Tackling the Sinosphere

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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby księżycowy » Fri Dec 10, 2021 7:33 pm

Deinonysus wrote: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.

No worries. If you ever want to visit Shanghainese, just give me a shout. I love Sinitic languages.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Dec 10, 2021 7:34 pm

I've gone through tape one of the Maryknoll course (which covers the basics of pronunciation), and I've also started in on tape 2, which covers the tone sandhi. It's a bit abstract so far but I think it will start making sense once I've started to learn some vocabulary and see how it changes in the dialogues. They put a superscript number of the pronounced tone on top of the original tone, so you can see the end result after all the sandhi rules. I can't tell whether I like that or not since it takes away the option to get used to calculate the sandhi rules yourself. Oh well.

Here are the tones written in the POJ alphabet:
  1. a (high level)
  2. á (high falling)
  3. à (low falling)
  4. ah (low falling, checked)
  5. â (low falling-rising)
  6. Merged into tone 7
  7. ā (low level)
  8. a̍h (low level, checked)

Note that the acute accent is a high falling tone! This may be confusing. The acute and grave accents are both falling tones but acute is higher and grave is lower. There is no plain falling tone, just a falling-rising tone, so I think acute vs grave is a pretty good way to distinguish between the two falling tones.

The letter h (representing a glottal stop when appearing at the end of a syllable) seems to be the standard example of a checked syllable, but it could also be a p, t, or k. Not to be confused with the Yale romanization system for Cantonese where a silent h is used to represent that a tone is lower in pitch.

I couldn't find any major patterns, but this is how the five phonemic tones are affected by basic tone sandhi:
originalsandhi
aā
áa
à/ahá
âā
ā/a̍hà

Note that both the high level tone and low falling-rising tone become a low flat tone, so as far as the basic rules go it looks like there are only four possible tones except for in the last word of a phrase. There are some more complex rules later on, so I'll see eventually if there are exceptions to this.

I've mentioned Cthonic a couple of times in this thread already so it's time to post a video of theirs!



This is the Taiwanese version. They have also released this song in English. I like their sound so far! Based on my first impression, I would describe them as Sabaton crossed with Cradle of Filth, but replace CoF's synth Western Classical sound with Chinese Classical music with authentic instruments.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Dec 22, 2021 12:50 pm

Well, I have a few updates.

I sent Maryknoll the money for the course, but I sent it in TWD because that's what their quote was in. Unfortunately, it turns out that their bank only accepts foreign currency, so my payment ended up getting rejected after it was already sent, so the money is in limbo. It looks like the banks have started getting in touch so things should be in motion. In the meantime, they have very graciously agreed to send the books in advance of the transaction being finalized so that I can wait until I have the original amount back before sending them the balance in USD.

I had started learning some basic spoken Mandarin in case I needed to call the bank myself. I did the first Pimsleur lesson and I thought I identified the sounds pretty well, but then I did the first of the six FSI Chinese phonology tapes (part of their modular Chinese course) and I found a marked improvement in my tone recognition upon redoing Pimsleur lesson 1, going from around 70% recognition to basically 100% recognition with just a 22 minute investment! I also looked ahead to their banking unit and I found the phrase "Hello, Bank of Taiwan", which has to be the most specifically applicable sentence I've ever seen in a course! From Pimsleur I have also learned the very useful phrase, "duì bù qĭ, qĭngwèn, nĭ huì shuō yīng wén ma?" (Excuse me, may I ask, do you speak English?)

I never figured myself for a Mandarin afficionado, but I've really fallen in love with it over the past couple of weeks. I always like the sound, finding it very soothing. I always assumed that Japanese would be my anchor language for the Sinosphere, but now I think Mandarin is the best candidate, with some backup from a couple of more conservative Sinitic languages.

I don't think it will turn out that I have to call the bank, so I think I'll return to Arabic for the time being. My future plan to learn the characters is:
  1. Complete Pimsleur and FSI Mandarin
  2. Complete the Maryknoll coursebooks
  3. Complete Pimsleur, FSI, and Teach Yourself Cantonese (and Assimil if I can get my hands on it but it's out of print); ignoring characters for now
  4. Finally, go through A Course in Contemporary Chinese. Learn each character that is introduced, plus not only the Mandarin reading but:
    • The Taiwanese reading
    • The Cantonese reading
    • Reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation with Cantonese tone
    • Simplified version of the character
    • For compound characters, learn all of the above for each component character.

