9 ms·

Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes

198 points by bmj1 14y ago

stralep 14y ago
I have been using their service for Spanish for almost a year... Really useful for expanding your wordlist.
aidos 14y ago
I've always wondered what would happen if you read a big book (like Lord of the Rings) that was translated progressively into another language. So it starts in, say, English and finishes in Spanish. At the start the sentence structure could even be in Spanish form (word ordering-wise) and words are progressively switched to Spanish as the book goes on. Probably wouldn't work at all but it'd be an interesting experiment.
- perlpimp 14y ago
  There is a video of Tim Ferris, where he explained that he used only a few sentences, translated to another language to get grasp of it and guide his learning. I imagine if you would know the book by heart, it would not be that useless. I suppose if the book is interactive if you can "peek" to see which words are which then it might just work!
  - sj4nz 14y ago
    Tim Ferris blogged a guide to those sentences here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/ http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn...
- tomjen3 14y ago
  It would. Not necessarily with a book like that because fantasy tends to have way, way more difficult worlds than ordinary writings. I am not a native english speaker, but I am working my way through A song of Ice and Fire as an audio book. I can keep up with ordinary podcasts just fine, I can keep up with television shows for the most part (extremly heavy accents can be a problem) but I really, really have to listen to the words carefully. I do believe you would be better of with a book that wasn't written as well. Atlas Shrugged would be pretty awesome for this precisely because it has so many repetitions.
  - robotmay 14y ago
    Hell, I'm a natural English speaker (and quite literate), and I still have to pay attention when reading Tolkien.
  - aidos 14y ago
    Ha, yeah, I was just trying to think of a long book. I tried reading Harry Potter in Portuguese once upon a time - quickly learnt that fantasy novels are a hard way to learn a language.
    - tomjen3 14y ago
      The only thing you could choose that is worse would be Shakespeare. I did read one of his stories, but only because I got edition where I could look up almost all the words in a little handy dictionary in the back.
- ColinWright 14y ago
  I had that idea several years ago. A few years ago I hacked about and produced a story that progressively converted from English to Spanish, starting off with single words, then small phrases, then longer phrases, then full sentences. It used a mish-mash of Google translate and the same work but properly translated. It worked remarkably well, but I lost it all in a disk crash and never did it again. I wonder how much of it stuck because I did the meta-work, and how well the actual resulting "book" would've worked. Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921773 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921773
- jamesjyu 14y ago
  Check out this Chrome extension that does exactly this, except for when you're surfing sites: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddj... You can specify the level of immersion, and it uses Google Translate to swap out a certain percentage of words with the target language you're trying to learn. You can then hover over them to see the translation.
  - aidos 14y ago
    Oh my word. I've just installed the extension. That's absolutely marvellous. Nice implementation. And actually, it's similar to my idea except that instead of the large work being a book it's the entire internet! Edit: On closer inspection - it doesn't really work that well because it's too much of a scattergun approach. You really want the words to be swapped out progressively. (Probably starting with the most common - articles etc)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- melling 14y ago
  A nice variation would be to practice the words for each chapter until you learn them then read it. You'd highlight the words you've learned. Words start to get repetitive from chapter to chapter so you'll only add the new words. I created a spreadsheet of words for Harry Potter and Around the World in 80 Days in Spanish. I'd like to do something like this in my iOS app. I'll have to look for some of the classics that are in the public domain. Of course, the translations need to be in the public domain too.
CitizenKane 14y ago
This article unintentionally highlights one of the difficulties in learning Chinese characters, that understanding them and reading them (in Chinese) are two completely different things. While understanding the meaning (Chinese characters are fun to learn!) isn't too difficult, getting to how it would truly be read is more tricky (the Pinyin for Mandarin being hàn zì hǎo xué).
tapiwa 14y ago
Almost reminds me of the Lingua Latina method I used to learn Latin. You basically read a text that is totally in Latin, with occasional images to guide you. It starts off very simply, and gradually introduces new vocabulary and grammar. You intuitively learn as you go along. The books are out of print, but you can still get them on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Pars-Familia-Romana/dp/1585102385 http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Pars-Familia-Romana/dp/1...
- tylee78 14y ago
  Yes, was going to mention it too. It's incredible and works so well... It's basically a khan academy for Latin and a shame not more people know about it. Definitely the way to go if you want to learn Latin the way a roman child learned it :-)
tomjen3 14y ago
That was an interesting idea. To bad it I nearly couldn't finish it because of all the bigotry.
- PommeDeTerre 14y ago
  Lighten up. You shouldn't be getting offended by something as minor as what's in that article.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    If they had been making the same claims against women would you also dismiss it?
tokenadult 14y ago
