Recently over on the le das Twitter, the great @papajohn and I have been having a ball using Chinglish with each other.

Below are some samples of our exchanges. John’s messages contained classified information, so I shan’t reproduce them here. Oh, I didn’t tell you? Yeah, we’re totally spies, dude. What, you didn’t think it was a little weird how invested we were in this whole language deal?

Aaah, screw it. I’ll reproduce the parts of papajohn’s communication that have no operational significance. Observe that John and I have generally used one language’s syntax with the other’s vocabulary, but we have stretches of full-on Chinese. We also switch across Mandarin and Cantonese, but that’s another story.

John’s Mandarin isn’t actually “transitional” — AFAIK, he’s a Mandarin princeling — but mine more or less is. Furthermore, we’re both native speakers of English _{[...oh wait, I forgot -- apparently, according to some people, I'm not ]} so…we have English thoughts _{[That doesn't sound dodgy...no siree]}, but we also have Chinese thoughts, having been raised Chinese since the age of twentysomething . A lot of, at least, my motivation, is to communicate directly to the heart and not just the head, so this sometimes becomes a factor in choosing which language gets to be the substrate or lexifier at any given time.

Too many smilies.

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@papajohn
I think I’m too 文字 focused. Worked great for 普通話, but I think treating 粵語 like some kind of 部落方言 would work better.

@ajatt (that’s me)
No ur absolutely 啱呀 雖然有文字 但係亦都有一個好大嘅部落方言/不立文字嘅element
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@ajatt
Glad you enjoyed the link. It’s hard to tell how 有用 a link is to other people! I’m prone to 想ing that everyone but me 已經 知道ed about it
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@papajohn
Amazon.cn hey? I’m a Dangdang man myself. Does this mean you’re riding the 簡體 train?

@ajatt
哈哈 梗唔係啦！只不過係因爲台灣嗰邊 除咗動畫之外 都冇歐美電影嘅國語配音版DVD可以買。 咁所以冇辧法囉～。仲有Amazon.cn好平添。大陸萬歲！呵呵

@papajohn
哦，明白了。大陸的配音是不是跟臺灣的有所不同？我一直覺得臺灣的配音很柔軟、可愛似的。大陸配音北方人多：）
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John and I started doing this to save space on Twitter, because Chinese characters can communicate more information in less space. In 140 kanji, you don’t even have to be pithy; yous can writes yourself a whole mini-essay!

I wonder whether such a mixed approach to output (and maybe even input?) might not be a great way to ease into 使うing your target 言語anguage(?)

In the past, it would appear that a lot of 教育ducation systems around the 世界orld have favoured a cold-turkey approach to second-language/basilectal/dialectal learners of a target language. Barring cases of forcible acculturation, the intent behind this was good — the system designers didn’t want to further encourage or create dialects/pidgins/creoles, so they went straight for the goal.

However, I did recently read about some mixed-usage graded readers for children who are native speakers of the Ebonics dialect of English. If I recall correctly, the readers are initially mostly in Ebonics, and gradually introduce more and more acrolectal [is that even the right word?]/Standard English usage until they are written completely in Standard English. Apparently, they were really successful in getting kids reading acrolectal English with ease and fluency. _{[As it turns out, according to some linguists, Ebonics is not mere slang; it's actually an entirely self-contained logical-syntactical system, with a relationship to Standard English akin to that of Schwizerdütsch to Hochdeutsch].}

And that just seems to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, mixing is, of course, “impure”, heterogeneous, asymmetrical. And that kind of thing doesn’t appeal to the little zealot inside all of us, that binary part of us that wants everything just so. But at the same time, there’s just something very natural and organic and logical and workable-seeming about the whole idea.

Human beings, more often than not, need to be eased into things, I think. Put another way, there’s far less likely to be a rebound — much like an organ transplant rejection — if the transition is gradual rather than sudden. Accomodating this apparently natural tendency can seem like a sort of half-buttocked mishmash compromise (and it can end that way if the transition window stops moving), but ironically enough it can also lead to rain on wedding days, free rides when you’ve already paid, and true, permanent behavior change in a way that coercion often does not. Coercion produces resistance. Well-executed gradual change can bypass this resistance completely.

