anyway.
• Even after the song stops getting playtime on your mp3 player, the SRS will ensure that you keep getting practice with it. This is a microcosm of how the SRS is a powerful partner to an immersion environment – even after you stop immersing in, say, technical documents from a certain field, the SRS will guarantee you keep getting the practice in that field that you need to retain your proficiency in it.

『宇宙，人類的終極邊疆。這就是星艦「企業」號的旅程。
它的任務是探索全新的世界，挖掘新的物種和文明，勇敢的前往沒有人去過的地方。』
[Audio file]

Shortest AJATT post ever…

早上好。
再過一小時，
這裡的飛機將與世界各地的盟友並肩戰鬥。
你們將參與人類歷史上最大的空戰。

人類。這個詞今天對於我們所有人將有新的意義。
我們不能再為小小的分歧而內耗。
我們將為共同的利益團結起來。

也許是上帝的安排，今天是獨立日。
你們將再一次為自由而戰。
不是為了反抗暴政、壓迫和迫害。
而是免遭毀滅。
是為生存的權力而戰鬥。

如果我們今天能夠勝利，
七月四日將不僅只是美國人民的假日，
而且將使全世界人民發出同樣的吶喊：

“我們不會默默地走向黑暗！”
“我們不會就這樣坐以待斃！”
“我們要生活下去！”
“我們一定要生存！”

今天我們要慶祝自己的獨立日！

As time goes on, you might have outgrown wanting to be cool in the high school sense. You might have decided that your society sucked enough that you no longer cared if you became dead to it. But you still might carry some residual tendencies towards cynicism — so ingrained was the habit of being cynical.

So when a guy like Tony Robbins comes at you with that voice and that grin (that grin )…urging you to have a positive mental attitude, when Napoleon Hill tells you that “[w]hatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, when Mormon girls called Stacy _{[whose mother, I am reliably informed, has got it going on]} smile that Utah smile and offer you cookies, your knee-jerk reaction might be to go “yeah, right”, roll your eyes rather far back into your head, and proceed to dig up the dirt behind these “tricksters”. Anyone that happy has got to be hiding something, right? Or so our culture of mediocrity would have us believe.

And then there’s the (not necessarily inevitable) fact that having hope does carry the potential to set you up for disappointment — especially in the hands of a hope novice: one almost has to learn how to use hope correctly.

My personal solution to all this is to:

1. First, avoid both hope and dread — go for a flatline — and then,

2. Gently bias myself in a positive direction by simply doubting the possibility of failure. _{Sure, you don’t know if you’re going to succeed, but you don’t know if you’re going to fail either. Indeed, if you did know things with such certainty, you would be effen omniscient and you should be picking stocks or something. But you’re not. You don’t know. And since you don’t know either way, you might as well assume and act in favour of the positive. To quote Dr. Annette Goodheart (who?):}

_{“If we’re going to be miserable we might as well enjoy ourselves [and] laugh.”}

So, this sometimes air-headed and always hard-to-sustain “YEEEEEEAAAAH!!! I’M GONNA DO IT, BABY!!!!” idea, is replaced with a calmer, easier “well, I’m certainly not going to fail” orientation. A strange sort of acceptance of positive inevitability. Or something to that effect. This is kind of hard for me to put into words.

More concretely, in terms of acquiring a language, what I’m trying to say is: don’t force yourself to succeed or produce or demonstrate or even to persevere. Give that up. Instead, if it suits you, you might try taking a more laid-back approach of “well, I’m going to dig up some soil, and plant some seeds, and put in some fertilizer and water, and then see what happens”, “I’m going to sow, and see what I reap”. It’s not quite “wait and see”, since that might not get you anywhere, it’s more a “do and see“, an “act and see“.

Do your work and see what happens. Don’t try to force the results; they will come when they come. No matter what you do, at some level, results are always outside your full, direct control. But action never is. You can always do the right thing _{[and if you don't know what the right thing is, then the right thing might be to go find out what the right thing is]}; you can always take the/a right action.

Always. No matter what situation you are in, there is always something you can do. In extreme cases, the the thing to do might be to get out of the current situation. In most cases, it’s as simple as open the book, turn on the TV, plug in the earphones.

Something. Anything.

So why did I get to thinking this? Well, I CAN WATCH AND UNDERSTAND VIRTUALLY ANYTHING ON HONG KONG TV NOW !(T+19 months) Violent triad movies, weird accents, regular TV news, parody news, phone prank shows, Korean-made documentaries about the history of noodles…bring it. In some cases I read the Chinese subs quite a bit for confirmation, but this simply shows how fast a reader I’ve become — I used to be unable to make it across even half a subpicture before it changed…now I can read it 1.5 ~ 2 times in that same brief time window. In short,  my input is almost a Jedi, though my output be at youngling level.

And the weird thing is…I was barely even trying. Not really. I mean, yeah, I have Cantonese TV and movies playing close to 24/7 in my house, and put a laptop in the kitchen so I can watch things like The Simpsons Movie _{(that’s right, son, there’s a Canto dub…Marge, Lisa, Bart and Flanders’ voices are dead on; Homer’s is “re-interpreted” slightly, but I never liked his original voice anyway)} while washing dishes, and I have Chinese comics in the restroom, and Chinese newspapers pasted all over my walls, and Chinese books permanently sitting in my manbag ready to go anywhere I do, and…yeah…and stuff. But once you get those things set up, it’s almost all just a matter of, how you say in the simple English…sitting back and watching. Once you do set up and maintain the right environment, all that’s left is to show up…to exist.

So…just do it already. But don’t wait and worry and weep and wail and gnash your teeth over results. Don’t act like a desperate stalker, always watching, always trying to get the phone number, always trying to get to second base, always asking Mummy if you’re there yet. Sitting by the door checking the clock every five seconds is not going to make the FedEx lady (yeah, my neighbourhood FedEx guy is a girl) come any quicker. Just be cool. The results will call you when they’re ready. They always call . You need only act; you need only plant; you need only keep walking — sooner or later _{[later than you would wish, but sooner than you would fear]} the destination will practically be forcing itself into your face.