This is unintentionally an illustration of how LOUSY general (all-languages-included) materials for language-learning are. I am a native speaker of English who acquired Chinese as a second language at adult age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, gaining professional work as second-language teacher (Chinese for English speakers and English for Chinese speakers) and translator and interpreter. I don't like Rosetta Stone materials (as I have seen earlier editions of those) for the same reason that I don't like this Memrise lesson: the lesson is based on frameworks of learning Spanish or French for English speakers, and the lesson doesn't work nearly as well for Chinese, a non-Indo-European language. The astute criticism already given in another comment has full force--the lesson here doesn't do a thing to teach a reader how to pronounce Chinese. Moreover, the lesson totally muffs up Chinese grammar, because "汉字好学" is not a "condensed form" of an expression that would include a copula verb in Chinese such as "汉字 [form of verb 'to be'] 好学" but rather the sole grammatical way to convey the idea in Chinese. Chinese grammar prefers stative verbs to combinations of copulas and adjectives. The word and character etymologies are also treated abominably poorly in the Memrise story. I never advocate filling one's mind with junk just to have memory hooks for learning new information. This approach doesn't lay a good foundation for successful learning of Chinese by a native speaker of English. The tried and true textbooks by the late John DeFrancis from Yale University Press and their accompanying audio recordings reflect an older period of standard northern Mandarin, but are much better resources for learning Chinese than Memrise. Especially, DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader is still the royal road for learning to read Chinese, the subject of the article kindly submitted here. DeFrancis made a very careful analysis of reading difficulties second-language learners of Chinese encounter. That is published in condensed form in the front part of Beginning Chinese Reader, and in full form in the classic article "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. As Confucius said, 學而時習之不亦說乎, so there is no substitute for practice in language learning. Language learning is overlearning, and learning languages well takes time. AFTER EDIT: Two kind replies below raise questions about what I've written above. I was asked about James Heisig. I have perused his books about Japanese (another language I have studied, not as much as Chinese). Doing some looking-up just now to answer the question, I would say that the James Heisig interview http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979 http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979 gives, in Heisig's own words, cautions about using his texts as a comprehensive approach for learning literacy in Japanese. For memory aids for Chinese characters, I much prefer Grammata Serica Recensa by Bernhard Karlgren, a less popular but much more accurate reference book. On the issue of "royal roads" to language learning, I am aware of the work of the Foreign Service language program and of its frequent failings. United States diplomats sometimes attain amazing success in learning languages--I met one once who was the best non-native speaker of Mandarin I have ever met, and who apologized for his Mandarin while saying that Lao is his stronger foreign language--but many United States diplomats are hobbled in their work by poor command of the relevant languages, which plays little role in the selection process for United States diplomats. I'm very respectful of differences among learners and agree with Israel Gelfand that "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages." That said, there is an irreducible body of fact in any new subject that each learner has to learn somehow, one hopes with the guidance of a good teacher. The late John DeFrancis was a very good teacher indeed of Chinese, and by validated test, most of the best readers of Chinese as a second language in my generation came into their reading ability with help from his textbook series. The approach taken by Beginning Chinese Reader is certainly better than that taken by the James Heisig popular books on Japanese, if I may say that to tie together the two kind comments.
eric-hu 14y ago
I grew up in a Mandarin speaking household failing to learn Chinese when my parents tried forcing me to. I forced myself to learn in college for personal reasons. Oftentimes, this was hard, really hard. Having said all that, this page was quite a joy to read. I know all those characters, and the page has one big flaw for learning these characters--the pronunciation. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic way to express the meaning of these characters. If anything, I'd say that it captures the essence of Chinese characters--building up new meaning blocks by compounding basic pictographs together. This is the premise of the Chinese 'radical' system--radicals are the subcomponents of characters like the "child" and "female" characters that comprise "good". Developer aside: the majority of written Chinese is comprised of about 1000 or so radicals. This may seem like a lot, but having learned enough to recognize them has helped me even in development--I feel like I learn hotkeys, plugins and VIM commands a lot faster than my coworkers because I forced myself to learn how to memorize.
- gliese1337 14y ago
  The lack of pronunciation information doesn't seem to me like a flaw; it's just not what they were trying to teach. After all, Chinese uses semantic logographs, not phonetic representations, and lots of different spoken languages use the same Chinese writing system (thus a Shanghainese speaker can exchange letters with a Mandarin speaker despite difficulty actually conversing). Unlike learning to read, write, and speak English, or Russian, or Hindi (e.g.), learning to read Chinese and learning to speak some specific dialect of Chinese are much more distinct tasks, and this is tackling only one of them.
  - eric-hu 14y ago
