Tackling the Sinosphere

[Deinonysus]

I fell into one of my language rabbit holes that my regular readers will be quite familiar with. First I'm innocently researching the most populous languages that use the Latin alphabet (for the international keyboard layout I'm working on), and I discover that contrary to my initial assumption, Southern Min (a Chinese dialect continuum that includes Taiwanese Hokkien) is frequently written in a Latin script; the most established alphabet (POJ) has the fun diacritics o͘ and ⁿ in addition to tone marks. And before you know it I'm emailing back and forth with a Catholic organization whose Taiwanese books are one of the finest old-school audiolingual courses ever made, and trying to figure out how to wire the money internationally.

I like to pick "anchor" languages that will help me to easily dabble in a group of related languages. For example, French is my anchor for the Romance languages and Arabic is an anchor for the Semitic languages, the Arabosphere (the Arab dialects, Persian, and formerly Ottoman Turkish), and the hundreds of languages worldwide that have a small but crucial base of Arabic vocabulary, such as Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, and Swahili. As an anime fan for about 25 years, I had always assumed that Japanese would be my anchor for the Sinosphere (the Sinitic Chinese languages plus Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese). However, only 60% of Japanese vocabulary comes from Chines so it isn't ideal as an anchor. My recent infatuation with Taiwan has suggested a better solution: Mandarin and Taiwanese as co-anchors.

~~Learning the Characters~~

My initial plan to learn the Chinese characters was to use James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. However, that makes heavy use of mnemonics due to Japanese's varied pronunciations of the characters. However, a large proportion of the characters are partly phonetic (I think I've seen a figure of 80%). So I think a better way to learn them is to first reach a high level of spoken Chinese, and then learn the characters in Heisig order (starting with the basic building blocks and then learning more and more complex characters) but learning the Chinese pronunciation.

Now, which Chinese to learn? Well, as I understand it, Cantonese is the most conservative languages for finals; it preserves all six final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, and ŋ) and preserves all eight of the Middle Chinese tone classes (and has an additional split in tone class 7 which I believe follows historical vowel length but I'm not 100% sure on that). However, Mandarin seems to more conservative regarding the other parts of the syllable (initial, medial, and core vowel). So short of learning reconstructed Middle or Old Chinese phonology, learning spoken Mandarin and Cantonese does seem to be the best way to take advantage of the phonetic nature of the Chinese characters. I will plan on learning the traditional characters first, then the simplified characters. Again, this will not be in the near future because my plan requires a high level of the spoken language, which will take a while.

~~Taiwanese vs. Cantonese~~

Now, although Cantonese is likely the best candidate to help distinguish finals, Taiwanese is not far behind. It preserves all the final consonants, plus a glottal stop that has been lost in Cantonese (but I believe the phonemic distinction is preserved by the tone system). And it has had only one tone merger, so it reflects seven of the eight Middle Chinese tone classes (I can't say "preserves" because the Min languages actually diverged before Middle Chinese). Teochew, another Southern Min dialect, distinguishes all eight of the classes but the best resources I could find were for Taiwanese. I think that giving up one phonemic tone is a fair trade for the feeling of connection I have with Taiwan and the excitement of learning something off the beaten path.

In addition to its more complete tone system, Cantonese has a few other advantages. It was historically the most dominant Chinese language in North America, and even today it is competitive with Mandarin in the US. Because of this, it is really easy to find Western media that has been dubbed into Cantonese.

I was going back and forth between Taiwanese and Cantonese, but in the end, Taiwanese won, for many reasons:

• X-factor: As mentioned above, Taiwanese has the excitement factor of studying something that is off the beaten path but still has great resources, and my interest in the POJ Latin alphabet.
• Popular media: Although it is much easier for me to get Western media in Cantonese than Taiwanese, that doesn't actually appeal to me that much because I prefer to enjoy media in the original language, and there seems to be just as much material from Taiwan as from Hong Kong on Netflix, although the Taiwanese materials probably feature a lot more Mandarin. As a metalhead, I am also excited to get into the Taipei-based band Chthonic, which has songs in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Classical Chinese, and English.
• News media: Hong Kong ranks at a perfectly respectable 80th place on RSF's 2021 Press Freedom Index (not far behind #67, Japan, and ahead of #86, Israel, as well as several European countries), #43 Taiwan narrowly missed out to #42 South Korea to have the best score in Asia, and is just ahead of the #44, the USA. There are more options for streaming video news in Cantonese, but there is a 24-hour Taiwanese Hokkien channel, PTS Taigi which probably has some news shows. It's geoblocked but of course there are ways around that. There is also the 24-hour news channel FTV News. I watched a little bit of it (not that I actually understood anything except an English-language car commercial with Chinese subtitles). It was all in Mandarin as far as my untrained ears could tell, but maybe there are some opportunities to hear Taiwanese on that channel as well. As far as I know, all print news is in Standard Chinese.
• Difficulty: I haven't gotten past the dabbling stage before in a tonal language, but luckily I seem to have a good ear for tones. Mandarin tones are absolutely trivial for me and any listening mistakes I make are related to the palatal consonants, not the tones. Taiwanese has the extra complication that it has level and falling tones at two different pitch levels, but that has not caused me any problems so far. One issue down the road will be that Min tone sandhi is absolutely bonkers, with only the last syllable of a phrase being unaffected, but I am told that the changes are very regular. Cantonese, on the other hand, presents me much more of a challenge. There are level tones at three different pitch heights, and in addition the two rising tones seem to have around the same starting pitch for some speakers (with only the ending pitch being different), so that is giving me much more trouble.
• Sound appeal:Cantonese and Taiwanese do share a lot of pronunciation features (such as final stops, syllabic nasals and some tone pairs that differ only by pitch), but I do prefer the sound of Taiwanese because it sounds a bit more mellow to me. Cantonese is spoken faster and the high tones are higher, giving it the impression of being shouted (although I'm sure that is something that I would get used to with exposure). I also like the nasal vowels, final glottal stops, and three-way stop contrast (voiceless aspirated vs. unaspirated, and voiced) of Taiwanese, and I like that it has just six vowels, which are six of Italian's seven vowels; it's missing the front rounded and back unrounded vowels that you might hear in other Chinese languages (at least with a Taichung accent which is what I'll be learning; in Southern Taiwan the closed o is replaced with roughly the "uh" vowel of English).

~~Short-term plans (next year or two)~~

The Sinosphere languages don't have a lightweight reputation so this project will take many years. This isn't something I can casually dabble in. My first priority is to reach an advanced level in Arabic, followed by Modern Hebrew. So I will mostly be trying to fit extended Sinosphere language study into time slots where it won't interfere with Arabic.

Taiwanese (Latin alphabet only)

I have ordered a set of the legendary Maryknoll language books and audio from Taiwan. It is a very extensive five-volume audio-lingual course, with the first two volumes roughly equivalent to an FSI Basic course, with each volume having enough audio to fill two mp3 CDs. The last three books have a bit less audio, only one mp3 CD each. The third book is full of dialogs with very little English instruction except to introduce new vocabulary. I had not heard of books 4 and 5 before but this is the description they gave me:

The theme of Book 4 is "Taiwanese Festivals and Holidays". The content includes lessons on everything from births to funerals, from marriage customs to Taoist mythology, from beliefs about the Zodiac to annual company dinners, from naming conventions to lunar/solar holidays, and more.

Book 5 is a short novel about a nurse in a hospital who falls in love with one of her patients. After becoming pregnant with the patient's child, the patient disappears and the nurse loses her job. The rest of the story is about her journey following the above hardships, and how she manages to carry on despite all the challenges facing a single mother in Taiwanese society.

The package will be shipped by sea so I probably won't get it until February or early March. Fortunately, the text of the first three books are posted very publicly, and I also received the audio for the first two books by a kind benefactor, so I am able to start studying right away. I won't point to exactly where I got them since I'm not sure of their copyright status and the last thing I want is for MI6 to bust down Rick's door. So far I have only gone over the first tape, which covers the vowel and consonant sounds and the basic tones. The tone Sandhi rules will be covered on the second tape.