If you can’t be motivated, don’t be _{[I can't]}. If you can’t feel passion _{[I hate this word]}, don’t. Just be curious instead. Just keep sowing instead.

So for all you Chinese learners out there. Here is the merchandise. This is the detaaaaagent [if you didn't watch Kenyan TV commercials in the early 1990s...I cannot help you with this one]! This is what you need. There are 1500 characters in this first volume, so it’s just something to get you started up. A second volume, with another 1500, is in the works. Should it be delayed, then, rather than wait for it to come out, I would recommend applying the stories/components in the first volume to the characters in Rick Harbaugh’s Chinese Characters: A Geneaology and Dictionary (zhongwen.com), and then move on to sentences. With steady progress, it shouldn’t take very long at all, and you’ll be able to read (comprehend) and write Chinese like a madman, despite not yet knowing how to sound stuff out yet.

Anyway, yeah…FYI, whoomp there it is.

It’s been out for like a month, actually.

One thing that writing this blog has made me aware of is that I always seem to be hustling for new and better ways to do things. And, you can take that a bunch of ways, but I take it to mean that I have massive room for improvement. When I was just writing ex post facto about how I had learned Japanese it was easy for you good-looking, well-proportioned, intelligent people reading this, and even for me as the writer, to silently fall into the trap of thinking that the method had just dropped into my lap after maybe a tiny little bit of thinking, and that I spent the rest of the time simply cranking out this already-perfect method. This idea is so easy to fall into, that a reader named reineke made this comment on this post:

Is it still the old proven method? Are you watering down things a bit too much? I know you can do it, but is it wise?

Wow, like, I had no idea that I was already “established”, hehe. But, like I said in my response to that comment, there is no “proven old method”, at least as far as I’m concerned. There are just related iterations; you stay at one iteration as long as you know it to be the best choice for the scenario at hand, but once the scenario changes, or you find better choices, then you tweak or change things appropriately. So, it is still a 99% perspiration to 1% inspiration deal, only that some of the inspiration comes in at the beginning, and some comes during the perspiration.

Remember, also, that one of the stated aims of this site, in addition to providing an account of how I acquired Japanese, is to share: “new cool tools that I did not have, and that would have made things much faster and easier for me”. New methods fit that description.

SRS Image Hack

Anyway, back on topic, thanks to a couple of readers (like Saleem/Kid Ethnic), I’ve had the opportunity to rediscover some information to which I had actually been previously exposed, but on which I had never acted extensively. Specifically, this piece about using multiple senses when learning, and this article about how children learn (the latter originally from Slashdot).

And, it led me to make yet another tweak to how I do my SRS items. First my report on the tweak — it works really well for my active recall, much faster than ever before. Why? Because it all comes down to associating a specific image — one or more actual cartoons or photographs — with each SRS item. This is what it looks like (the format is exactly the same as that explained here, except with pictures added).

Example 1: Learning a proper noun without sentence/phrase context (name of a famous actor)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of XinhuaNet
[Audio]
ANSWER:
劉德華
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
Lau Dak-wa
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio...I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 2: A sentence/phrase (newspaper headline about Hong Kong stocks tanking over 1000 points — the image is pretty close the audio/text content, but to the extent that it doesn’t actually give it away, it’s still good)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of Epoch Times
[Audio]
ANSWER:
港股暴跌逾千點
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
gong gu bou dit yu chin dim
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio...I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 3: Sentence/phrase (article headline about whether or not microwaving food causes cancer)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of ENorth
[Audio]
ANSWER:
微波爐加熱食物致癌？
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio; this text is on the long side; you generally want to keep things shortish, even as you get better]
mei bo lou ga yit sik mat ji ngaam？
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio...I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 4: Sentence/phrase (“Shut up! I’m talking!”)
QUESTION:

Images Courtesy of 510q and Scott Hong
[Audio]
ANSWER:
你收聲! 我話事!
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
nei sau seng! ngo wa si!
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio...I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

So, anyway, like I said, it’s really helping me with actively remembering all this stuff, because the audio I’m hearing is being directly associated with actual concrete images. Now, when I think of Andy Lau/劉德華’s face, I can say his name; I would have been able to do that eventually, but this makes it all happen much sooner.

This sort of thing, I think (not my own all-original idea, by the way) is one part of what’s so effective about the methods children unknowingly use — when a kid learns something like “the glass broke” in her so-called native language, she almost always gets to hear something breaking (like glass), and see that cracked glass and feel the shock and have shards strewn all over the floor. When a kid learns about bee stings, cuts, “that smarts”, “pain” and “ow!” in a “native” language, she may be right in the middle of it. This is powerful stuff. And kids get this with everything — they don’t just get random words in a list, they get sentences, and not just sentences, but sentences with visuals and sounds and emotion. And these are the kind of things that are bound up strongly in memory.

Like one of my teachers once said, most Americans can remember where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001 because that was my sister’s birthday and the news was carrying it like crazy, everywhere you looked: “Khatzumoto’s Sister Turns 31″, “The Big 3-1 for ‘Moto Sibling”, “Over 30 for the First Time: Khatzumoto’s Sister Moves On”, “Nine Years to 40: Khatzumoto’s Sister Ripens”; and then the appointed President of the US was like “Well, we’ve got to celebrate! You only turn 31 once!”; it was a huge deal. The shock of realizing my sister was turning 31 helped bind what people were doing at the time, to their memory. Now you don’t always have to use shock — humor, grossness, and even just a good, decent, appropriate image (like a picture of a wireless router with a sentence about wireless internet), will also do. But don’t take my word for it — read that biologist’s stuff.

So, anyway, lots of words to explain a little tweak, but there you go…such are the inefficiencies of human communication/my writing.

Anyway, go ahead and give it a try…it may sound counter-intuitive, but you might be pleasantly surprised. And feel free to share your results with it.