    But there are phonetic similarities with characters that share the same right-radical. I can honestly say that many intermediate-level characters were easier for me to learn because I knew 2 things: they followed the pattern of symbolic-radical on the left and pronunciation-radical on the right. Learning the pronunciation can help learning to read characters as well.
westiseast 14y ago
it's good - Chinese has an extremely steep initial learning curve, and this would be a good start. I also think the methods are sound (ie. mixing the word in, substitution, the way the actual tool tests you). <pedantry> It does feel very limited. I think you'd outgrow this in a couple of weeks TBH. For example, this article gives 子 as one of the first characters, and says it means "child". It does, but it also doesn't. On its own it is purely conceptual, and only has meaning combined with other characters. If you said "my 子 is 4" then that makes no sense. It can mean bullet (子弹), atom (原子), son (儿子), or a generic "thing" measure word (eg. 骗子, conman). An early learner doesn't need to know the word for 'bullet' or 'atom', but it's not good either to tell them that "子" means child and then they think they can say "child" in Chinese. What's the parallel in English? It's like teaching you "pre-" and saying that means "early", and then you run around saying "He arrived pre-". Why not just teach the word for child (孩子) and then substitute that? Then you learn to recognise meaningful words and not conceptual characters, which is actually the key skill in reading Chinese. You have to start somewhere, but I wish that more Chinese learning tools/books used modern learning methods like these, but with better linguistic accuracy. </pedantry>
- klodolph 14y ago
  Extending this farther, I'd say everything you read or listen to in a foreign language should be in some kind of context, the richer the better. Reading characters outside of their context in words is pretty useless, but reading words outside of sentences isn't that much better, and sentences can be pretty awful by themselves. For example, in English: "Do you have any paper towels?" What does the sentence mean? Context #1: At a supermarket, talking to a clerk. The sentence means, "Please direct me to the cleaning supplies." Context #2: At a friend's house, after I spill soda on the floor. The sentence means, "Please give me some cleaning supplies." Context #3: A friend asked me to help pack for a camping trip, and we're going over the list of what's packed. The sentence means, "I suggest packing cleaning supplies." Context #4: A friend spilled spilled soda on someone else's rug, but is unconcerned. The sentence means, "You should clean that up." Exercise: Come up with a context where the sentence has its literal meaning, "do you have any paper towels?" Pragmatics (as above) are a pretty extreme example, but even fairly plain descriptive sentences can be indecipherable without context. E.g., in Japanese 「本を貸してくれた。」 you know that somebody lent someone else a book and that the speaker somehow benefited from this action, or perhaps feels grateful. It probably very clear in context, but you have to practice reading it with the context. And this is why flash cards suck (not that they're useless...)
Produce 14y ago
Started losing me at: 学字 - creative teaching & boring teaching, I don't understand how those two stack and what they mean in unison. The last paragraph lost me completely.
- alanning 14y ago
  I was disappointed with that section as well. Thought it could have been written clearer to differentiate the two. 学 - study 字 - character So the author actually meant boring teaching of 'characters' with the section on 字 but I don't think it came across well.
  - elliotlai 14y ago
    In my point of view, as a native Traditional Chinese user (I'm from Taiwan) THIS ARTICLE IS SO WRONG! 学 is actually the simplified version of the character 學. And the character 子 in both of these characters doesn't really have much connections The character 子 (literally means children) in 學 stands for "student", but in 字 it is just a rebus (phonetic loan) character.
- raldi 14y ago
  学 means "learn" 字 means "characters"
  - grovecai 14y ago
    >字 means "characters" Not exactly! Single 字 has meanings in Chinese, but single character generally has no meaning in English.
jiyinyiyong 14y ago
You will be confused when there are much more characters to learn. It's not a general rule to learn characters like this. Even Chinese characters might be invented like this 2000+ years ago, the shape of them haved changed for several times. The meaning of most characters cannot be judged by its share. Reading posts on Chinese forums( ruby-china.org , zhihu.com , douban.com , weibo.com ) I think would be benefit, the phrases and sentences used frequently in daily life are always better for people who are still learning, comparing to novels or something like that which contains many language skills. Ancient Chinese is not a good choice, it's a bit hard for a big part of us to read, Though many articles in acient Chinese was teached in school, it is rarely used during conversations. (Like Haskell, it's great but not widely used.) And I speaks Chinese well, I'm worrying about how to learn English well.
- taligent 14y ago
  I wouldn't worry too much about English. Pretty soon it is going to be so dam ezy 2 get way with it lol.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Actually, there are a few books that teach characters through mnemonics like this, going through the first 1-2,000 characters. (The mnemonics don't need to be correct - they simply need to give the right general meaning for that character.) Quite a number of learners have already used these systems to learn characters. Learners don't rely purely on this to read - absolutely not. They learn reading and grammar separately, usually starting with everyday conversations and words. This is merely the initial base to develop a knowledge of characters quickly, and I definitely think it's helpful (though I studied Chinese in school and haven't needed to use this mnemonic approach). （难得见到一位中国程序员在HN发帖。）
  - vorg 14y ago
