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“Prestudy”: Learning Chinese Through Reading
- prehistacct123 8y agopeople need to go massive input either in country or online having actually learnt to the point of watching news tv shows and reading chinese forums i can say that going the classroom or exam route is a waste of time and money learn the top 50 to 70 chars then start watching dual subtitled programs like cctv4 do it actively meaning pausing rewinding attempting to read subtitles before the speaker etc but never touch a dictionary in flow only much later if you couldnt figure from context repeatedly ie greater than 6 7 context attempts fail 1.5 years and you will be much ahead of anyone else
- archgoon 8y agoHi, that cctv4 looks like a great resource; thanks! Can you recommend any others? Are there archives of cctv4?
- prehistacct123 8y agoyoutube has cctv4 shows going back years and also livestreams https://m.youtube.com/user/cctvch https://m.youtube.com/user/cctvch i learnt chinese pretty much just watching Homeland Dreamland 远方的家 and Across China 走遍中国 from about 2016 to mid 2017 after which i was able to watch purely chinese shows without english subtitles these are travel and tech shows so you learn about people places and lot more than just the language also keeps it fresh and never boring so you never lose motivation for long 100s of hours of content all dual subtitled
- deepanchor 8y agoThis is the ultimate site for learning colloquial, idiomatic Chinese IMO (it has other languages too): https://www.viki.com/explore?country=china https://www.viki.com/explore?country=china It has a huge database of modern Chinese TV shows (ranging from ancient dramas to modern CSI-esque crime). But the greatest part about it is that it has a "learn mode" that provides instant translations when you hover over characters you don't know, and pauses the show automatically [1]. [1]https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/231829048 https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/231829048 Highly recommended.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoI echo this approach. If it is not for the hollywood movies/western RPGs, I won't find my inner calling to conquer English at all. I picked up writing by simply want to have a reasonable discussion with people on the Reddit (well, that was years ago, not sure it is possible nowadays). To some degree, I see there is similarity between how human/algorithm approaches language. The trick is always data-driven: expose yourself/model more to the true distribution, which in this case the society where the language is used natively, the more the better.
- hderms 8y agoIt's clearly worked for you because you are using what I would consider very idiomatic phrases. Good job, this is obviously not easy to do.
- ikawe 8y agoVery nice!
- lalos 8y agoKerrick what are your thoughts on the Pleco flashcards instead of Anki for iPhone Chinese flashcards?
- wibr 8y agoThe big advantage of flashcards in Pleco is the integration with the whole app. If you use the Pleco Reader, you can add new cards directly from the Reader. You can also create cards from dictionary entries and during studying check other dictionaries for each card, play the audio etc.. Some people prefer Anki, but personally I would recommend the Pleco Flashcards for learning Chinese.
- philliphaydon 8y agoI'm unsure how this works, because this technique wont teach you what the English equiv is when 2 (or more) words are next to each other are. For example, COW + MEAT = BEEF. 牛肉 牛 = Cow 肉 = Meat This is a very simple example but there are more complicated words such as Divorce. In Chinese this is 離婚 which is 離 (from or without) and 婚 (marriage) but it's hard to learn that this is actually Divorce in English. Edit: Wife is Taiwanese and I'm trying to learn Chinese.
- Nadya 8y agoIt isn't picking out just the Hanzi - it is picking out words! If you look at the second picture used it detects the top 3500 words from a .YAML file (and expects you to add words that are not detected in the top 3500 words). For example, 離婚 is in the file. - trad: 離婚 simp: 离婚 pinyin: lí hūn defs: - to divorce - divorced from (one's spouse) example_sentences: - trad: 我想她會和他離婚。 simp: 我想她会和他离婚。 pinyin: wǒ xiǎng tā huì hé tā líhūn 。 eng: I think she will divorce him. 牛肉 is not in the file but is such a simple example. 牛奶 made the list though! So I guess milk is more common than beef.