By the way, the pictures are just googled. They’re for personal study so, you know, whatever, just download them.

A lot has changed. A lot. And I haven’t been telling you jack. Not because I’m a bad person, but because I don’t like to talk about things I’m not sure about. Because, generally, one of two things happens when you do this:

a. People get too excited, try it, but if it doesn’t work (since it wasn’t fully tested), then they feel bad, and maybe they tell you that you suck.

or:

b. People shoot you down before you’ve even tried it, and (if you’re delicate like me) it kills your will to try, and we all know that not trying is the source of all failure. But I digress.

This “not talking until the doing has been done” thing is one of the main reasons why I didn’t put up AllJapaneseAllTheTime.Com at the start of my Japanese journey. I left it till the end, when I had nothing left to prove as such, and any barbs directed at my person, real or imagined, would be functionally useless, since they cannot negate the simple fact that I have near-native Japanese ability now. You know, kind of like how only people who don’t have money are hurt by people thinking they don’t have money? Or something to that effect…I’m sure you understand what it’s like – the Internet is full of the most negative, demoralizing, borderline-to-overtly racist crap when it comes to East Asian languages, and normal, sensitive (see Fig. 1) people are easily harmed by it.

By the way, the other main reason is that making a website used to be annoying. Blogs have been around for a while, but I honestly thought that blogs were just for keeping diaries for a limited audience because that’s all that people used to do with them. That is, until I saw someone using a web log other than for logging, with articles actually written to be read by non-insiders, and that changed the game for me. Speaking of logging, Momoko encouraged me to keep a log of my Cantonese progress, even if I don’t actually post on it for a while. I am more or less doing that.

But you didn’t come here to hear that kind of beanbag philosophy (“dewd, like, isn’t it amazing how..”), back to the article.

Crap…what was I gonna say. OK, first stop is Anki and Text-to-Speech (TTS).

Text-to-Speech (and Anki)

In Chinese Project Notes # 8, I discussed changes I had made to my SRS entry format. Based on the effects of those changes, I have made even more alterations. Some I will discuss in this article, some may have to wait for later; there’s seriously that much going on.

First, why did I make these alterations? Well, I discovered that while the Chinese Project Notes # 8 changes were definitely a step forward for my handwriting – I can produce hanzi/kanji from memory with great speed and accuracy and exactly when I want them – the changes have not (yet?) given me the aural benefits that I had expected. My Chinese writing advanced to pwnage level, but my listening comprehension was not being all that it could be.

To the chase I am cutting. My calculations indicate that at this time it would not be economical to add free sound support for everyone on KhatzuMemo. Plus, Anki is a really good SRS, so why not try it out, right? That’s what I did. After tons of pride-swallowing, trial, and error, my Cantonese (and some Mandarin) SRS items essentially consist of:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

[Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

[Dictionary definitions, as necessary]

[Translation of sentence, if necessary]

[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

Here’s an example:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

你去邊? [Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

你去哪裡? [Translation of sentence, if necessary]

Néih heui bīn[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

The process is basically that I am both chorusing (or parroting, or whatever) and taking dictation at the same time. I think dictation is one of the best language-learning exercises out there in that you are connecting the verbal and written parts of a language, something that a lot of people fail to do. It’s a hybrid input-output affair that puts almost all the skills that matter on the line – you have to understand what’s being said, and you have to know how to write it out exactly correctly. Chorusing, or what I am calling chorusing, is really good, too — listening to (native) speech and imitating it. Step-by-step it goes like this:

1. Play audio (as many times as necessary).

2. Say audio.

3. Write down text, based on audio (audio may be repeated).

4. Compare my text to the correct answer.

Where do you get the audio? I use text-to-speech (TTS) software. It set me back a bit, but I like to think of it as an educational expense. The TTS software I got comes in two parts – a reader, and voices. As far as I know, you need both. My reader and voices are:

• TextAloud – the reader. It does cool things like managing text and converting it to MP3. I believe it comes with a basic, default English voice, but good voices and voices in other languages need to be purchased separately. There is a free trial version of TextAloud available here.
• Voices. I use Lily for Mandarin, Sin-Ji for Cantonese and Misaki for Japanese. I chose female voices because I found them easier to understand. Maybe it’s a high-frequency thing? Or maybe it’s just my imagination – I don’t actually know for sure. Currently, I only use the Japanese one for reading me long articles, like the ones from this site.

TTS has been around a relatively long time. Why am I only now getting into it? Well, it used to suck; it was a running joke. TTS is much better now than it was 5 years ago, and while the voices are not yet perfectly human, if you’re a beginner, they’re almost certainly much closer to perfection (accurate pronunciation) than your voice is in your target language, which is what counts. The Japanese voices are especially blowing me away [audio sample of the first paragraph of this article].

There is also something special about the nature of Chinese that drove me to TTS. Other than Bopomofo/注音符號, there are no satisfactory phonetic systems for representing Chinese. By “satisfactory”, I mean “consistent, easy-to-understand, and will lead to native-like pronunciation if followed”. Pinyin sucks. Jyutping sucks even harder. Yale Mandarin is decent. Yale Cantonese is an improvement over Jyutping but still not all the way there. I needed to know how to pronounce Cantonese without, like, balancing an equation every two seconds (because that’s what tone numbers turn life into). The tone markers had no meaning to me – I could not differentiate them – until I actually heard a lot of Cantonese. I needed to focus on what Cantonese sounds like, because that’s what matters, not some trainwreck of a Romanization system. This is what led me in the direction of TTS. The results are good so far – one Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong on Skype accused me of lying about not being Chinese, despite my insistence that “it’s not that good…yet”, so I had to borrow a friend’s webcam (see Fig. 2), and then the Skype guy made me undress. It just goes to show that watching and/or listening to Cantonese dubs of American cartoons 18 hours a day doesn’t not have an effect. And, yes, I do randomly find Cantonese speakers on Skype to talk to. I learn a lot from them if I shut up. Skype chat records are automatically saved, so you can go back later and sentence-pick, and also to absorb the corrections you no doubt asked for.