Uh... that'll take a few years so I'll probably want to wait until I've achieved my basic goals in, at the very least, French, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. So this is a looooong term goal. And yes, I am fine being illiterate in three different Chinese languages for a couple of years while I learn the spoken language. It's definitely the scenic route but there's certainly a boost in motivation for doing something your own weird way.

I think my priorities have been a bit off. I want my daughter to get plenty of exposure to Hebrew which means prioritizing my Semitic project, but I think French is more important to us as a family language. My wife was in local patisserie run by French people, and during a chat with one of the workers she asked my daughter « t'a les macarons ? », forgetting to switch back to English, and she was floored when my daughter replied, "yes, I have them!" So it seems like she has absorbed more French than we thought.

So I think my short term goal will be to finish up the Arabic resources I'm working on right now (Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Assimil), and then switch back to French, starting with Duolingo and FSI and then moving on to the CLE books. However, I've gotten pretty obsessed with chess which has limited my language learning progress.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby księżycowy » Sun Dec 26, 2021 6:44 pm

Deinonysus wrote:Well, I have a few updates.

I sent Maryknoll the money for the course, but I sent it in TWD because that's what their quote was in. Unfortunately, it turns out that their bank only accepts foreign currency, so my payment ended up getting rejected after it was already sent, so the money is in limbo. It looks like the banks have started getting in touch so things should be in motion. In the meantime, they have very graciously agreed to send the books in advance of the transaction being finalized so that I can wait until I have the original amount back before sending them the balance in USD.

Wow, I'm sorry to hear you're having an issue with transferring the funds. I just used Wise.com and transferred in USD (as it doesn't have an option for TWD). I hope it gets worked out for you.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Dec 26, 2021 7:14 pm

księżycowy wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:Well, I have a few updates.

I sent Maryknoll the money for the course, but I sent it in TWD because that's what their quote was in. Unfortunately, it turns out that their bank only accepts foreign currency, so my payment ended up getting rejected after it was already sent, so the money is in limbo. It looks like the banks have started getting in touch so things should be in motion. In the meantime, they have very graciously agreed to send the books in advance of the transaction being finalized so that I can wait until I have the original amount back before sending them the balance in USD.

Wow, I'm sorry to hear you're having an issue with transferring the funds. I just used Wise.com and transferred in USD (as it doesn't have an option for TWD). I hope it gets worked out for you.

It did end up working out! My bank got the money back. I'll resend the transfer to them shortly. And now I have a better idea about what to ask when I'm trying to wire money internationally to buy books.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby księżycowy » Sun Dec 26, 2021 9:39 pm

That is great to hear! :)
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jan 27, 2022 2:43 pm

I've been trying to work on Hebrew but motivation has been lacking since chess has overtaken language learning as my main hobby. But since the final episodes of Attack on Titan are now airing, I do have some energy to spend on Japanese and I thought of a novel way to dabble in it.

I've seen the first season of Attack on Titan a few times, but I've only seen the other seasons once when I binge-watched them a while ago (maybe six months?). So when the new episodes started coming out earlier this month, I found that I didn't have a great recollection of who all the characters were (other than the OG season 1 cast) and what was going on, so I started binge-watching again, and I reached season 2 yesterday. I have noticed that I've been particularly attentive to the spoken dialog, keeping an ear out for known words and also picking up some new words that occur frequently, such as kyojin (giant) and ningen (human).

As mentioned above, my original plan was to power through the Kanji using Heisig before embarking on Japanese, but since 80% of Chinese characters have a phonetic component I have decided to spend time on assorted spoken Chinese languages before dealing with them. But I do want to be able to increase my enjoyment of Anime. Other than English, Japanese is the only language that I binge-watch. At first I thought to just do Pimsleur, but honestly it is pretty slow-paced and doesn't contain a very large amount of vocabulary, so it would be better if I could supplement with Assimil. I hadn't considered it before as a potential resource because of my hangups with written Japanese, but I realized that if it has furigana (phonetic hiragana written over the Kanji), I can go through it without worrying about the Kanji. I took a look at the preview on the Assimil website and as it turns out, it does have furigana for every lesson! So I ordered a copy of Le japonais and it will arrive in a couple of weeks.
If I pick up some Kanji through osmosis, that's great, but if I don't, no big deal.