- KerrickStaley 8y agoYeah, the list isn't perfect (for example, 羊肉 is listed even though 牛肉 isn't). 牛肉 isn't common enough to make the list, but for some reason the Chinese government decided 羊肉 should be one of the first 300 words you learn (it's in HSK 2), so it ended up high on my list because my list partially pulls from HSK, in addition to another list called SUBTLEX-CH. In this case, I think actually neither should be on the list, and you should instead learn 牛，羊，and 肉 separately and infer the meaning of 牛肉 and 羊肉 from those. I'll change it.
- philliphaydon 8y agoHow do you learn to infer the meaning of the 2 put together? Is there a method or is it something you just learn over time?
- throwawayperson 8y agoThe ROI of learning Chinese is very low, be careful.
- shinryuu 8y agoThere are other reasons than simple return on investment for learning a language.
- throwawayperson 8y agoThat's totally true, people can learn it out of pure love. But realisticlly, Mandarin is very hard to learn, we learn it here in China everyday until the last day of highschool, the everyday classes of Chinese language is no less than any other major course, that's serious time investment even for native speakers, yet still many college students are basicly asses with it. I'd say the information within it's language world is low quality, large parts of it were translated poorly from English, no where near the English one since it's the world language, so you basicly were reduced to using it for everyday conversation, if you realy want, I suggest you don't invest more than that. And I oppose teaching it in foreign middle schools aside for Chinese American, it's good to dabble in for some basics though.
- harryeakins 8y agoThe ROI of learning speaking and listening is very high. I’ve been learning Chinese for 10 years and have gotten much more out of it than my 6 years learning German. Why is that? Living in England, there weren’t many German-speaking people around so I didn’t get much out of it. Even when I went to Germany, they all spoke English better than I spoke German so we mostly ended up conversing in English. Chinese on the other hand... there are lots of Chinese speakers in most places, and they’re mostly very happy, relieved and even excited to speak Chinese with you. If you ever go to China, speaking Chinese opens you up to a whole host of new experiences. Few people confidently speak English there so you can get a lot of practice very quickly. I do agree that ROI on reading/writing is low, and it’s mostly due to the insane difficulty of memorizing characters. My suggestion: learn how to read and type simplified Chinese. Don’t bother with writing (which interestingly is much harder than typing on a pinyin keyboard), or traditional Chinese (there are tools which convert back and forth between the two of you need
- wibr 8y agoThis is neat! Also useful for this kind of analysis: https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ I'm doing something similar but instead of reading native books I'm still sticking to readers with increasing difficulty so that I don't have to look too many words up while reading. Since the readers also include word lists I can learn almost all of the words beforehand. My reading list (traditional characters) is here: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/44336-graded-readers-by-the-numbers-characterswords-page-count/?do=findComment&comment=438883 https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/44336-graded-rea...
- KerrickStaley 8y agoThanks for the links! Really interesting to see other projects working in this direction. I'll try picking up some of those readers too :) I'm trying to learn both simplified and traditional (but my simplified is pulling ahead right now because of all the work I'm putting in on The Three Body Problem).
- rdlecler1 8y agoOne summer I was running a month long simulation for my PhD and decided to learn Chinese using an undergrad text I found. It had about 17 chapters with 50 new characters per chapter. Normally this would be a two semester course. Using spaced repetition, some books that helped to show the pictographic evolution, and color coding the tones, I was able to go through a chapter a day—granted it took about 14 hours a day. After a few weeks I could read write and speak about 1300 words/850 characters. Reading was the easiest, then, writing, then speaking. Listening was the hardest and one I always struggled with. I don’t have a great memory, but if you have the time, tools, and will it’s very manageable. Usually we lack the time for such an indulgence.
- selimthegrim 8y agoWhich text was this?