One annoying problem with the Chinese TTS voices I use is that they cannot pronounce certain characters correctly or at all, especially ones used in written colloquial Cantonese, even some commonly used ones. Not only that, but they have no “learning” ability – you can’t “teach” (customize) them to pronounce certain things correctly. Misaki does have such ability; she can even be “taught” intonation…I look forward to a customizable Cantonese voice. At any rate, TTS is still a great tool, and I imagine many people could benefit from using it.

Note – you could try just cutting sound samples by yourself instead of using TTS. I have tried this; it’s good but it has its limitations – it takes time to do and it obviously won’t have the same vocabulary range as TTS. I primarily use TTS, but a mix of TTS and manual sound-clipping seems like it would be a great combination.

Cantonese: What’s Up With That?

As you may be aware, Cantonese has been “on my radar” for quite some time. When I made the decision to learn it, I was already focusing on learning Mandarin. The reasonable thing to do, and what I initially chose to do, was to continue doing Mandarin until my Mandarin got really, really good.

So I started building a Mandarin immersion environment. That involved getting Mandarin dubs of my favorite American cartoons — stuff like 蝙蝠俠/Batman, 飛天少女驚/Powerpuff Girls, almost all the Disney/Pixar movies. As it turns out, almost all of these DVDs had a Cantonese track as well. Occasionally I would switch to the Cantonese track for laughs — it sounded so funny!

Anyway, this “funny-sounding” language or dialect started to grow on me. The Bruce Lee effect and the fact that (until recently) the Chinese that most non-Chinese people heard was in fact Cantonese, certainly played a part. Cantonese is even more “magical”, more BS-ed about, more Orientalized, more feared, more hyped than Japanese; this, I am sure, tickles my reverse-BS glands.

So it got to the point that I was just trying to “get through” Mandarin in order to get to what I really wanted to do – Cantonese…After much, much, much, deliberation and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go all Cantonese all the time; Momoko had gotten fed up of hearing me whine and worry compare and contrast. I continue to learn token amounts of Mandarin out of a feeling of necessity, no, duty, even. But I do Cantonese out of love and therefore Cantonese gets all my time now. If Mandarin and Cantonese are in danger of drowning, and I can only save one, Cantonese gets saved every time. There is so much Cantonese playing in my house that Momoko sometimes randomly says things like “開開心心”/heppy, whether or not she understands them. Repetition will do that.

Victory Calendar

Everyone who reads this site is incredibly good-looking and positive. And that helps. In fact, most of my fears and doubts are self-induced. But anyway, to keep me from sinking into fear, doubt and I-can’t-do-this-ism, I have made myself what I call a “Victory Calendar”. Wait, before I tell you about the calendar, let me just say this. I finally understand the sheer disbelief that I sometimes read from people who read this site. Because the method explained on these pages is so simpo. Just DO it. It’s THERE. You CAN. It’s so simpo that it would seem that anyone could do it, right? And anyone can. But if it’s so simple, why isn’t everyone doing it? Why are there people who have been living in Japan for 20 years and can’t even read hearmegana? Can’t even write one kanji?

Because, it’s just like Jim “the Rohnster” Rohn said – “the things that are easy to do, are easy not to do”. It is just as easy to eat fruit as to eat a candy bar. Just as easy to watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese as to…not watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese. What the Rohnster is saying is that the results, the achievements (or lack thereof) of our lives are the sum total of tiny, “insignificant” decisions. “Surely it couldn’t hurt just this once”, they say. “Even Jesus drank alcohol”, they say. “You need to let your hair down a little bit once in a while; it’s just not healthy to be so healthy”, they say. We kid ourselves with these little lies that seem to make sense, that seem so reasonable, and then someone comes who has been making the right little decisions for a long time, and we call them “talented”, we say they were “lucky”, it was “in their blood”, or maybe we outright accuse them of lying. Expletives cannot describe how angry that makes me – so angry that I can’t even get angry at it…because arguing with people who refuse to see sense only makes you stupider.

Anyway, back to the calendar, it’s basically a list of 18 months of days (540 days in total), dating from when I started Cantonese. Every day has a space for me to evaluate my SRSing, listening and reading, respectively. My task is merely to honestly evaluate and record whether or not I did my SRS reps, added SRS items, read some Cantonese/Chinese material and listened to Cantonese for the greater part of my waking (and maybe even sleeping) hours. X is “did nothing”, circle is “did it fully” and triangle is “half-done”. Doing SRS reps and additions takes 90 minutes or so, listening counts as “full” when it amounts to 10-12 waking hours or more, reading is 60-90 minutes. Listening can overlap with everything else, but for my purposes I consider SRSing and reading to be separate, if related.

I’m noticing that whether or not I do/live/play Cantonese has nothing to do with how busy I actually am, and far more to do with how organized I am that day. In fact, on my “perfect” Cantonese days (all circles), I have been berry, berry busy with other commitments and projects. Also, keeping Cantonese on while I sleep really helps. For one thing, it ensures that there’s no “morning warm-up”, whereby I forget to start doing my Cantonese immersion until, like, midday. It also gets me listening during my half-awake states (like just before falling asleep and just before waking up).

The last day on the calendar is fluency. Giving my fluency a date really makes a difference; it brings it from the realm of dream to the level of an actual calendar event. Maybe you can try making your own Victory Calendar .

Indeed, one thing that drove me to go all the way with Japanese was that I had to be ready to go to a technical career fair at the 18-month mark, where I would have job interviews in Japanese. Money had been paid, air tickets bought and a hotel room reserved, months in advance. Cash and face were on the line. Through the Victory Calendar, I am trying to bring some of that “encouragement”, and concreteness, to my Cantonese process.

That was seriously me keeping it short.

[Edit: here's a copy of my victory calendar].

So, I called the dubbing department, the Disney Department of Dubbing, and spoke to a lady named D-star (not kidding…all D’s). D-star was really nice but said she had no clue about exact transcripts, since they are handled locally (French in France, Chinese in China, etc). But she did say to try “Character Voices”. Character voices were looking for actors…No dice.