I will hopefully be able to keep up my Arabic studies using Pimsleur, Assimil, and Duolingo while studying Taiwanese.

Spoken Mandarin

Once I have finished my current Arabic resources I will want start DLI Arabic Basic Course, which is quite extensive (181 tapes, so somewhere between 75 and 90 hours of audio). That will replace my Taiwanese time slot but should free up my commuting time slot, so I am thinking of doing Pimsleur Chinese (Mandarin) concurrently with DLI Arabic.

Korean

Korean seems to be the most dabbleable Sinosphere language due to its lack of tones and heavy reliance on an alphabet and limited use of Chinese characters. I've been thinking of giving Korean a brief dabble, so I might take a quick break from Arabic before starting the DLI course and Pimsleur Mandarin. My goal is to be able to read the instructions on the instant noodles that my wife tends to buy, as well as being able to pick out some words and phrases while enjoying popular Korean media.

Starting resources: Pimsleur, Assimil, and Duolingo.

~~Long-term plans (after I have died of old age)~~

Written Chinese

As mentioned above.

Japanese

I would love to spend a lot of time on it some day! After reaching a good level of spoken and written Mandarin and Taiwanese, it shouldn't be too hard.

Resources: Pimsleur, Duolingo, and maybe the Genki textbooks and/or Assimil.

Cantonese

Just because I fell for Taiwanese, doesn't mean I wouldn't also love to learn Cantonese some day!

Resources: Pimsleur, Teach Yourself, FSI. There's also an Assimil course but it's out of print and I haven't been able to find a copy.

Shanghainese

I'd probably like to learn a bit of this too. I'm not aware of any good English resources other than a short Mango Languages course, so I'll have to hold off on window shopping for now.

Vietnamese

It's a cool language and I love the instantly recognizable derpy, overloaded Latin alphabet. I'll probably want to study it at some point.

Resources: Pimsleur and Assimil (Northern dialect), Duolingo (? dialect), FSI (Southern dialect).

[lichtrausch]

[*]News media: Hong Kong ranks at a perfectly respectable 80th place on RSF's 2021 Press Freedom Index (not far behind #67, Japan, and ahead of #86, Israel, as well as several European countries),

I don't know if that is still up to date.

Hong Kong press freedom is in ‘free fall’

[Deinonysus]

[*]News media: Hong Kong ranks at a perfectly respectable 80th place on RSF's 2021 Press Freedom Index (not far behind #67, Japan, and ahead of #86, Israel, as well as several European countries),

I don't know if that is still up to date.

Hong Kong press freedom is in ‘free fall’

I guess we'll have to see how it changes in the 2022 report. It's already down from 73rd place in 2019. The US improved by three spots from 2019 to 2020 so it does seem to be pretty current for a given year.

Edit: I just took a look at the article; it just came out yesterday and the quote is from RSF themselves, so Hong Kong's score will surely take a hit in the 2022 report. I believe it is released in April.

I guess the takeaway is that Korean and Taiwanese Mandarin (again, ranks 42 and 43 respectively) are by far the two best languages for reliable news from East Asia (or actually the entire continent). The next best ranks in East Asia are Japan and Mongolia (67 and 68).

[Xenops]

Tackling the Sinosphere...

Finally.

[StringerBell]

As a metalhead, I am also excited to get into the Taipei-based band Chthonic, which has songs in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Classical Chinese, and English.

Not to derail your thread, but what metal bands are you into at the moment? I'm a huge fan of Slipknot and Trivium.

[vonPeterhof]

Shanghainese

I'd probably like to learn a bit of this too. I'm not aware of any good English resources other than a short Mango Languages course, so I'll have to hold off on window shopping for now.

Shanghainese was recently added to uTalk, but since their "courses" are essentially glorified phrasebooks with memory exercises it might be more useful as a supplement than the main learning material. I still regret not having bought Aleksakhin's Shanghainese book I saw in a Russian bookstore long ago and haven't been able to track down ever since. As an aside, his insight into the nature of final consonants in all varieties of Sinitic is pretty interesting if controversial (I discussed it in my log here and here, but an unhelpful tldr is that he thinks they don't really exist )

Resources: Pimsleur and Assimil (Northern dialect), Duolingo (? dialect), FSI (Southern dialect).