- s_m_t 8y agoAfter using what was essentially this technique to learn to read Japanese I'm not entirely convinced it is actually all that useful compared to just reading. I found myself spending so much time in anki that sometimes I wouldn't do real reading at all... And for what? So I would have a chance at being sort of familiar with a character when I came across it? So called "flashcard blindness" is also a real thing. Context is so important when learning, sometimes it was like I had to learn two words, the word I 'learned' in anki and the word in the wild. Even though they were obstinsably the same word somehow they couldn't connect. If this technique did help at all I think the effect was mainly psychological. Looking at a page with a bunch of words you don't know is stressful and demoralizing. Even being able to think that you have seen a character somewhere without knowing what it means can be comforting. It sounds silly but any amount of stress can severely inhibit language acquisition. You might be better off meditating for 15 minutes... Or taking drugs The only thing that seemed to be 100% effective was readimg content that I was completely engaged in. It didn't matter if said content was close to my skill level or way beyond my skill level. As long as I am sufficiently engaged it doesn't matter how many times I have to reference the dictionary or comb google for grammar explanations.
- wodenokoto 8y ago> "flashcard blindness" [...] sometimes it was like I had to learn two words, the word I 'learned' in anki and the word in the wild. Even though they were obstinsably the same word somehow they couldn't connect. I've also felt this problem a lot too, but haven't found a good alternative for self study. Anki/flash card needs to be a support, that uses the minority of your study time, and links closely to the other parts. This is easier when following a class, than when doing self-study. It is so easy to build elaborate flashcard strategies and get lost in implementing them.
- KerrickStaley 8y agoI've definitely experienced what you've mentioned. Learning a word is a two-step process, first you memorize its definition, then you see it in context and its meaning sinks in. But I think both parts are useful. If I just read without flashcards I forget words too quickly, and the burden of looking up words again and again slows me down a lot.
- cgag 8y agoI think prestudying vocab before doing more extensive reading is a great technique and I haven't seen it mentioned much. I've got a rough prototype of a tool for finding unknown words in text with european languages, but you've gotta mark them as known rather than integrating with anki: https://words.sh/ https://words.sh/
- farresito 8y agoA bit of a late answer, but your idea is pretty cool, definitely something I could see myself using if it were integrated in an ebook reader or something similar. For German (and a few other languages, actually), a very good website to fetch sentences and translations from is Linguee. I might implement something similar on top of epubjs-reader.
- gpetukhov 8y agoI use Pleco dictionary for reading Chinese books (read 20% of 三体 so far). There is a built-in copy-paste reader in the app. You copy-paste any book (it's just text) you want and it's possible to look up any word and add it to flashcards, pronounce it, etc. Minimum effort and preparation.
- howlingfantods 8y agoThis is what I do too. In the iOS version, you can directly open epubs. It's great
- KerrickStaley 8y agoInteresting, I'll check out Pleco's tool for this.
- foobarqux 8y agoNice tool. I'm interested in Chinese websites primarily so here is some code I wrote to dump text from a Chinese website. import re import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup url='http://www.36kr.com' r=requests.get(url) soup= BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml') RE = re.compile(u'[^⺀-⺙⺛-⻳⼀-⿕々〇〡-〩〸-〺〻㐀-䶵一-鿃豈-鶴侮-頻並-龎]', re.UNICODE) # txt = soup.find_all(string=RE) txt = re.sub(RE, '', soup.get_text()) print(txt)
- dwg 8y agoI am reading novels in Japanese. My method is similar but without the flashcards. I read a page at a time, looking up and writing all unknown vocabulary in a notebook. There could be dozens of new words on the page. I then reread the same page. Usually I can read the entire page through quickly the second time, because it's fresh in my memory. However, when the same words come up again later I may have forgotten the reading or meaning, so it gets another entry in the notebook (even if I recognize it). After noting the same word a few times, I may start to remember it. The advantage of reading books, in my opinion, is that they tend to use the same vocabulary over and over. You'll eventually remember the most frequently used words naturally. The other advantage is that vocabulary appears in context. This is better for both remembering and for understanding. This is why I don't use flashcards, and just let the book be my study tool. It's much easier to use this method if the book is selected carefully. It should be relatively easy, but still interesting. Something that might be assigned reading in middle school or high school, I feel, are often good examples.