Went back to the Disney main switchboard, spoke to a really nice operator named J-star. Asked for the phone number for Disney Hong Kong. He only had the number for Hong Kong Disneyland. Snap. Plus it’s the ungodly-dead-of-night in Hong Kong just like here in Japan. Double snap.

Down but far from out, I called Pixar. The Pixar operator was like “dude, what the Dreamworks are you talking about?”, but she very kindly directed me to Pixar PR. A-star, the lady at Pixar PR, was super-kind, and directed me back to Disney, not just to the switchboard, folks, but to an actual person, name (L-star) and everything.

I have called L-star and reached her answering machine, where I left a message in my best English…I are been learning. Now waiting for her reply. But not passively – I’ve googled (and googled) translation companies in Hong Kong that appear to have done work for Disney. These guys may have those magic Word files of dialog for which we so thirst…thirst…thirst…Durst (dude, German just sounds thirstier). They will be hearing my resonant baritone in the very near future.

Will let you know more as the situation develops. Hey, it’s like this is one of those blogs where things talked about are actual current events! Haha…weird. OK, lates.

1) There may or may not be copyright issues, and
2) Someone, somewhere, already has an actual copy of that script anyway; because something had to be written down to give those (voice) actors. So in the overall scheme of human work, I am doing unnecessary duplication unnecessary duplication..

So, today, I’ve decided to call Pixar and find out who has the scripts for the Cantonese dubs of all those Disney/Pixar movies, and how I can get my hands on them. I already tried the Disney corporate websites for both Hong Kong and the US, but no phone numbers were to be found, anywhere…it’s almost as if they don’t want to talk on the phone (!) . I love Disney and they are very nice people. And kind. And good-looking. And forgiving of snide remarks. And good-looking. Anyway, I’ll let you know what happens as it happens.

• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Gustav Holst – 早晨+木星
• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Mussorgsky – これは何+Promenade.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Daft Punk – 簡單問句+Aerodynamic.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Mr. Oizo – 約會+Flat Beat.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. The Prodigy – 簡單答句+The Way It Is.mp3

I used the program Cool Edit Pro to do it. I’m sure there are free programs out there that can do the job for you. If you’re reading this and you know of such an app or apps, feel free to let the rest of us know. Also, if anyone knows good Cantonese music of any genre, feel free to share. 唔該(mhgōi ).

Cantonese Early Start

One week before Thanksgiving last year (2007), I began some experimentation with Cantonese (but did not inhale? What? 1960s hippie references not funny for you?). The details are going to have to wait, so don’t ask — I’m still experimenting. It did however necessitate a change in how I learn Mandarin.

SRS Question-Answer Pairs Flip/Shift

The way I had been SRSing Mandarin (and Cantonese) was like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

ANSWER (BACK):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0
あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Chinese sentence front, reading and meanings on back. I’ve flipped that slightly to look like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0

ANSWER (BACK):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Phonetic reading[here, green] on the front, actual text representation[here, red] and definitions[here, black] on the back. My task is to produce the Chinese text (and of course know its meaning[here, blue], not give a translation per se but just know what it means), given only the phonetic reading. So far, it’s working VERY well. I’m finding that the readings basically memorize themselves if I’m able to produce the hanzi given only the reading.

Why did I make this change? Well, for one thing it was more fun. I like writing Chinese. But in terms of more “practical” reasons…it prevents confusion for me between Cantonese readings and Mandarin readings in the cases that a Mandarin and Cantonese text are the same which they are when it comes to Written Cantonese. What I mean is, I have this kind of relationship going with kanji/hanzi:

Hanzi→[Cantonese, Mandarin]

But there was too much overlap between the Cantonese and the Mandarin. To prevent that overlap, I have done this:

Cantonese→Hanzi
Mandarin→Hanzi

But, I find that I am still comfortably able to do this:

Hanzi→Cantonese
Hanzi→Mandarin

Not in spite of, but because of flipping directions. I really can’t explain it beyond that. Another interesting thing that I’ve found is that the characters where I was continually having issues with the Chinese reading were also ones where I was actually a bit shaky on the writing. Interesting, huh? [However, I still do think it's advisable to learn meaning and writing before and to the exclusion of the reading, a-la-Heisig. This is because while there are phonetic patterns in hanzi, there are too many exceptions (I think) to make them useful, to an adult at least(?), until after you know the writing. For example 購(gou4) and 構(gou4) sound the same, but 講(jiang3) sounds completely different, despite sharing the same component on the right-hand side].

Another motivation was that I found my Chinese listening relatively weak. But literacy is crucial and I love text. So, what this does is both use and build strength in both writing and listening at the same time. Given a phonetic representation of Chinese, you have to produce the text (and of course in order to produce the text correctly, you have to have understood the phonetic representation). In that sense it’s like taking a dictation.

Could you do this for Japanese sentences/phrases, too? My first answer was actually, “no”. But Momoko said “yes”. And after trying it, I would say, “yes”, too. So, yes. You definitely can, and in fact I would heartily recommend you try, because I think it would do wonders for your kanji production skills and your listening comprehension skills (remember, there are no subtitles in real life). And of course if you can write it given the reading, you can read it given the writing, no problems. So, here’s an example of how you might do things for Japanese:

QUESTION (FRONT):

くさなぎ　もとこ
しんちょう：ひゃくろくじゅうはち　せんち
こうあん　きゅう　か　の　じっしつてき　りーだー。

ANSWER (BACK):

草薙素子
身長：168糎
公安９課の実質的リーダー。

That one’s from the Ghost In The Shell SAC 2 website. One exception to this style of SRS pairs in Japanese is personal names outside the context of a sentence. The number of plausible kanji variations for names like Hiroyuki (e.g. 弘之, 広幸, 裕幸, etc.) and Keiko (e.g. 啓子, 桂子, 慧子, etc.) runs into the dozens and hundreds. You know how it is — everyone wants unique-ish characters for their kid. So, in these cases, I would suggest doing things the “old-fashioned way” for names. Specifically:

QUESTION (FRONT):

中山廣幸

ANSWER (BACK):

なかやま　ひろゆき

That’s the primary method I used to learn how to read Japanese personal (and place) names, and it’s worked very well for me.

