Mandarin: Year 4.5

[Aozu]

My latest order of books arrived. Yeah, I just got some of those level 1 graded readers from mandarincompanion, but in the Harry Potter thread, I mentioned I was planning on reading the Hunger Games, and I figured that I should probably get around to ordering it before it went out of print or something. Lo and behold, Amazon had it - in stock, and free shipping - so poof, now I have another fat book to read.

I've also had Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on my wishlist forever, and well, one book purchase leads to another. Then I figured maybe I should try some nonfiction books, so I got a couple of reader-type biographies.

These things being in stock on U.S. Amazon was awesome. Previous book orders of mine have almost always been delivered via the slow boat from China (literally), sometimes taking up to 2 months to arrive.

Quick looks:
The Hunger Games ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/7506351536 ). Nice fat book, smallish characters, nice paper. Seems really similar in size & quality to one of the Game of Thrones volumes which I've had for a while (which have each book split into 3 parts, so this is probably about 1/3 the length of one of those), about 320 pages and ~600 characters a page (eep). No idea yet on reading level, though I assume it is easier than 'adult' books like Game of Thrones and the Stand.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/7533259610 ). Surprisingly thick at 210 pages and ~350 characters a page. Gonna give this one a quick trial read before bed to see how easy it is (man, I hope it's easy).

Chinese Biographies: Yao Ming and Chinese Biographies: Vera Wang ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887277594 and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887278779 ). These are more 'textbooky' than I thought, with a lengthy introduction on their purpose and a bunch of questions at the start of each chapter. They have pinyin above the characters, which I go back and forth on liking as a concept, and the pinyin is (gasp) correctly clumped or not to show which characters are forming words - which I am sure is super useful for more beginnery-type people. When I first started learning to read I did wonder how you could ever tell where the words break apart, or when a word turns out to be a proper name. Happily it sort of seemed to work itself out for me, but it is nice to have the pinyin there just in case. Lastly, there's also a website at http://chinesebiographies.com which has sound files and even more exercises and questions, yeesh. Anyway, I gave Yao Ming a little read earlier, and the book starts with a couple of quotes, bleh. The reason I say bleh is because these quotes are actually fairly hard to read, presumably because the translator is trying to accurately translate the original quotes from these two dudes. Anyway, perhaps once it gets to 'Yao Ming grew up on a farm' or whatever it will be easier, but I didn't get that far. The books say they're for people who know 300-750 characters, which is definitely me. They're fairly thin, about 80 pages (but figure about 10 of those are pages of questions), ~250 characters a page.



It had been a while since I bought any books, but now all of a sudden I have oodles. I need to start reading faster...

[Aozu]

Well, good news, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looks to be just about my perfect reading level, for fun reading with not too much looking stuff up. The grandparents all get different titles, of course, yay Chinese, with the dad's side being 爷爷 and 奶奶 (with full names 约瑟夫爷爷 and 约瑟芬奶奶) and the mom's 姥爷 and 姥姥 (full names 乔治姥爷 and 乔治娜姥姥). Actually, I guess 夫 might be part of Grandpa Joe's title since apparently 约瑟 is the standard Joseph.

But I digress. This is definitely going into the queue directly after the mandarincompanion readers, and I might even be looking forward to it as a sort of reward. And, as the next one of those readers, last night I started up the Monkey's Paw ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1941875025 ). Fell asleep before getting too far, of course.

[Aozu]

Welp, I joined the HelloTalk and the first message I get is 叔叔你好！Daaaamn.

In retaliation I sent back a two-line message that I am sure is mangled and a mess but gotta break into this actually-talking-with-people somehow. Maybe after a bunch of texting I'll finally gird myself for speaking (omg).

[Aozu]

I already have about a half-dozen HELLO HI HOW ARE YOU people gathered up in HelloTalk. I have started just responding to them all in Chinese (written), we'll see what happens. I also added profile information (as suggested here), 350-odd characters about where we live, my wife & my jobs, where her parents were from, what show we've been watching, and our 善变 cat. We'll see if I get some more interesting intros out of that.

I've taken to listening to the recordings of a couple of stories in my 500-word Graded Chinese Reader several times a day. Since the stories are pretty short, the recordings are about 5 minutes long, the perfect length to keep my attention. I had one on auto-repeat while I was playing Diablo (tsk tsk), it repeated 14 times and I still couldn't really understand it from audio only so I am now actually reading along in the text like an animal.

So close to being done with Glossika. I am going to go straight back into FSI after this. I hope the comparatively huge pauses for responses in that course will be funny, not irritating. Though I suppose I could always just open them in Audacity to speed things along if I need to!

