A lot of people have asked me “hey Khatzumoto, which monolingual Chinese dictionaries do you use?”. And I respond to them in comments, but no one gets to read comments. So here it is, a list of the monodics I currently use.

• [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, the Chinese Project is going really well. I made another shopping trip to my favorite Taiwanese online bookstore. These are new members of my Chinese media collection (except for 玩具總動員/Toy Story, which is an older member):

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.

This is a guest article by Momoko, Khatzumoto’s…how do you say…”special lady”. This was meant to be a regular article, but it unintentionally turned into a book recommendation. In keeping with the other book recommendations, we will later discuss the cons as well as the pros of this book…Probably. Maybe.

At first I was scared sheetless stiff at the thought of using a monolingual Japanese dictionary. My husband encouraged me from early on, but I was very skeptical. I didn’t think I knew enough vocabulary. I couldn’t even understand Japanese children’s books written for 2-year-olds without some serious effort…still can’t; [Note: I attempted to soothe her ego with a reminder that these books are either designed to be read to children by parents, or are written in all-hiragana — which is really hard for even Japanese adults to read. Certainly I find them quite unwieldy — Khatzumoto]. So the idea of looking up a word I didn’t know…only to encounter 10 times as many words I didn’t know in the definition…and then looking all those up only to encounter even MORE new words, and so on, seemed like opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. My husband tried to console me by telling me it would all come around in a circle to the starting point…there were only a limited number of words that could be used to describe a concept. But that just made me feel even more uneasy. If I didn’t understand any of the words in that circle anyway, how was that going to help?

At first I dipped my toe into the swimming pool with the Sanseido dictionary—a ‘concise’ Japanese-Japanese dictionary for adults. But I still found the definitions to be a bit wordy and confusing and difficult to navigate, since the search box works best with hiragana and I didn’t know the furigana on all the kanji. I went back to the trusty kanji-reading “Translate Words” function in WWWJDIC and contented myself with its wealth of English definitions. Once in a while I would salve over my guilt by cutting and pasting the simplest Japanese definitions from Sanseido (that I never fully understood and never cross-referenced). I’d stick them in the bottom of my SRS answers, telling myself that someday I’d know more words and those cryptic definitions would make sense…

But I have finally seen the light. My husband helped me select a Japanese-Japanese dictionary from the bookstore that is made for Japanese children: チャレンジ小学国語辞典（チャレンジ-しょう-がく-こく-ご-じ-てん）/The Challenge Elementary School Japanese Dictionary, published by Benesse, and edited by 湊吉正（みなと　よしまさ）, fourth edition. It has furigana on EVERY kanji in the book (woo hoo!), so I’m never lost in how to pronounce what I am reading or in looking up new words I encounter. The definitions are concise and clear, and there are helpful example sentences for each entry. I’ve been surprised at how much I already do understand, despite my limited knowledge of vocabulary. Sometimes I check my understanding with a Japanese-English dictionary, but usually I’ve already guessed right from the context—the multiple synonyms and the way the word is used in the example sentence(s). [Note: By having simple definitions and furigana on every kanji, this dictionary makes up for not being electronic — Khatzumoto].

And best of all, I no longer see the cross-referencing process as a burden…it’s a bonus—a way to easily and quickly mine new sentences for my SRS. Whenever I look up a word in my Japanese-Japanese dictionary, I enter the example sentence. Then I look up a word that’s new in that sentence (or from the definition) and use the example sentence(s) from THAT, and so on… Life is sweet.

Here is a sample page (click to enlarge):

Today, July 20, 2007, I crossed the Rubicon and went fully monolingual in Chinese. I do sometimes look up a Japanese word to find Chinese example sentences for it. So I guess this, makes me a mix between Steps 3 and 4 as outlined in this post on how to make the transition. As far as I’m concerned this counts as monolingual; any connection to anything but Chinese for Chinese quite tenuous.

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.

A lot of you have posted various quite valid concerns about monolingual dictionaries. Perhaps you’re too slow with them. You have to look up words in order to understand the word you looked up in the first place.Et cetera.

To me, all of that only underscores why we need to be using monolingual dictionaries. If you can’t understand it, it means you need to work on it. Now, sometimes the best strategy with something you don’t understand is to skip over it and pick some other low-hanging fruit. But this is not entirely the case with monolingual dictionaries (monodics? can I call them that?　monodics?).