Am I going to go change all my Japanese sentences in my SRS? No, too much trouble. But, my Chinese SRS pairs have the property of having full pinyin, so it was easy enough to flip them.

Nota bene: this flipping we’ve discussed is not the same as producing (translating into) Chinese/Japanese given English. I found that that sucked for me, not least because the same phrase can be translated multiple, multiple, multiple ways, so who’s to say what’s correct? One key feature of truly useful SRS question/answer pairs, I think, is to have a very limited number of reasonably possible correct answers — preferably only one plausible correct answer. That way it’s a good, “fair”, useful test. Translation does not allow for this. Plus it ties one to another language too much, which is not a good thing unless you’re laddering…and even then. But I digress.

Make Your Own Books: Printing Out Webpages

This is going to go down in history as a “flash of the blindingly obvious”, but…printing web pages is to a great way to give yourself more or less free reading material in a target language. Especially when you don’t have access to things like newspapers. You can just go to a news website or even the Pedia of Wiki, print yourself and article and carry it around. Best of all, unlike a book, you don’t have to be kind to it, you can mark that thing up with crayola like there’s no tomorrow. Then, when you pick sentences out of it for your SRS, you can just copy-and-paste and save yourself some typing. Yay!

OK, that’s all from me. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other .

The OS is dead! Long live the OS! I’m writing this from my freshly installed copy of Windows XP Traditional Chinese Edition. Let jubilation run freely (does that even make sense?). First impressions…sometimes, I feel like running with my tail between my legs back to my Japanese OS. I’ve been in a Japanese-only PC environment since February 2005, so about two and a half years. In that time, I’ve gotten really used to it, to the point that using an English OS is always a bit of context switch ["編集・・・コピー...Paste...what the English?? Oh, wait, I know English, too..."]. I’ve even gotten to the stage where I can kind of skim Japanese (not yet as quickly as English, but getting there). But now, in Chinese, going back to having to read error messages and program notifications word-by-painstaking-word-to-make-sure-I-get-what-the-heck-is-going-on-
oh-wait-I-don’t-quite-get-this-let-me-go-back-to-the-beginning-and-read-more-slowly-
so-how-do-I-get-the network-up-again? got me a little frustrated. But I’m fine; I’m calm now.

How To Read Books That Are Too Hard For You

So, up until now, I’ve always had a Japanese book with me in my manbag/over-the-shoulder European carry-all. The problem was that this isn’t very good Chinese practice. So, I started carrying a Chinese book. But the ones I wanted to read, while I understood them almost fully because they contain material I’ve previously been exposed to in other languages (they’re almost all books from movies and/or translations of other books), contained too many readings that I didn’t know — I know what the character means, but not the reading. This was discouraging, because I felt that I wasn’t growing: I had tried writing them down in a notebook for later reference, but that failed miserably because I hate going back through old notebooks; I tried looking them up one a time as I hit them, but this is really slow going when you’re on a train, and often required me to have 3 arms). For a while there, I even stopped carrying Chinese books around, since there seemed no point taking them; they were “too hard”. Anyway, by accident, I found a solution for myself.

It’s pretty simple: when I hit a character whose reading I don’t know, I stick one of these tiny sticky labels on it. Then, when I get home, I can go through and collect sentences containing those characters. The cool thing is, I don’t have to feel guilty about not instantly looking up a word when I’m on the road: I know I’ll get to it eventually because I’ve marked it up. Also, it’s much better than pen in that it’s cleaner, it’s quicker, and you don’t have to deface your book (so it’s OK to do on library books — assuming you get removable stickers that come off without taking a healthy chunk of book with them). Plus there’s that great sense of achievement from removing the stickie: it’s like taking off a training wheel or something. The sticky labels are about the size of 1-2 characters — just right to cover a word — and perhaps best of all, you get to see the word in the exact context where you first found it. Finally, it also makes me realize that I actually do know a lot of readings, relatively speaking: in the book I’m reading right now, I usually miss about 1-2 per paragraph, so in that sense it’s encouraging, it gives something of visual-numeric perspective of my current state of knowledge — when I stumble upon an unknown word or reading, I often feel dumb for not knowing it [and busting out a dictionary each time I stumble made it seem like reading takes forever; it made things painful], but seeing that on any given page there are only so many of these sticky labels, it makes me realize that things aren’t so bad at all — in fact, things are pretty good.

Skiving

Funny story — I slack off Chinese to watch Japanese shows sometimes. Japanese has gone from noble endeavour to guilty pleasure. When no-one’s looking, I watch Trick.

So, I’m working on Chinese right now. All Chinese All The Time. Or, “Mostly Chinese Almost All the Time”. Something like that .

You may be aware of how I’ve had an intermittent relationship with Chinese. Starting for a bit, only to stop. So sometimes I wonder: “what’s so different about this time? Why am I going to succeed this time? What about all those other times?”. Well, I proved it with Japanese, so Chinese should be cake, right?

It is, kind of. But it isn’t, kind of. Japanese and Chinese are related, but they are still totally different languages. So again, I wonder: “what’s so different about this time? Why am I going to succeed this time?”. Because I am. Because I decided to succeed. And because there is no such thing as “Chinese”. There isn’t this single monolithic thing called “Chinese” that I am trying to swallow whole. There’s nothing but a finite (yes, there is an end) collection of sounds and symbols that any human being is capable of encoding and decoding. All you have to do is learn these sounds and symbols one at a time. Eventually, you get to the point where you can encode and decode them freely. This, we call fluency. But you never have to tackle it all at once. You never have to do anything superhuman. You never have to concern yourself with the whole. You just have to work on parts. Just be consistent. Just knock in those golf balls/sentences, day in, day out [I like to pretend that my sentences are balls and my cellphone is a club...weird]. Boom. Boom. Boom. The “language” — the whole — will take care of itself, you never have to see or worry about it. All you have to see is this character, this sentence, this moment. That’s all. Quit worrying, quit thinking, quit hoping, quit wondering. Just do. Here. Today. Now. This one. I don’t know if I wrote this for you or for myself. And I know it repeats a lot of what I’ve said before. Oh, well .