- pouetpouet 8y agoReading full novels is the original spaced repetition tool. Words get reused regularly in context.
- dwg 8y agowell said :)
- bayesian_horse 8y agoYes. Unfortunately, they tend to use tons of words with a lower frequency than once per a couple hundred pages. So it's much better for over-learning on known words, and less good at acquiring tons of new ones.
- mikekchar 8y agoHaving done this many times before (it was my main study method), I'll say that at least for me putting the new vocab in SRS software improved the efficiency of reading dramatically. I changed my process to scanning the text and finding the first 20 pieces of vocab I didn't know. I'd put that in my SRS software (of my own invention because at that time Anki sucked, believe it or not :-)) I'd then memorise those 20 pieces of vocab and then read the text. Every day, I'd do that, and also do my SRS reviews. Every week or so, I'd reread the whole week's text. If it was a particularly difficult book, then I might do the same thing after a month (ie. read the whole month's work). Almost always, by the time I got to half way through the book, I didn't need the SRS software anymore. Authors tend to use the same vocab and grammar over and over again. So I could read several books written by that author with almost no difficulty (although it depends on the level). Anyway, what I found was that this was the fastest way to bootstrap me to free reading. If I didn't memorise vocab as I went, then I'd need to look up stuff for the entire book (and beyond). But if I did memorise vocab, then I could easily get to a point where I'm just reading casually without any desire to look stuff up. Studies (which I don't have pointers to at the moment, unfortunately) have shown that you need 95% comprehension (on average) to learn new vocabulary and grammar from context. So the key is to get yourself there (in the context of what you are reading) as quickly as possible. It makes a big difference.
- peteretep 8y agoThat is _awesome_. I've been wanting to do exactly this for Thai Wikipedia for quite a while, but you have some serious issues with identifying words in Thai.
- yorwba 8y agoWhen I want to segment words in some language, I usually check what Apache Lucene does. In this case, the Thai tokenizer [1] simply uses java.text.BreakIterator [2] and hopes that Thai is supported. [1] https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=lucene-solr.git;a=blob;f=lucene/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/th/ThaiTokenizer.java;h=53f71699f2f9041bbdaab2d450e9315a6545cce9;hb=HEAD https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=lucene-solr.git;a=... [2] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/10/docs/api/java/text/BreakIterator.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/10/docs/api/java/text/BreakIt...
- peteretep 8y agoFantastic tip, thanks
- freshfey 8y agoVery interesting article. I'm trying to learn Mandarin with a focus on speaking and conversating (using Memrise 2x per day for 15min). Would this help as well? Reading seems to me like a much more difficult project to tackle.
- KerrickStaley 8y agoI've always been a visual learner and listening and speaking never really did it for me. Reading, though harder because of the character system, has helped cement vocabulary and grammar in a way that speaking and listening didn't. My speaking and listening are getting better by osmosis too.
- tralarpa 8y agoJust a word of warning to all HN readers who plan to follow the author's method. It is a quite painful way to learn a language, especially Chinese. I have learned a language (not Chinese) in this way, but I doubt that it is more efficient than following a decent language course (which are, unfortunately, very rare for Chinese. That could explain why the author did what he did). First of all: Don't start reading a real book from a too low level. It's absolutely fantastic that the author has the energy and perseverance to attack a real book, but it can quickly end in frustration for most people. The author says he passed HSK4. Let's assume that his Chinese was actually a little bit better than HSK4 which would correspond to a vocabulary of around 1800 words. This sounds a lot but it's actually...nothing. I can only assume that his real level was significantly higher than HSK4, otherwise he would have seen many more than 5-10 new words per page (20 or 30 per page would be more realistic for the first 50 pages in my opinion). Second, in my experience, even if you know all words of a Chinese text, you are still very far from understanding it. The grammar is a bitch. What will probably happen is that you will stare at what you assume is a sentence and wonder whether you accidentally got some old edition where the characters are printed from right to left or vertically. It's a pity that the author has solely focused on vocabulary acquisition in his article. That could give readers who only know Indo-European languages the impression that Chinese is somehow like Spanish (or even Farsi) where the sentence structure is similar enough to English and where just knowing the words can be already enough to enjoy a book. (Edit: language)
- PavlikPaja 8y agoAnd Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Far from looking up every other character or so. Only a few % of encountered characters are not among the first 2000. I thought of trying to read the three body problem along the audiobook, however the one I found online doesn't seem to contain all the chapters.