Frog in hot water. Frog in water that gradually gets hotter.

This gradualism thing, we are seeing, is true of children, and I think it may be even more true of adults. Not because adults are less malleable or resilient than kids or any other ageist crap like that, but because adults have the power to resist and escape. I’ve seen this with training my two cats, who are of different ages: it’s not actually “easier” to train kittens — they have short attention spans and less background knowledge — but kittens aren’t as strong as adult cats, so you can…you know…literally put them right where you want them. With adult cats, on the other hand, you kind of have to coax and negotiate and reason, otherwise you will get the scratch, motherlover.

Babies can’t turn off their immersion environment. Babies can’t build their own gaijin bubbles.

So, kids, 次回ext time you’re at a loss for 詞words…try mixing 言語anguages. Of course, you want to get to the stage where you use or can use just the one. But for now, treat it as a phase you’re going through.

To tell you the truth, I’ve already done this mixing before, but in analog form — when I was in college, I would take coursework notes in a hybrid kanji-katakana-Latin [in order of priority/abundance] shorthand, making and using words very loosely in a highly personalized, idiosyncratic sort of way; I’d often make up original kanji compounds on the spot.

When you think about it, until your vocabulary matures and fills out, you’re already a de facto “transitional user” of your target language. The only question is: do you now recognize and exploit this fact, or do you suppress it out of fear of the risk involved? As it is, with conventional methods, many people give up learning their target language and thus remain “transitional” for life anyhow. But acknowledging this “middle passage” through language-mixing may have the paradoxical effect of carrying more people through to full fluency than a strict language separation.

Anyway, food for thought. Anyone with information to share, go ahead and 發言launch words! Oh yeah — sorry for being autological; I know that annoys some people. Or maybe it’s my inner purist that’s annoyed. Yeah, it’s probably just me. Oh well…

To all tha haters that sed we wuz whack. That sed “hanzi be rockin’ semantic-phonetic duality, son… ideographic component analysis just won’t work — I played Othello at Cambridge!”; that sed we couldn’t represent no more. Well here’s a big BOOYAKASHA from Timothy “Tha Killa” Richardson and James “Old Kanji Bastard” Heisig, two thugs with PhDs in school but also in life, cousin. That’s right. Thirty years after the first Remembering the Kanji hit the streets of Compton and sparked drive-by arguments ["Oh, Reginaaald...? I disagree!"] from Osaka to Oakland, Remembering the Hanzi is out, just in time for Kwanzaa.

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.

Just so we’re clear on this: gigantic, Microsoftial sums of money changed hands before this article came up. This, people, is what ska fans call “selling out”…What else, oh yeah — you need one of these! Buy one or you’ll never know happiness! In fact, buy two!

I’ve previously discussed Japanizing your environment, and part of that Japanization involves covering your walls with kanji. The kanji posters I had on my walls back in the day were from Rolomail and zhongwen.com, respectively. The Rolomail one comes on three separate sheets and is used in Japanese schools; it comes in phonetic order; you need to laminate it yourself if you want to protect it. The zhongwen.com action was a case of me photocopying the index of the book, blowing it up to three or four sheets of 11″x17″ paper, and then laminating it.

Now something better has come along. Brought to you by people other than the people who brought you Jurassic Park — Paddy, a reader of this site and — it’s KanjiPoster! A massive 23″ (58cm) wide, 37″ (94cm) long wall of Japanese kanji goodness. Now, what’s so good about a KanjiPoster kanji poster?

1) It comes in Heisig/Remembering the Kanji (RTK) order. In that sense, I think it is the first of its kind. At the very least, it is the first such product I have come across. Most kanji posters come in either phonetic order or, worse, scholastic order, and generally only have relatively few characters on them.

2) It’s got kanji on it. That should be enough right there.

3) It looks sweet.

4) Contains all general use kanji and then some (over 2000 in total).

5) It’s a single poster. One poster to rule them all. All the other kanji posters I have ever made, bought, or seen are in fact not one poster but a set of multiple posters.