Sometimes, I also worry about my Chinese pronunciation. I don’t think it’s bad…it isn’t. But, does it sound indistinguishable from a Chinese person? That, I don’t know. But I realized that the solution to that is just to hear more Chinese, and pay attention to it. There’s no magic to sounding like a native speaker — it’s just acting. It’s just doing an impression while keeping a straight face.

Splitting Audio for Aural Snacking

In a previous project notes post, I mentioned that I would rip the audio from DVDs in order to make a radio play-like experience. What hit me at the time I was doing this with Japanese was how long these were. I mean, you rip a DVD, and a typical movie runs 90 minutes, that means you have a 90-minute mp3. I never did anything about this back then; it wasn’t that big a problem. However, now with Chinese, I noticed that I almost never listen to my mp3 player for 90 minutes straight [not because of Chinese itself, but because my daily routine has changed]. This created a situation where I would hear the beginning of something a ton of times, but I almost never got to hear the middle or end.

…Which is bad for three reasons: (1) it’s boring, (2) it’s boring and robs me of chances to get listening practice from the rest of the DVD and (3) it’s boring and often I ended up avoiding listening to the movies in favor of music. The solution that I came up with was to split the 90-minute mp3 file into what is, for me, the perfect chunk: equal parts of approximately 3 minutes and 30 seconds — the canonical length of a pop song. I then put these audio clips on random shuffle. It’s fun, because of the variety [it's kind of like..."aural snacking" on bite-size chunks of fun, like that cocktail party food with the toothpicks and all the different cheeses and stuff, whatever you call it]; you don’t have to make this commitment to listening to the whole movie from start to finish, but you get to enjoy it in pieces that are long enough to provide great listening practice, short enough that you can’t get bored, and spread out evenly across the entire movie so that you get to hear dialogue from every part of the film even if you don’t invest a full 90+ minutes. Anyway, not earth-shaking, but a fun hack, I think.

There is a completely free program available that does that splitting (an mp3 splitter) here: I looked for a free Japanese one, but to no avail.

1. Get the Chinese version of a movie that I’ve seen before in a language that I’m already good at (generally Japanese, sometimes English)
2. Loop the movie. I’m not doing anything, just sitting back and enjoying the pretty pictures. I do this several times.
3. Start pausing, listening closely, perhaps mimicking dialogue.
4. The main event: start picking out sentences to enter into the SRS (sentence-mining). Again, the pause button receives heavy use. Sometimes I write them down to enter later. Other times I enter them directly — I find direct entry works best, since reading notebooks can be suuuper boring. By the way, I only do this for as long as my energy and concentration allow, which can be anything from hours to minutes.
5. You’re tired. Go back to step 2.
6. Rip the audio of the DVD movie to mp3. I use Xilisoft DVD Ripper for this. The effect is one of having a radio play where you already know what all is going on, and you can just focus on dialogue mechanics rather than plot or setting — this is true in general of watching or listening to a target language version of something you’ve already seen in base language (assuming your target and base are separate). Like everything on this site, it may not be the most earth-shaking idea ever, but I came up with it as a way to give myself Japanese “radio” at a time when I could neither (a) get, nor (b) meaningfully follow Japanese radio. It’s also a time-management thing: watching a film requires you to stay in one place and use both your sight and hearing; listening to audio only requires hearing.
7. Listen to the audio all day while doing other things (and maybe even at night while sleeping), loop, loop, loop.

In each of those repetitions, you will pick up something you didn’t know before. Since you’ll be doing so much repetition, it’s crucial to have fun stuff and lots of it. If you are bored, find something fun. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did — if you’re bored, do something else, just make sure it’s in the target language.

• [internet] 國語辭典簡編本 (The Abridged Mandarin Dictionary, designed for children, it has pictures and you can even get the definition text read out to you. Sweet).
• [internet] 國語辭典 (the Mandarin Dictionary, the big version of the above, both are made by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education)
• [electronic] 現代漢語辭典 (Modern Mandarin Dictionary on my Canon Wordtank V-90; this is a PRC dic)
• [paper] 國語小辭典 (a children’s paper dictionary I bought online from Taiwan). IMHO, paper dictionaries are no good for real sentence-mining and lookups, but they are fun to browse.

So, most of what I have are comic books and Disney/Pixar DVDs in Chinese. I also have Chinese-dubbed Powerpuff Girls, because I love that show; the dialogue is hilarious; the animation is top-notch minimalist and…and yeah. It’s a good show. McCracken and Tartakovsky are unsung geniuses; as far as I am aware, their work was the only thing in American TV animation worth watching during that dark age after both Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles had ended. Am I comparing Dexter’s Lab to Gargoyles? Yes.

I’ve already watched 玩具總動員/Toy Story about 10 times, I looped that “I’ll make a man of you/男子漢” song in 花木蘭/Mulan until people (Momoko) started making death threats. This is what I mean about having fun things to read and watch — you can learn a ton of words and sentences and have fun at the same time. I’ve been singing 男子漢 all night — I’ve even made up a version called 「孫小龍」 (my cat’s Chinese name…long story, but he was “hunting” and doing other manly (that’s sexist…lionesses hunt all the time…anyway) things, so it seemed more than appropriate).