- yorwba 8y ago> And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Learning Chinese based on characters is going to be very frustrating. Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word. In the SUBTLEX-CH frequency data, 94% of characters are among the top 1000, but only 82% of words. So it's quite common to see a sentence where you know all the characters, but don't understand it because you don't know how they group into words.
- EmmaRoll 8y agoReading Chinese is the best apparatus to expands your vocabulary: Without reading, it's by difficult to effectively increase new vocabulary all alone. The way toward gaining vocabulary expects you to retain another articulation and the relating meaning. While understanding, you will experience another word, you will find it in a lexicon and you can make a cheat sheet to reexamine it later. Certainly, you can watch motion pictures or tune in to Chinese discussions rather (and you should), however perusing gives you significantly more control over your advancement. You can <a href="https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find this</a> more information
- EmmaRoll 8y agoReading Chinese is the best apparatus to expands your vocabulary: Without reading, it's by difficult to effectively increase new vocabulary all alone. The way toward gaining vocabulary expects you to retain another articulation and the relating meaning. While understanding, you will experience another word, you will find it in a lexicon and you can make a cheat sheet to reexamine it later. Certainly, you can watch motion pictures or tune in to Chinese discussions rather (and you should), however perusing gives you significantly more control over your advancement. You can<a href="https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find this</a> more info.
- EmmaRoll 8y agoReading Chinese is the best apparatus to expands your vocabulary: Without perusing, it's by difficult to effectively increase new vocabulary all alone. The way toward gaining vocabulary expects you to retain another articulation and the relating meaning. While understanding, you will experience another word, you will find it in a lexicon and you can make a cheat sheet to reexamine it later. Certainly, you can watch motion pictures or tune in to Chinese discussions rather (and you should), however perusing gives you significantly more control over your advancement. Yoy can <a href="https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find https://wildessays.com/services/buy-college-essays">find this</a> more information about education.
- peterburkimsher 8y agoI wrote https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io to add spaces between words, pinyin, the literal translation for each word, and a parallel English translation when available. It also has support for simplified/traditional conversion, bopomofo, Taiwanese and Cantonese, and typing from pictures. The most useful texts are bilingual. For me, I was reading the Bible, song lyrics, comics, and subtitles. I want to upload those, but I've been threatened with copyright issues.
- cromwellian 8y agoI estimate I'm currently at HSK3, but I have not read any Chinese books or novels except childrens books. I would imagine that an adult Chinese novel probably contains a lot of idioms (成语）and these have to be recognized 4 characters at a time, the meaning won't come from just knowing the meaning of the individual characters. Think of an intermediate English reader encountering the phrase "piece of cake", or "cakewalk", or a phrase like "bite the bullet" Part of my difficulty learning Chinese is I taught myself, primarily by studying vocabulary, and learning characters, not practicing conversation with other people and I think this is a bad way to start. It's much better to put in far far more speaking and listening practice than reading/writing. I didn't do so, and now I can read Chinese text and communicate in chat, but have difficulty listening. And that's a shame, because I think once your listening skills gets reasonable good, you can start watching Chinese TV and Movies, and bootstrap a lot faster -- and in an entertaining way that seems less like mentally taxing work.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoReading novel is always difficult. Having lived in an English-speaking country for many years, and communicated fluently with locals, even in certain cases passing their radar without being identified as foreigner, it is still pretty hard to read a reasonably popular English novel. The words they use, the rhetorics are all so different from everyday spoken language. In case of Chinese novel, depending on author's style, if you are not reading those period novels, the idioms will not be a huge problem. Although I do see that since the flexibility of the Chinese language, author tend to create new combinations of characters into their own vocabulary to keep the their language fresh, which might be low-effort to the local readers but might present great challenges to language learners.