    Learning the first 1000 Chinese characters are the easiest. Moving from 1000 to 3000 characters is really hard. The first 1000 we reinforce seeing street signs when walking along the road, words in the menus, the newspaper headlines, subtitles on TV shows. But beyond that, we don't see the remaining 2000 in contexts often enough, and need to use flashcards and other more artificial methods to learn them.
stephenlee 14y ago
I'm from China, I think the method for familiar with Chinese characters is creative and useful. But if you want to learn the real Chinese, the most effective method is using it. I often watch the video on Youtube and make tweets on Twitter. And I'm benefit from it for my English. So you can communicate with Chinese people on Youku(like Youtube) and Weibo(like Twitter) directly, though those websites' designs are not so friendly. We're pleasure to communicate with you.
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  A while back I tried signing up for some Chinese BBSes to practice my written mandarin (I believe I tried mop.com and 163) and I found it utterly impossible to figure out what to do. I was expecting something similar to reddit, HN or traditional phpBB sites and it was nothing like that at all. Do you know some sites that might be easier to figure out?
  - creamyhorror 14y ago
    Chinese forums live in the bad old days of the early 2000s. If you're afraid of the plunge, you can come post in the Chinese-language-only section of Chinese-Forums.com; we're a friendly bunch.
  - v-yadli 14y ago
    I would suggest http://www.douban.com/ http://www.douban.com/ Much cleaner user interface (just forget about mop.com or 163.com, those are ancient sites...) Better content, people discuss about books, movies, music and much more(you can try "groups", there're so many with a wide range of topics) And www.guokr.cn -- Geek topics goes here. :-D
    - stephenlee 14y ago
      Yeah, I also suggest douban,Very clean design website.
  - stephenlee 14y ago
    Sorry, as far as I know, we don't have web service like reddit or HN. Like @v-yadli suggests,douban is good site, most of its user is student and young artist(文艺青年).If you want to write long articles, you can try www.diandian.com, a light weight blogger like tumblr.
raldi 14y ago
The amount of rage in these HN comments makes me think MemRise must really be onto something.
nirvana 14y ago
This didn't work for me at all. I think telling a story like that is good, but you gotta tell us what the characters are/mean at some point. You can't just start using them an expect us to get it. At this point I think the character for children is one, the character for characters is children with a roof and the character for learning is an excited child with a roof. I don't know if this is correct or not because the sentence "thus X means Y" doesn't appear before X started getting used... when you have 3 uncertainties in my head, then I stop reading because its hard to know what you're talking about because there's too much you haven't answered, and I don't expect you'll get more clear as I go further.
naush 14y ago
字学 is the kind of confusion you run into only when you learn simplified Chinese. If I have to interpret 学, it looks more to me like a person sitting in a house on fire; whereas the traditional form 學 is a man holding 爻 in his hands in order to learn his fate, hence "learn". Similarly, 覺 is one who sees (見) his fate. Chinese characters are created with all sorts of clues for you to pick up. It is unfortunate that some of these clues got taken away with the simplification of the language. 學 is not only more distinguishable than 学, but takes the same amount of effort to type.
- cloudkj 14y ago
  Well put; I share the same sentiment. I feel that one of the strongest arguments for traditional characters is that it retains the original meanings behind the characters themselves. Simplifying the characters just throws information away. It's a lossy compression!
nemo1618 14y ago
Memrise is pretty cool, I've been using it to learn the lojban gismu and it seems quite effective so far.
VeejayRampay 14y ago
With all the respect in the world for the great nation of China, I keep wondering why people would learn Mandarin. I mean, isn't it time we all go for a common alphabet and language? I'm French, I quite fancy my language, the culture around it and its sophistication, but it's about time we all focus on English. Let's make it as ubiquitous as possible, please. It's just so simple, flexible and expressive...
- splat 14y ago
  If we're after a common language, why not Esperanto? It's simpler than English and certainly simpler than Mandarin.
  - VeejayRampay 14y ago
    Esperanto has a huge bias towards latin-based languages. It's FAR from being universal.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Chinese isn't going away considering how many speakers it has and how influental China is. Even if it would, it would be sad because losing languages means merging different cultures into one big blob of metaculture, losing a lot in process. And not that English is so good as the language. It is simple, yes, but the phonetics are tricky and inconsistent and the dictionary is long (without providing as much utility) and fragmented. Also, being very simple (and limited) is fine for pigdin conversations - least common denominator - but not necessarily a good thing to force on the entire humanity. What if there is actual value lost in leaving aside languages with more complex grammar?
- vorg 14y ago
  The way the Hanzi are introduced in the newspaper article could be the way to go, i.e. embedded within English text and grammar. E.g, your post could be rewritten: "With all the respect in the 世界 for the great nation of 中国, I keep wondering why 人们 would learn 汉语. I mean, isn't it 时间 we all go for a common alphabet and 语言? I'm 法国人, I quite fancy my language, the culture around it and its sophistication, but it's about time we all focus on 英语. Let's 让 it as ubiquitous as possible, 请问. It's just so 简单, flexible and expressive."
adlep 14y ago
I am Polish, but I am convinced that we as a human kind should just pick one language and stick with it. All these languages are there to prevent us from freely exchanging the ideas. With the age of the Internet all of us should just start using English.