Duolingo is also in the Northern dialect, as are probably most learning materials not aimed at US soldiers in the 1960s. Personally I'd be very interested in learning more about North-Central Vietnamese, due to its combination of phonetic conservatism (some of its varieties seem to have preserved all the phonemic contrasts reflected in the orthography) and highly divergent vocabulary in relation to both mainstream Northern and Southern varieties.

[Deinonysus]

As a metalhead, I am also excited to get into the Taipei-based band Chthonic, which has songs in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Classical Chinese, and English.

Not to derail your thread, but what metal bands are you into at the moment? I'm a huge fan of Slipknot and Trivium.

Slipknot's cool, I liked their first album but didn't follow them after that. Although Corey Taylor singing the Spongebob theme will never not be funny. My favorite Nu Metal band by far is System of a Down; another favorite album is Powerman 5000's Tonight the Stars Revolt, and the genre gives me big feelings of nostalgia. I also love Rammstein who are kind of Nu-metal adjacent. I don't really know much about Metalcore and I don't think I know any songs by Trivium. I did see Killswitch Engage live once way back in the day and they put on a good show. It was Ozzfest and I was waiting for Mastodon and Rob Zombie to come on. I think that In Flames switched from Melodic Death to Metalcore at some point but I only know their older stuff; sadly I missed them at Ozzfest because they were on a different stage.

My favorite metal musician by far is Devin Townsend. It's hard to say who my second favorite is. Some of my other favorite metal bands, in no particular order, are Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Megadeth, Dream Theater, Blind Guardian, Symphony X, Opeth, Mastodon, and Fear Factory.

Shanghainese

I'd probably like to learn a bit of this too. I'm not aware of any good English resources other than a short Mango Languages course, so I'll have to hold off on window shopping for now.

Shanghainese was recently added to uTalk, but since their "courses" are essentially glorified phrasebooks with memory exercises it might be more useful as a supplement than the main learning material. I still regret not having bought Aleksakhin's Shanghainese book I saw in a Russian bookstore long ago and haven't been able to track down ever since. As an aside, his insight into the nature of final consonants in all varieties of Sinitic is pretty interesting if controversial (I discussed it in my log here and here, but an unhelpful tldr is that he thinks they don't really exist )

Resources: Pimsleur and Assimil (Northern dialect), Duolingo (? dialect), FSI (Southern dialect).

Duolingo is also in the Northern dialect, as are probably most learning materials not aimed at US soldiers in the 1960s. Personally I'd be very interested in learning more about North-Central Vietnamese, due to its combination of phonetic conservatism (some of its varieties seem to have preserved all the phonemic contrasts reflected in the orthography) and highly divergent vocabulary in relation to both mainstream Northern and Southern varieties.

Yeah, I took a look at uTalk for Xhosa but it was basically just Memrise but expensive. I wasn't impressed.

That book by Aleksakhin sounds interesting! His idea about final nasal consonants being realized as nasal vowels might apply to some Chinese languages but definitely not Taiwanese. Nasal vowels are phonemic and sound different from -m, -n, and -ng.

I had the exact same thought about Vietnamese! I generally always want to go for the most conservative dialect of a given language when possible. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good resources for Central Vietnamese, and also I've heard that Northerners and Southerners generally can't understand it due to lack of exposure.

My ? for Duolingo was because I remembered reading that it was a weird mishmash of Northern and Southern vocabulary, although on searching again it seems that it does seem to mainly be based on the Northern dialect.

[Saim]

Cool project! I love that you'll be doing some Hokkien, not many people pick it up as far as I can tell but it seems like a really interesting language.

What benefit do you think you'll get from Heisig? It doesn't seem too useful for what you're trying to do here. I've been dabbling in Mandarin for a while and honestly I feel like just reading + Anki sentence cards with audio (at first I had the audio on the front, now I'm starting to have it on the back of the card) has done more for my ability to deal with characters than anything Heisig gave me. Maybe Heisig helped a bit with breaking down characters into their component parts but I think there are probably better ways to do that.