6) Having one of these around is very motivating. It’s like a big, in-your-face, concrete, visual tracker of your progress through Heisig’s book — a great example of posting your goals where you can see them. Even if you’re already done with RTK, having one of these around acts as a free review of what you’ve learned. Every time you cast your eyes on KanjiPoster, you’ll be reinforcing your connection to the characters. Having a bad kanji day? A glance at KanjiPoster will remind you how far you’ve come, and reassure you that while the task may be large, it is definitely not infinite. Having a good kanji day? Let everyone know — mark up your KanjiPoster (KanjiPoster is laminated, so you can write on it with a dry-erase marker) and show your friends, family and innocent bystanders just how much kanji tail you kick.

In fact, the only thing KanjiPoster doesn’t have is readings and keywords. It’s just the characters. Adding more information would probably have made things too cluttered or too big to fit on a single sheet. So, I don’t see this as a big loss.

What are you waiting for? Get a kanji poster already! Do it for the children .

[Everybody needs one kanji poster to rule them all; one kanji book or website to learn them; one SRS to review them all, and into the brain burn them -- including kids learning Chinese. So watch out for a Chinese version (HanziPoster?) in the geologically near future. As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, KanjiPoster is developed by Paddy, who reads this site, and is therefore very handsome in addition to being totally cool. He's always looking for ways to improve himself and the product, so if you have any requests or suggestions, he'll be happy to hear from you].

此間、CajunCoderと名乗る人に「おい、勝元。日本語で記事書いたらどうだろう！？」って言われた。困ったなぁ。

実はこのブログを始めた途端、全ての記事を日本語で書こうと思っていたし、自分の執筆にも自信があった。しかしそれは恐ろしい現実に気付く前だった。

自分の文章が下手だという現実。

下手だけど頑張って向上しようとしている。今回、その向上方法を紹介する。

●先ず、文章をたくさん読め！
人間は電卓だ。正しく入力されれば正しい出力が出てくる。当然その反対もあって、入力が駄目だったら出力も駄目だし、入力が少なければ出力も少ない。日本語で書かれたメールを読んだことがあるか？ブログは？論文？読んでいないなら、自分で書くのをやめよう。

良い日本語をたくさん読んだり聞いたりしない限り、良い日本語は決して話したり書き出したりできない。だから日頃の読書を欠かさずやりなさい。読んだ量が多い程、書いた質が上がる。

●練習として短い文を書け！
メール・日記・漫画なんでもいいので、とにかく毎日100～400文字程度書きなさい。しかし・・・

●書いた物は必ずネイティブに読んで訂正して貰え！
子供の頃を覚えているか？どの文章も親もしくは学校の先生に訂正して貰っていただろう。我々ネイティブでない人間を日本語で表現すると「子供」に当たり，ネイティブ＝スピーカーは「親」であると言える。肉親と同様、日本語の親の役割は子供なり我々を正しく育てることである。具体的に言うと、「訂正」すること。

日本は「お世辞大国」で、日本人は一番進化した「お世辞動物」って言っても過言ではない。従って、「お前、ここ直せ」って自然に言ってくれる日本人は居ない．だから躾が必要。幸い、その躾がとても簡単で、「私が間違えたら、直ぐその場で厳しく訂正して下さい」と何度も言えば十分だ。繰り返した数だけで、相手が本音を漏らし始め、訂正を行う。これは話し言葉にも書き言葉にも当て嵌まる方法。

悪い習慣を定着させないために、やはり子供に返るのだ。書いた文章を必ず「親」に訂正して貰いなさい。それから「親孝行」の意味で、訂正されたポイントをキチンと吸収して、SRSに入れて、二度と同じ間違いを繰り返さない。間違いというのは死ぬまで犯してもいいが、同じ繰り返しは馬鹿馬鹿しくて許されない。

●専門家の意見を求めよう。文章向上に就いての本も読め！
文章を向上させるための本があきれるほど一杯あり、どれを買ったらいいか分からない。こうした中で、救世主のような本がある。この一冊を読んで実践するだけで、少しずつ文章の達人になれると思う。他にいい本もあるけれど、初めの一冊としては本多勝一著の「日本語の作文技術」を是非お勧めしたい。

以上、「日本語での文章を上手くする方法」だった。また今度ね！