198 points by bmj1 14y ago

I have been using their service for Spanish for almost a year... Really useful for expanding your wordlist.

aidos 14y ago

I've always wondered what would happen if you read a big book (like Lord of the Rings) that was translated progressively into another language. So it starts in, say, English and finishes in Spanish. At the start the sentence structure could even be in Spanish form (word ordering-wise) and words are progressively switched to Spanish as the book goes on. Probably wouldn't work at all but it'd be an interesting experiment.

perlpimp 14y ago
There is a video of Tim Ferris, where he explained that he used only a few sentences, translated to another language to get grasp of it and guide his learning. I imagine if you would know the book by heart, it would not be that useless. I suppose if the book is interactive if you can "peek" to see which words are which then it might just work!
- sj4nz 14y ago
  Tim Ferris blogged a guide to those sentences here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/ http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn...
tomjen3 14y ago
It would. Not necessarily with a book like that because fantasy tends to have way, way more difficult worlds than ordinary writings. I am not a native english speaker, but I am working my way through A song of Ice and Fire as an audio book. I can keep up with ordinary podcasts just fine, I can keep up with television shows for the most part (extremly heavy accents can be a problem) but I really, really have to listen to the words carefully. I do believe you would be better of with a book that wasn't written as well. Atlas Shrugged would be pretty awesome for this precisely because it has so many repetitions.
- robotmay 14y ago
  Hell, I'm a natural English speaker (and quite literate), and I still have to pay attention when reading Tolkien.
- aidos 14y ago
  Ha, yeah, I was just trying to think of a long book. I tried reading Harry Potter in Portuguese once upon a time - quickly learnt that fantasy novels are a hard way to learn a language.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    The only thing you could choose that is worse would be Shakespeare. I did read one of his stories, but only because I got edition where I could look up almost all the words in a little handy dictionary in the back.
ColinWright 14y ago
I had that idea several years ago. A few years ago I hacked about and produced a story that progressively converted from English to Spanish, starting off with single words, then small phrases, then longer phrases, then full sentences. It used a mish-mash of Google translate and the same work but properly translated. It worked remarkably well, but I lost it all in a disk crash and never did it again. I wonder how much of it stuck because I did the meta-work, and how well the actual resulting "book" would've worked. Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921773 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921773
jamesjyu 14y ago
Check out this Chrome extension that does exactly this, except for when you're surfing sites: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddj... You can specify the level of immersion, and it uses Google Translate to swap out a certain percentage of words with the target language you're trying to learn. You can then hover over them to see the translation.
- aidos 14y ago
  Oh my word. I've just installed the extension. That's absolutely marvellous. Nice implementation. And actually, it's similar to my idea except that instead of the large work being a book it's the entire internet! Edit: On closer inspection - it doesn't really work that well because it's too much of a scattergun approach. You really want the words to be swapped out progressively. (Probably starting with the most common - articles etc)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
melling 14y ago
A nice variation would be to practice the words for each chapter until you learn them then read it. You'd highlight the words you've learned. Words start to get repetitive from chapter to chapter so you'll only add the new words. I created a spreadsheet of words for Harry Potter and Around the World in 80 Days in Spanish. I'd like to do something like this in my iOS app. I'll have to look for some of the classics that are in the public domain. Of course, the translations need to be in the public domain too.

CitizenKane 14y ago

This article unintentionally highlights one of the difficulties in learning Chinese characters, that understanding them and reading them (in Chinese) are two completely different things. While understanding the meaning (Chinese characters are fun to learn!) isn't too difficult, getting to how it would truly be read is more tricky (the Pinyin for Mandarin being hàn zì hǎo xué).

tapiwa 14y ago

Almost reminds me of the Lingua Latina method I used to learn Latin. You basically read a text that is totally in Latin, with occasional images to guide you. It starts off very simply, and gradually introduces new vocabulary and grammar. You intuitively learn as you go along. The books are out of print, but you can still get them on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Pars-Familia-Romana/dp/1585102385 http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Pars-Familia-Romana/dp/1...

tylee78 14y ago
Yes, was going to mention it too. It's incredible and works so well... It's basically a khan academy for Latin and a shame not more people know about it. Definitely the way to go if you want to learn Latin the way a roman child learned it :-)

tomjen3 14y ago

That was an interesting idea. To bad it I nearly couldn't finish it because of all the bigotry.