[księżycowy]

I know of some good Shanghainese materials in English. I'm not sure if some of them are still in print, but I'll put a list together in a bit.

EDIT: As promised, here are the resources I know of in English:
-Shanghai Dialect for Foreigners by Ziliang Xu (there are two editions, a newer pocket edition, a slightly bigger "normal" version which is older)
-学说上海话 by 叶盼月 (Despite the Chinese title, the book does indeed contain both English and Mandarin explanations. It's one of the best of the bunch. If you're interested I can help you track down a copy, just PM me.)
-Shanghai Dialect: An Introduction to Speaking the Contemporary Language by Lance Eccles (Another good course, but assumes knowledge of Mandarin. Very slim on grammar. It basically is a series of dialogues and vocabulary with the occasional note about usage, pronunciation, grammar, etc.)
-Shanghai Common Expressions (2e) by Wu Ying
-Chinese-English-Japanese: A Shanghai Dialect Course (No audio that I know of.)

[Deinonysus]

Cool project! I love that you'll be doing some Hokkien, not many people pick it up as far as I can tell but it seems like a really interesting language.

What benefit do you think you'll get from Heisig? It doesn't seem too useful for what you're trying to do here. I've been dabbling in Mandarin for a while and honestly I feel like just reading + Anki sentence cards with audio (at first I had the audio on the front, now I'm starting to have it on the back of the card) has done more for my ability to deal with characters than anything Heisig gave me. Maybe Heisig helped a bit with breaking down characters into their component parts but I think there are probably better ways to do that.

Hokkien is a hidden gem! The more I learn about it the more I'm surprised that it isn't more popular for hobbyists. Taiwan is just as hip as Japan and Korea! Maybe Chthonic will be the next BTS.

Well yes, breaking down characters is my main reason. But actually you gave me a really good idea, which is to go through a Taiwanese Mandarin textbook and learn the characters as I see them, but I don't just learn all the characters in a chapter, I learn all the components of compound characters, and I learn all the components of those components, so that I don't end up trying to learn some 30-stroke monstrosity without being able to chunk it into smaller known parts. And by working with a textbook, I'll see the characters in context so they'll sink in better.

A Course in Contemporary Chinese seems to fit the bill quite nicely. The audio is free to download and it seems very easy to get in the States. All but one volume are available as ebooks on Google Play and the first volume seems pretty easy to get ahold of in hard copy. And I think I read somewhere that although new vocabulary is only introduced in traditional characters, the reading passages are also given in simplified characters, which would be a great way to get used to reading them.

I would want to learn the pronunciation of each character in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and possibly also Cantonese to make sure that the phonetic component of each character is as obvious as possible. So I would want to be familiar enough with those spoken languages to be able to read the characters accurately.

I know of some good Shanghainese materials in English. I'm not sure if some of them are still in print, but I'll put a list together in a bit.

EDIT: As promised, here are the resources I know of in English:
-Shanghai Dialect for Foreigners by Ziliang Xu (there are two editions, a newer pocket edition, a slightly bigger "normal" version which is older)
-学说上海话 by 叶盼月 (Despite the Chinese title, the book does indeed contain both English and Mandarin explanations. It's one of the best of the bunch. If you're interested I can help you track down a copy, just PM me.)
-Shanghai Dialect: An Introduction to Speaking the Contemporary Language by Lance Eccles (Another good course, but assumes knowledge of Mandarin. Very slim on grammar. It basically is a series of dialogues and vocabulary with the occasional note about usage, pronunciation, grammar, etc.)
-Shanghai Common Expressions (2e) by Wu Ying
-Chinese-English-Japanese: A Shanghai Dialect Course (No audio that I know of.)

Wow, that's awesome! As always you've done your research! But I think I'm all set for now on Shanghainese. I think I'm juggling enough Category IV languages already! I'm sure I'll want to dabble in it at some point in the future.