[Aozu]

HelloTalk adventures continue...

I have had two actual communications now. The first was in regards to my first actual honest-to-god embarrassing mistake.

So I had mentioned that I updated my profile, and someone's first message to me was 错字好多 (many crying faces). I puzzled that out as 'lots of mistakes', and since I had never talked to this person before figured they must be talking about my profile. I looked up 错字, saw it can mean 'typo', and with a heavy sigh (man, I thought most of it was right) messaged back 请告诉我这些错字， 谢谢. This took a while to assemble, since I had to sort of reword the question in my mind from 'what mistakes did you see' to something I could actually ask with the grammar I know (ends up being 'please tell me these mistakes'). There were two typos this person then mentioned, and one was the awesome one.

What I meant to say: 我知道很多汉字 . "I know a lot of characters".

What I actually had: 我知道很多汉子. "I know a lot of men." Whooooops.

Well, I got that first horrible mistake out of the way. Yay?

The second conversation was with some guy who had only put 'China' as his location. I thought asking where he was from (meaning city, in my mind) could be a conversation starter, I asked 你来自哪里 (where are you from). The reply? 'China'. This also happened with another person at about the same time (they also hadn't put in a city). China, nation of smartasses, or am I asking it wrong?

Anyway, to follow up more specifically I asked him what his hometown was (老家) since I couldn't really figure out how to word 'where are you living now', and he replied with some place I never heard of, so I looked it up in google maps and it is some giant island. So I said I live on an island too, near San Francisco (ohgod now he knows where I live, but I couldn't resist since San Francisco has a cool name in Chinese), and now I suppose we are conversing.

I am spending a little more time on HelloTalk then I expected but it is really good so far for getting me past that initial block. I think the best part is that all these contacts (who seem to be overwhelmingly university students) are just as bad at starting the conversations as I am. None of us know what we are doing, and that is kind of freeing.

My new tactic is to ask every single one of them the same sentence, audio, first English then Chinese, and see what happens. I will ask them all what they are studying and see what happens. I think all the (presumably different) answers will be interesting.

Well, all except the guy who asked why we named our 'dog' what we did. That guy, I can talk to him about the cat that is not a dog.

[Bakunin]

Just wanted to stop by to say that I enjoy reading your log! Stumbling through awkward conversations on HelloTalk in a different script is something I'm going to have to do soon as well, so it's great to read about your experiences

My new tactic is to ask every single one of them the same sentence, audio, first English then Chinese, and see what happens. I will ask
them all what they are studying and see what happens. I think all the (presumably different) answers will be interesting.

That's a great idea. It's similar to what some people call narrow reading (= reading several texts about one specific topic with the hope that it gets easier over time) only that you apply it to conversation. Doing this you should be able to pick up key vocabulary and sentence patterns in no time. HelloTalk actually lends itself perfectly to this tactic because most contacts anyway lead nowhere. So why not exploiting the system a bit

[NIKOLIĆ]

The second conversation was with some guy who had only put 'China' as his location. I thought asking where he was from (meaning city, in my mind) could be a conversation starter, I asked 你来自哪里 (where are you from). The reply? 'China'. This also happened with another person at about the same time (they also hadn't put in a city). China, nation of smartasses, or am I asking it wrong?

This used to happen to me all the time on chatroulette. They would respond "China" no matter what I wrote.

I asked a Chinese dude how to say "Which province are you from?", and he responded with "你是哪个省的?"(If I remember correctly) and another sentence containing "地方", but I can't remember what it was.

I use the first one and it works like a charm, although I don't know if it's grammatically correct.

[smallwhite]

... (with full names 约瑟夫爷爷 and 约瑟芬奶奶) and the mom's 姥爷 and 姥姥 (full names 乔治姥爷 and 乔治娜姥姥). Actually, I guess 夫 might be part of Grandpa Joe's title since apparently 约瑟 is the standard Joseph.

「约瑟」 is the standard in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong. I don't know about China. 「约瑟夫」 would be Joseph as well, 「夫」 representing the "ph" sound. 「约瑟芬」 would be Josephine.

They would respond "China" no matter what I wrote.

You should've asked someone from Hong Kong. They will NOT respond "China" no matter what.

[NIKOLIĆ]

You should've asked someone from Hong Kong. They will NOT respond "China" no matter what.

I did not mean to offend anyone by writing that. I didn't speak with anybody from Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is listed as a separate country on Chatroulette.

[Aozu]

「约瑟夫」 would be Joseph as well, 「夫」 representing the "ph" sound.

Oh durrr, that makes sense. I even sat there for a while saying yue se fu, hmm, that doesn't sound like Joe.