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[JLS]

Chinese question:

I also came across 地 in this sentence: 彼得拼命地逃跑。I see the "de" sound again, but this time it is 地, and not 的 or 得。What's different with 地?

[jeff_lindqvist]

I think I read something about that in Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar (now hidden somewhere in the mess ...). 地 makes an adverb from an adjective along this pattern:
Subject + Adjective + 地 + Verb
彼得 + 拼命 + 地 + 逃跑
Bǐdé + pīnmìng + de + táopǎo

A bit like adding -ly to the adjective:

他 + 轻声 + 地 + 说话
Tā qīngshēng de shuōhuà

(He + quiet + ”-ly” + speaks)

[JLS]

I think I read something about that in Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar (now hidden somewhere in the mess ...). 地 makes an adverb from an adjective along this pattern:
Subject + Adjective + 地 + Verb
彼得 + 拼命 + 地 + 逃跑
Bǐdé + pīnmìng + de + táopǎo

A bit like adding -ly to the adjective:

他 + 轻声 + 地 + 说话
Tā qīngshēng de shuōhuà

(He + quiet + ”-ly” + speaks)

That makes perfect sense. Thank you! It seems the "de" sound frequently occurs in context of some kind of modification.

天上的（de）星新
彼得拼命地 （de）逃跑
他的心跳得 （de）很快

However, 得 may have the second tone is some contexts, like it does in the name 彼得。In the sentences I provided, the pinyin indicates that "de" is atonal in each instance.

[JLS]

What happened to Japanese?

I started on Japanese, and I do little bits with it here and there. However, considering how I have the ball rolling on Chinese, I decided to give that priority. I probably won't make a "fluent in 2 years" goal (not that this is possible), but maybe I'll have something to begin with when the time is right to take on Japanese full force.

Chinese vocabulary project
I'm working on a project to list in Microsoft Excel all the vocabulary I have learned from Chinese resources, including classifications such as noun, verb, adjective, and sub-categories like color, place, occupation, etc. I'm good at sorting and sifting in Excel, so I can automatically create sorted specific lists. That is, if I want to review my animal list, I know how to pull up all the animals I've learned in one short list. Same with colors, occupations, etc. Might also be good for me to include the sentence in which I heard the word.

Granted, it means going over words I know quite well; but it's a good way to get at words I don't know as well. Also, I'm trying to gauge what I really know. This will provide something of a word count for all that I have learned.

Don't be too proud to go over basics. The better ingrained and instinctive the basics, the better structures you can build on them.

[JLS]

Chinese Listening Recognition Progress

I've been using children's materials to study Chinese. I just turned on a children's video I had not listened to in a long time, 小红帽. When I had listened to this before I understood none of it. Although I know the story which helps, I'm recognizing several words that I've studied from other materials. A small but real, tangible milestone of progress in the journey of Chinese.

I've noticed other things. Sometimes the character addresses include the sound 啊 at the end, which I understand is to soften and make friendly. Other little things are pleasing, such as picking up the character's greeting to 奶奶 as 您 and not 你。These show progress.

When you start a language and you listen to any material, it sounds blitzing fast. Chinese sounds much more even-paced to my ears than it used to.

But I've noticed too, I still tend to think of Mandarin in a monosyllabic fashion, although I know it's not. Maybe because I'm used to words composed of multiple syllables being separated by spaces in text.

I'm noticing that the wolf (when pretending to be 奶奶) addresses 小红帽 as "baobei." I expected "baobao." When he says 你 it sounds like "ni-e." Is this a diminutive?

Chinese word Excel list

I'm still working through that Excel list I mentioned in my last post. I'm not done with the listing of words I've gotten so far from 彼得兔的故事, but so far it's about 120. When listening I certainly understand them all, and it looks like I'm picking out words when I hear them elsewhere. It's a bit exhausting to come up with a list like this, but it's getting me to think on every word. I don't think we should be embarrassed to do exercises at this level. Bigger stuff is made of smaller stuff, and the more you master the basics the better you master what builds on it.