If it still hurts your soul, all that extra dictionary time you are spending, just think of it this way: at its core, a monodic is nothing but a book — a book written in the language you are wanting to learn. Since, presumably, you are wanting to learn that language, being able to read books in that language is also something you want (need) to do — the fact that a book is in entirely in Japanese is reason enough for a Japanese learner to own it and be reading it. And guess what else? This book, the monodic, is not like other books: it’s self-referential. A self-referential book that contains many if not most of the secrets of the language you want to learn. Sounds like magic — indeed, in a very real sense, it is.

Dude, you’re getting a monodic.

Of course, the main reason I’m learning Chinese is because I love Chinese characters; they’re logical, useful and beautiful. But there is another motivation for this project — it acts as a sort of time machine, taking me back, if you will, to when I was first studying Japanese; this helps me better understand how a beginner thinks and feels, because it is easy to forget — just like I suddenly find myself not having any idea how children think and feel, despite having so recently been a child for so many years.

Of course, Chinese and Japanese are different, but they are similar enough (writing system that is logographic and emphasizes meaning over pronunciation) that methods for learning one can easily port to the other.

Anyway, on to the main topic. So, one of the things that I recommend as part of the method described on this site (and, indeed, on AntiMoon), is to GO MONOLINGUAL. Whatever language you are studying, start as soon as possible to study it only in itself. Only use Japanese to learn Japanese, etc.

But how does one go about making this transition? Well, you could just go cold turkey (I more or less did; the transition was very, very short). But I know at least one person who’s having trouble with that. Since I’m in the process of making a more gradual transition from Chinese-Japanese to Chinese-Chinese, this seems like a good opportunity to explain how to do it.

In the rest of this post (and in future posts), I may make more references to language-learning in general, rather than to a specific language. I feel kind of unqualified doing this, because although I have either been a native speaker of, or taken classes in about 7 languages, I’ve forgotten most of them through disuse and/or violently boring teaching methods. But since Japanese has an unfair reputation for difficulty, we can just pretend I have the right to speak about other languages as well, right? It can be our little secret.

Step 1. Accept that it will be a bit slower to begin with. This goes without saying. Due to lack of practice, you’re not yet as good at the target language as you are at the base language. That’s fine. The reduced speed will be more than made up for by the self-multiplying benefits of studying a language using itself. Looking up definitions of parts of definitions using a monolingual dictionary will deepen your qualitative and quantitative connection with a language no end. Your study of a given language is now using that language — this is a great thing; it means that every moment of your time is now a moment where you are thinking, using and therefore getting better at, the language in question.

Step 2. Just try it. Dip your toe in. Start mixing your lookups in the bilingual dictionary with lookups in the monolingual dictionary. Put monolingual and bilingual definitions side-by-side in SRS entries.

Step 3. Keep using sentences that have a translation in the base language (i.e. sentences from the bilingual dictionary, etc.), but only use definitions from the monolingual dictionary. If you are really stuck and don’t know what a word in the actual definition means, feel free to look that up in the bilingual dictionary — but look go find and use the relevant monolingual entry right afterwards.

Step 4. Out of the baby pool, into the fire (huh?). Go strictly monolingual. All lookups to be made only in a monolingual dictionary. You do not speak English any more. You do not know English.

Regardless of the step you are at, until you feel comfortable doing otherwise, I would include furigana/bopomofo/pinyin for the full text of monolingual definitions (i.e. those in the “answer” section of your SRS) — after all, it’s not like you are trying to test your knowledge of the answer section, so give yourself all the help you need.

If you don’t already have a monolingual dictionary, get one. A lot of people have the idea that they should save things like this for when they “get good”. Bad move. Don’t wait to get good to get materials in your target language. Remember, you get good at your target language by doing things in your target language. Ultimately, native fluency is both the cause and effect of acting native and experiencing things made by and for native users.

Again, if you can, I would just bite the bullet and go monolingual in one shot. As long as you keep using a different language B (base) to study language T (target), your thoughts of language T will be polluted by language B. Your conception of the meaning and usage of words in language T will suffer from language B-style thinking. Perhaps this is fine for a while if you’re laddering languages (in which case your motives lie as much in continuing to improve language B as in language T), but even then, only for a while.