Yes, that’s another personal development book at the bottom. I feel kind of embarassed buying stuff like that, like “what’s the matter, Khatzumoto — you need wittle help becwoming a bwetter pwerson?”, but…whatever, I guess. Actually, if you ever do get the chance, Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog is a really good time management book. Short, sweet, no BS, straight to the point. Speaking of BS, there are of course a lot of shady people in the PD industry. I think part of the problem is that many people treat personal development with a fervor that is essentially religious; they’re looking for a religion — they’re looking for something that is good and true all the time and that they need only believe and obey in order to be happy. The problem is that the PD industry is very much a human endeavour, so it does require you to have your brain turned on and your BS radar working at full capacity. On the other hand, I think it’s immature — literally — a sign of underdeveloped thinking to say that “the PD industry has problems, therefore we should ignore it completely” — very much a baby-and-bathwater way of doing it. Some of its good, a lot of it sucks, and you have to pick out the good — the good authors, the good parts of the good authors’ books, and stuff. I don’t know…That particular PD book in the picture, by the way, has some people in it who are full of crap, so I wouldn’t recommend to you unless you’re happy separating wheat from chaff.

Also, in the past week, I realized that my ability to create a foreign-language environment is…too powerful. I was finding myself going for long stretches of time without ever using Japanese; this had no short-term effect, but I worry that it could stunt my Japanese growth in the long term. I don’t “need” to know any more Japanese than I do now — I can function as an adult — but why not go beyond that, I think? Why not keep building a massive vocabulary? So, in the interests of maintaining and expanding use of Japanese, I am scaling back my use of monolingual Chinese dictionaries — I am going back to using the laddering method, with Japanese as a base language for Chinese. Interestingly enough, though, my sojourn with Chinese monolingual dictionaries has given me a lot of confidence in using them, and sometimes when I’m unhappy with a certain Japanese definition, I refer to a C-C dictionary.

Feelingswise it’s really liberating. Learning a language through another language is so mentally burdensome. It always seems like you’re doing translation in your head. From what I know of Japanese and English, I can confidently say that running a J-E translation in your head every time you want to say something is being recipe for これは is a disaster of Engrish proportionです . Plus there’s all the time and brain cycles spent (wasted) reading ABOUT your target language instead of actually USING it. After all, I’m not in this game to discuss or analyze Chinese, I’m in this game to become the best durn Chinese user since that other guy. If that analysis is IN Chinese, well and good — otherwise, as Ludacris might say: “move, beach! get out the way” [dang, if my sisters read this blog, they'd have a stern word or two for me...].

As for the number of sentences I do per day, I’m not worrying too much about that. I was initially doing 100 per day, because I wanted to be a trailblazer like Wan Zafran. However, it took too long per sentence, and hate to admit weakness, but I haven’t quite built up the mental strength to go for 100 Chinese-Chinese sentences in one day (Chinese-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese would be fine…but even though the quantity would be higher, I think the quality of doing Chinese-Chinese is greater — ultimately, the lack of a crutch (Japanese) is making me use my own “muscles” more). Earlier in my life, this would have led to me feeling bad or even giving up altogether, but that would be silly.

It really demonstrates that the power of an SRS isn’t really on that first day, but weeks and months down the line when your constant practice has given you a gift that is as powerful as it is under-appreciated: familiarity. Perhaps it’s not so much that we “learn” a language as it is that we become familiar with it; we get used to it. Or not, I don’t know.

The other thing this shows is that sentences/phrases can and do come from anywhere and everywhere. The whole world is there for you to learn anew. This is part of why I enjoy learning new things (such as Chinese or ice-skating), because it takes you back to being a child — everything is for the first time again, fresh, waiting to be discovered. I mean, nothing could be more mundane than an order confirmation email — until it was IN CHINESE(!!!). Chinese text is almost magically…charming, wondrous, cool to me, just like Japanese text once was (until I got so used to seeing and reading it that it’s pretty much just text to me now…hmm, actually, it still is charming, just slightly less so).

As it happens, the email contains English, but I successfully averted my eyes from the dreaded Roman script. Plus I used a mixture of Chinese-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese dictionary lookups, with a bias towards monolingual lookups. This only strengthened by belief in monolingual dictionaries — I found a much clearer, more detailed, more accurate explanation of the word ” 則” (ze2) in the monolingual dictionary than in the bilingual. It seems to me that a language is best explained/analyzed “in itself” — or, rather, the best explanations/analyses of any language are generally found “in itself”.

By the way, here is a list of what I bought, to give you an idea of what I’m doing:

• 吃了那隻青蛙 (Chinese translation of Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog. I already own the Japanese version) NT$153
• 動物星球頻道：貓霸王 (A Discovery Channel Documentary on Cats) NT$199
• 玩具總動員-10週年平裝紀念版 (Toy Story, 10th Anniversary Edition. At NT$365, it’s pretty pricey, but then it’s to be expected of Disney. I like getting Disney movies because the vocab is really simple).
• 頭文字D (Initial D, starring Jay Chou!) NT$199
• 模特兒的故事 (A Korean soap opera dubbed and subbed into Chinese. I got it because it’s cheap at NT$199, and it’s the entire show, all 20+ episodes)

Shipping to Japan was an extra NT$353, making a grand total of NT$1458, which comes to JPY5,405 or US$44.40, according to Yahoo.co.jp today.

So, 1 book and 4 movies. All the movies have both Chinese audio and subs. Some have Cantonese as well, which may prove useful down the line. As you can see, it’s a mix of foreign media dubbed into Chinese, and some pure Chinese stuff.

A couple of months back, again at books.com.tw, I bought Chinese translations of Japanese comics. I also got a Chinese comicization of the famous trilogy 無間道 (Infernal Affairs), which was remade into a Hollywood film, The Departed. I haven’t seen the Hollywood version, but for my money, I wish they’d just promoted the original movie in the US; it was already a really, really well made film: great acting, great story, great production values. Maybe someone thought American audiences weren’t ready to make the cultural jump, but that’s not giving American audiences enough credit. 周 潤發 (Chow Yun-Fat) and 呉 宇森 (John Woo) have already successfully shown the world outside of the Sinosphere that there’s more to Chinese action cinema than martial arts.

Well, we’re not here to talk about movies or use English, so off I go back to work.