[JLS]

Hiragana and Katakana Brush-Up

3 months ago I learned all the hiragana and katakana--92 characters in all. I dropped it for 2-3 months. On Saturday I tried reading, and I found that I had forgotten most of the hiragana, and nearly all the katakana. However, it took amazingly little brush-up time for them to all come back to memory. Granted, my review was intense, but it's back now.

Why such efficiency? Probably because of how I drilled myself three months ago. My goal was to be able to handwrite all the hiragana and katakana from memory six times over. I achieved it. That created the deep grooves in the memory. They stayed all this time.

Just shows, if you learn something well enough the first time, it will have staying power.

[JLS]

Finally... Thinking in Chinese!

Last night I was able to think successive thoughts in the Chinese language! Granted, very simple thoughts, probably with uses of words more English than Chinese, but it's a step forward.

Getting to the Open Waters - When One Transitions to Acquisition

I heard in a video that language learning is like swimming away from shore. At first you have a hard swim because of the waves and turbulence by the shore, but once you get past that it's smooth and fast swimming. I think the point where you get to the "open sea" is when you can begin to simply acquire. That is, the rules, basic vocab, etc. are learned well enough that you can efficiently use them to learn more. Until you learn those basics, it's very difficult to just read and listen and thus pick up things; but once you get to this point, acquisition becomes more natural.

[JLS]

Chinese seems to have accelerated lately

Lately I've experienced a noticeable lurch forward in Chinese. I realized, it is because I'm not focusing on learning the hanzi; I made a point to just focus on spoken and audible Chinese, and to let the hanzi take care of themselves in time. So, I find a piece of writing in Chinese, I extract the pinyin, and I learn the words without regards to the hanzi (for now). Much easier for my mind to connect with Mandarin by this method.

Granted, the hanzi need to be learned, but I'd rather have first the benefit of spoken and audible Chinese. Once this is embedded, it will create stronger mental hooks for learning hanzi.

[JLS]

ChatGPT for katakana reading practice

I had a hard time finding some strict Japanese katakana text, but then I realized I could use ChatGPT for this. I got ChatGPT to write out 200 lengthy sentences strictly in katakana, and I used this for out-loud reading practice today.

I had quite resisted AI until this moment. Now I'm starting to see where it could be useful. However, I'm still quite cautious.

Yes, I know that this has pretty much no literary value. This is strictly reading, recognition, pronunciation practice. I believe in drilling the basics.

Question for Japanese learners: Why is there katakana?

Why is there katakana? Why did the Japanese not want to use hiragana for loan words, etc.?

[vonPeterhof]

Why is there katakana? Why did the Japanese not want to use hiragana for loan words, etc.?

The short, sassy, unsatisfying and probably not 100% accurate answer is "because hiragana didn't exist yet". To expand on it somewhat, this combination of questions seems to based on the assumption that katakana was created at a time when hiragana was already available as a phonetic writing system. The reality is that the two systems both originate from the practice of using Chinese characters purely for their phonetic value to represent the sound of spoken Japanese, started development at more or less the same time but in very different contexts, and katakana arguably reached something resembling its modern-day form much earlier.

Out of the two systems katakana is the more "purposefully designed" one, having been created by monks by stripping the Chinese characters to simple fragments mainly for the purpose of phonetically transcribing foreign Buddhist texts. By contrast, hiragana originated out of cursive forms of those same Chinese characters, which actually makes it a tricky question where exactly to draw a line between cursive man'yōgana and early forms of hiragana. What's more, since each syllable in man'yōgana could be represented by a number of different characters, the same was true of early hiragana, and it wasn't until 1900 that the principle of "one syllable = one character" was enshrined (apparently katakana also had variant forms prior to that, but much fewer and much less divergent ones). Now I have no idea when exactly the practice of using all three scripts in the same text originated, but I think it makes sense that when it did katakana would end up being primarily associated with loanwords, given its origins.