PommeDeTerre 14y ago
Lighten up. You shouldn't be getting offended by something as minor as what's in that article.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  If they had been making the same claims against women would you also dismiss it?

tokenadult 14y ago

This is unintentionally an illustration of how LOUSY general (all-languages-included) materials for language-learning are. I am a native speaker of English who acquired Chinese as a second language at adult age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, gaining professional work as second-language teacher (Chinese for English speakers and English for Chinese speakers) and translator and interpreter. I don't like Rosetta Stone materials (as I have seen earlier editions of those) for the same reason that I don't like this Memrise lesson: the lesson is based on frameworks of learning Spanish or French for English speakers, and the lesson doesn't work nearly as well for Chinese, a non-Indo-European language. The astute criticism already given in another comment has full force--the lesson here doesn't do a thing to teach a reader how to pronounce Chinese. Moreover, the lesson totally muffs up Chinese grammar, because "汉字好学" is not a "condensed form" of an expression that would include a copula verb in Chinese such as "汉字 [form of verb 'to be'] 好学" but rather the sole grammatical way to convey the idea in Chinese. Chinese grammar prefers stative verbs to combinations of copulas and adjectives. The word and character etymologies are also treated abominably poorly in the Memrise story. I never advocate filling one's mind with junk just to have memory hooks for learning new information. This approach doesn't lay a good foundation for successful learning of Chinese by a native speaker of English. The tried and true textbooks by the late John DeFrancis from Yale University Press and their accompanying audio recordings reflect an older period of standard northern Mandarin, but are much better resources for learning Chinese than Memrise. Especially, DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader is still the royal road for learning to read Chinese, the subject of the article kindly submitted here. DeFrancis made a very careful analysis of reading difficulties second-language learners of Chinese encounter. That is published in condensed form in the front part of Beginning Chinese Reader, and in full form in the classic article "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. As Confucius said, 學而時習之不亦說乎, so there is no substitute for practice in language learning. Language learning is overlearning, and learning languages well takes time. AFTER EDIT: Two kind replies below raise questions about what I've written above. I was asked about James Heisig. I have perused his books about Japanese (another language I have studied, not as much as Chinese). Doing some looking-up just now to answer the question, I would say that the James Heisig interview http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979 http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979 gives, in Heisig's own words, cautions about using his texts as a comprehensive approach for learning literacy in Japanese. For memory aids for Chinese characters, I much prefer Grammata Serica Recensa by Bernhard Karlgren, a less popular but much more accurate reference book. On the issue of "royal roads" to language learning, I am aware of the work of the Foreign Service language program and of its frequent failings. United States diplomats sometimes attain amazing success in learning languages--I met one once who was the best non-native speaker of Mandarin I have ever met, and who apologized for his Mandarin while saying that Lao is his stronger foreign language--but many United States diplomats are hobbled in their work by poor command of the relevant languages, which plays little role in the selection process for United States diplomats. I'm very respectful of differences among learners and agree with Israel Gelfand that "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages." That said, there is an irreducible body of fact in any new subject that each learner has to learn somehow, one hopes with the guidance of a good teacher. The late John DeFrancis was a very good teacher indeed of Chinese, and by validated test, most of the best readers of Chinese as a second language in my generation came into their reading ability with help from his textbook series. The approach taken by Beginning Chinese Reader is certainly better than that taken by the James Heisig popular books on Japanese, if I may say that to tie together the two kind comments.

eric-hu 14y ago

I grew up in a Mandarin speaking household failing to learn Chinese when my parents tried forcing me to. I forced myself to learn in college for personal reasons. Oftentimes, this was hard, really hard. Having said all that, this page was quite a joy to read. I know all those characters, and the page has one big flaw for learning these characters--the pronunciation. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic way to express the meaning of these characters. If anything, I'd say that it captures the essence of Chinese characters--building up new meaning blocks by compounding basic pictographs together. This is the premise of the Chinese 'radical' system--radicals are the subcomponents of characters like the "child" and "female" characters that comprise "good". Developer aside: the majority of written Chinese is comprised of about 1000 or so radicals. This may seem like a lot, but having learned enough to recognize them has helped me even in development--I feel like I learn hotkeys, plugins and VIM commands a lot faster than my coworkers because I forced myself to learn how to memorize.

gliese1337 14y ago
The lack of pronunciation information doesn't seem to me like a flaw; it's just not what they were trying to teach. After all, Chinese uses semantic logographs, not phonetic representations, and lots of different spoken languages use the same Chinese writing system (thus a Shanghainese speaker can exchange letters with a Mandarin speaker despite difficulty actually conversing). Unlike learning to read, write, and speak English, or Russian, or Hindi (e.g.), learning to read Chinese and learning to speak some specific dialect of Chinese are much more distinct tasks, and this is tackling only one of them.
- eric-hu 14y ago
  But there are phonetic similarities with characters that share the same right-radical. I can honestly say that many intermediate-level characters were easier for me to learn because I knew 2 things: they followed the pattern of symbolic-radical on the left and pronunciation-radical on the right. Learning the pronunciation can help learning to read characters as well.