- ofrzeta 8y agoDoes anyone have experience with methods like Michel Thomas or Rosetta stone learning Mandarin?
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoI wonder if the author's tool can be generalized to be used for other languages.
- baby 8y agoI’ve been trying this technique via two apps: * duchinese * wordswing I tried also: * special books: but it’s impractical as they usually translate not enough words at my level * webpages with perapera plugin: font is too small, translation is unaware of context and the texts I found were not easy to read
- dgacmu 8y agoAuthor, since you're commenting: you have the pinyin for San Ti wrong in the first line of your first major subsection. San is first tone, but it's marked in your post as 4th. (you have Ti correctly in 4th)
- k__ 8y agoSounds like a good technique. Get a book that is written in conversional language and learn the vocabulary of a page before reading it. This probably neither gets you speaking and writing in that language, but being able to read it is a good start.
- de_watcher 8y agoSoftware developers should be more efficient with symbols. This approach may actually work better.
- zmh 8y ago>It also only supports texts with simplified characters. I’ll eventually add support for traditional characters. The silver lining is that when you add a flashcard for a simplified character, you’ll also get a flashcard for the traditional character. It’ll be suspended by default so you’ll have to unsuspend if you want to study it. This goal is difficult the way you put it. In Chinese, besides reduction in strokes, a number of traditional characters (of different or similar meanings but mostly pronounced the same) are converted into one simplified character. In other words, traditional character set has a n-to-1 relationship with simplified character set. For most characters this n=1, but you would also see n=2,3... quite often. For this reason, you would often see articles awkwardly converted from simplified characters into traditional characters when it's done automatically. The other direction--traditional character to simplified character conversion--has no such problem.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoI don't believe it's a very good idea to start reading "god-mode" texts in a foreign language until you can get to something resembling a smooth reading flow. A couple of new words per page is ok, a couple of new words per sentence isn't. One of the keys is to NOT look up every unknown word. You'll figure out which ones you need and which ones you don't. Next important secret: Don't write down the words. Instead, reread the pages a while later, and see if you can remember it from the context. If not, look it up again. Anyway, until that stage flashcard based methods are faster and I find it easier to stick with that. I recommend "Decipher Chinese" for beginning to advanced Chinese learners. Also Duolingo has a nice conversational-based course, though I recommend using something else to get a grasp of the first maybe 400 characters. You need to know how characters work. You really need to write them with your hands, either with pen and paper or on a tablet/phone. My theory is that this is necessary for an efficient "neural encoding" of Chinese characters. They are designed to be written in a certain way, as if you had a wet brush in your right hand.
- vonnik 8y agoFor any one learning Mandarin, the best advice I have is: don't start with reading, start with speaking. The Michel Thomas method has worked pretty well, much better than Pimsleur, for me: https://www.michelthomas.com/ https://www.michelthomas.com/ And the Yale "Speak Mandarin" series with romanized Chinese is also really helpful. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak-mandarin-textbook https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak-mandarin... Learning Mandarin, overall, carries a much higher cognitive load than, say, Spanish, because the sounds don't map to 26 letters. They map to 1000s of characters that must be memorized. This makes reading a much less useful way for a beginner to approach a language.
- Timmah 8y agoThere is no language called "chinese". I'm surprised to see this faux pas in a teaching resource.