westiseast 14y ago

it's good - Chinese has an extremely steep initial learning curve, and this would be a good start. I also think the methods are sound (ie. mixing the word in, substitution, the way the actual tool tests you). <pedantry> It does feel very limited. I think you'd outgrow this in a couple of weeks TBH. For example, this article gives 子 as one of the first characters, and says it means "child". It does, but it also doesn't. On its own it is purely conceptual, and only has meaning combined with other characters. If you said "my 子 is 4" then that makes no sense. It can mean bullet (子弹), atom (原子), son (儿子), or a generic "thing" measure word (eg. 骗子, conman). An early learner doesn't need to know the word for 'bullet' or 'atom', but it's not good either to tell them that "子" means child and then they think they can say "child" in Chinese. What's the parallel in English? It's like teaching you "pre-" and saying that means "early", and then you run around saying "He arrived pre-". Why not just teach the word for child (孩子) and then substitute that? Then you learn to recognise meaningful words and not conceptual characters, which is actually the key skill in reading Chinese. You have to start somewhere, but I wish that more Chinese learning tools/books used modern learning methods like these, but with better linguistic accuracy. </pedantry>

klodolph 14y ago
Extending this farther, I'd say everything you read or listen to in a foreign language should be in some kind of context, the richer the better. Reading characters outside of their context in words is pretty useless, but reading words outside of sentences isn't that much better, and sentences can be pretty awful by themselves. For example, in English: "Do you have any paper towels?" What does the sentence mean? Context #1: At a supermarket, talking to a clerk. The sentence means, "Please direct me to the cleaning supplies." Context #2: At a friend's house, after I spill soda on the floor. The sentence means, "Please give me some cleaning supplies." Context #3: A friend asked me to help pack for a camping trip, and we're going over the list of what's packed. The sentence means, "I suggest packing cleaning supplies." Context #4: A friend spilled spilled soda on someone else's rug, but is unconcerned. The sentence means, "You should clean that up." Exercise: Come up with a context where the sentence has its literal meaning, "do you have any paper towels?" Pragmatics (as above) are a pretty extreme example, but even fairly plain descriptive sentences can be indecipherable without context. E.g., in Japanese 「本を貸してくれた。」 you know that somebody lent someone else a book and that the speaker somehow benefited from this action, or perhaps feels grateful. It probably very clear in context, but you have to practice reading it with the context. And this is why flash cards suck (not that they're useless...)

Produce 14y ago

Started losing me at: 学字 - creative teaching & boring teaching, I don't understand how those two stack and what they mean in unison. The last paragraph lost me completely.

alanning 14y ago
I was disappointed with that section as well. Thought it could have been written clearer to differentiate the two. 学 - study 字 - character So the author actually meant boring teaching of 'characters' with the section on 字 but I don't think it came across well.
- elliotlai 14y ago
  In my point of view, as a native Traditional Chinese user (I'm from Taiwan) THIS ARTICLE IS SO WRONG! 学 is actually the simplified version of the character 學. And the character 子 in both of these characters doesn't really have much connections The character 子 (literally means children) in 學 stands for "student", but in 字 it is just a rebus (phonetic loan) character.
raldi 14y ago
学 means "learn" 字 means "characters"
- grovecai 14y ago
  >字 means "characters" Not exactly! Single 字 has meanings in Chinese, but single character generally has no meaning in English.

jiyinyiyong 14y ago

You will be confused when there are much more characters to learn. It's not a general rule to learn characters like this. Even Chinese characters might be invented like this 2000+ years ago, the shape of them haved changed for several times. The meaning of most characters cannot be judged by its share. Reading posts on Chinese forums( ruby-china.org , zhihu.com , douban.com , weibo.com ) I think would be benefit, the phrases and sentences used frequently in daily life are always better for people who are still learning, comparing to novels or something like that which contains many language skills. Ancient Chinese is not a good choice, it's a bit hard for a big part of us to read, Though many articles in acient Chinese was teached in school, it is rarely used during conversations. (Like Haskell, it's great but not widely used.) And I speaks Chinese well, I'm worrying about how to learn English well.

taligent 14y ago
I wouldn't worry too much about English. Pretty soon it is going to be so dam ezy 2 get way with it lol.
creamyhorror 14y ago
Actually, there are a few books that teach characters through mnemonics like this, going through the first 1-2,000 characters. (The mnemonics don't need to be correct - they simply need to give the right general meaning for that character.) Quite a number of learners have already used these systems to learn characters. Learners don't rely purely on this to read - absolutely not. They learn reading and grammar separately, usually starting with everyday conversations and words. This is merely the initial base to develop a knowledge of characters quickly, and I definitely think it's helpful (though I studied Chinese in school and haven't needed to use this mnemonic approach). （难得见到一位中国程序员在HN发帖。）
- vorg 14y ago
  Learning the first 1000 Chinese characters are the easiest. Moving from 1000 to 3000 characters is really hard. The first 1000 we reinforce seeing street signs when walking along the road, words in the menus, the newspaper headlines, subtitles on TV shows. But beyond that, we don't see the remaining 2000 in contexts often enough, and need to use flashcards and other more artificial methods to learn them.

stephenlee 14y ago

I'm from China, I think the method for familiar with Chinese characters is creative and useful. But if you want to learn the real Chinese, the most effective method is using it. I often watch the video on Youtube and make tweets on Twitter. And I'm benefit from it for my English. So you can communicate with Chinese people on Youku(like Youtube) and Weibo(like Twitter) directly, though those websites' designs are not so friendly. We're pleasure to communicate with you.

wickedchicken 14y ago
A while back I tried signing up for some Chinese BBSes to practice my written mandarin (I believe I tried mop.com and 163) and I found it utterly impossible to figure out what to do. I was expecting something similar to reddit, HN or traditional phpBB sites and it was nothing like that at all. Do you know some sites that might be easier to figure out?
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Chinese forums live in the bad old days of the early 2000s. If you're afraid of the plunge, you can come post in the Chinese-language-only section of Chinese-Forums.com; we're a friendly bunch.
- v-yadli 14y ago
  I would suggest http://www.douban.com/ http://www.douban.com/ Much cleaner user interface (just forget about mop.com or 163.com, those are ancient sites...) Better content, people discuss about books, movies, music and much more(you can try "groups", there're so many with a wide range of topics) And www.guokr.cn -- Geek topics goes here. :-D
  - stephenlee 14y ago
    Yeah, I also suggest douban,Very clean design website.
- stephenlee 14y ago
  Sorry, as far as I know, we don't have web service like reddit or HN. Like @v-yadli suggests,douban is good site, most of its user is student and young artist(文艺青年).If you want to write long articles, you can try www.diandian.com, a light weight blogger like tumblr.

raldi 14y ago

The amount of rage in these HN comments makes me think MemRise must really be onto something.

nirvana 14y ago

This didn't work for me at all. I think telling a story like that is good, but you gotta tell us what the characters are/mean at some point. You can't just start using them an expect us to get it. At this point I think the character for children is one, the character for characters is children with a roof and the character for learning is an excited child with a roof. I don't know if this is correct or not because the sentence "thus X means Y" doesn't appear before X started getting used... when you have 3 uncertainties in my head, then I stop reading because its hard to know what you're talking about because there's too much you haven't answered, and I don't expect you'll get more clear as I go further.

naush 14y ago

字学 is the kind of confusion you run into only when you learn simplified Chinese. If I have to interpret 学, it looks more to me like a person sitting in a house on fire; whereas the traditional form 學 is a man holding 爻 in his hands in order to learn his fate, hence "learn". Similarly, 覺 is one who sees (見) his fate. Chinese characters are created with all sorts of clues for you to pick up. It is unfortunate that some of these clues got taken away with the simplification of the language. 學 is not only more distinguishable than 学, but takes the same amount of effort to type.

cloudkj 14y ago
Well put; I share the same sentiment. I feel that one of the strongest arguments for traditional characters is that it retains the original meanings behind the characters themselves. Simplifying the characters just throws information away. It's a lossy compression!

nemo1618 14y ago

Memrise is pretty cool, I've been using it to learn the lojban gismu and it seems quite effective so far.

VeejayRampay 14y ago

With all the respect in the world for the great nation of China, I keep wondering why people would learn Mandarin. I mean, isn't it time we all go for a common alphabet and language? I'm French, I quite fancy my language, the culture around it and its sophistication, but it's about time we all focus on English. Let's make it as ubiquitous as possible, please. It's just so simple, flexible and expressive...

splat 14y ago
If we're after a common language, why not Esperanto? It's simpler than English and certainly simpler than Mandarin.
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  Esperanto has a huge bias towards latin-based languages. It's FAR from being universal.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Chinese isn't going away considering how many speakers it has and how influental China is. Even if it would, it would be sad because losing languages means merging different cultures into one big blob of metaculture, losing a lot in process. And not that English is so good as the language. It is simple, yes, but the phonetics are tricky and inconsistent and the dictionary is long (without providing as much utility) and fragmented. Also, being very simple (and limited) is fine for pigdin conversations - least common denominator - but not necessarily a good thing to force on the entire humanity. What if there is actual value lost in leaving aside languages with more complex grammar?
vorg 14y ago
The way the Hanzi are introduced in the newspaper article could be the way to go, i.e. embedded within English text and grammar. E.g, your post could be rewritten: "With all the respect in the 世界 for the great nation of 中国, I keep wondering why 人们 would learn 汉语. I mean, isn't it 时间 we all go for a common alphabet and 语言? I'm 法国人, I quite fancy my language, the culture around it and its sophistication, but it's about time we all focus on 英语. Let's 让 it as ubiquitous as possible, 请问. It's just so 简单, flexible and expressive."

adlep 14y ago

I am Polish, but I am convinced that we as a human kind should just pick one language and stick with it. All these languages are there to prevent us from freely exchanging the ideas. With the age of the Internet all of us should just start using English.