Children's books often contain furigana, but more importantly, most manga has it too! I picked up the first three books of the Attack on Titan manga in Japanese at Schoenhof's before it closed. They've been in the original wrapping for years, but I opened up the first book and to my surprise, it does have furigana! Usually, manga for more mature readers (such as Berserk or Akira) does not have furigana. Since manga is the main written Japanese material I'm interested in reading, it looks like I can actually get by without worrying about kanji at all! My bookshelves are uh... pretty full at the moment, but there do seem to be some sites where I can buy digital manga in Japanese for a reasonable price.

So for now I will spend some time on Japanese. I usually have to relearn katakana every time I am interested in Japanese (hiragani generally sticks pretty well), but by seeing it in context in Assimil and maybe some children's books and manga, I think I can finally cement it. I am working on Duolingo's script lessons at the moment, but I won't do the main course since I believe it requires memorization of Kanji.

Regarding the pitch accent, I've been a bit intimidated by it in the past but after having done some tone drills for Mandarin and Taiwanese, the pitch of Japanese words is starting to jump out at me. I may also make an Anki deck where I look up the pitch pattern for each word I learn. Wiktionary seems pretty good about having the pitch accent for their Japanese entries.

Edit: I found the 3-volume series Japanese: The Spoken Language. It exclusively uses a romanization and most importantly, it puts heavy emphasis on the pitch accent! I'm strongly considering picking up a copy of volume 1.

Edit2: I ordered volume 1! I'll get it this coming week. So I'll be working on the kana for the next couple of days, then I'll start in on Pimsleur on Monday and then Japanese: The Spoken Language and Assimil le Japonais when they arrive. That's a pretty good setup, I'll have a spoken language resource, a graded reader/grammar hybrid, and a more traditional grammar & pronunciation guide.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby devilyoudont » Fri Jan 28, 2022 2:47 am

In terms of furigana manga, it is often the case that the specific magazine they are published in is more important than their actual genre. Attack on Titan and Akira were both from the same publisher, but Attack on Titan happened to be on their "shonen" imprint and Akira on their "seinen" imprint. Smaller magazines may have less editorial consistency in terms of furigana.

Some other places for pitch accent if wiktionary fails you:
https://takoboto.jp/
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/search
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby księżycowy » Fri Jan 28, 2022 9:04 am

Deinonysus wrote:Edit: I found the 3-volume series Japanese: The Spoken Language. It exclusively uses a romanization and most importantly, it puts heavy emphasis on the pitch accent! I'm strongly considering picking up a copy of volume 1.

Edit2: I ordered volume 1! I'll get it this coming week. So I'll be working on the kana for the next couple of days, then I'll start in on Pimsleur on Monday and then Japanese: The Spoken Language and Assimil le Japonais when they arrive. That's a pretty good setup, I'll have a spoken language resource, a graded reader/grammar hybrid, and a more traditional grammar & pronunciation guide.

I've been considering using that very course for when I return to Japanese. I've had the books for a while now. I think I'll pick up the Supplimentary Japanese Typescripts as well, just so my reading doesn't suffer too much. As I've said before, I wish more Japanese textbooks properly covered pitch accent.
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Re: Tackling the Sinosphere

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Jan 29, 2022 2:35 pm

Okay, I had another idea for Japanese learning. Rather than deferring learning the Chinese characters until after I have reached a high level of spoken Chinese... I think I can pronounce reconstructed Middle Chinese decently enough to use it as a learning tool now. Wiktionary is very comprehensive for giving several reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations for every Chinese character. I think I will go with Karlgren. Now, the exact realization of tone is not known, so I will simply use the Cantonese tone. It matches up pretty well with the eight Middle Chinese tone categories (four tones, each split into voiced and voiceless initials). For the "level" tones, you got the two falling tones (just one falling tone for Hong Kong) and the high level tone. For the "rising" category, you get both rising tones. For "departing", you have the two lower flat tones. And for "entering" you have the checked tones. I can more or less produce the Cantonese tones in isolation (although it is much more difficult than Mandarin or even Taiwanese), but I will work on my Cantonese pronunciation for the next couple of weeks while I'm waiting for my new Japanese books to come in.

I got it into my head that Duolingo's Japanese course was only cursory. Maybe that was what it was like when it came out, but since it is one of their most popular courses, they have greatly expanded it, and now it is very thorough. There are over 700 crown levels (making it one of the longer courses) and it teaches over half of the Jōyō Kanji! So my plan is, for each new Kanji that I learn in Duolingo, I will put that character along with the Middle Chinese pronunciation (and a very basic definition) into an Anki deck. And I will also check Wiktionary to see which component characters it's made up of, and put those in as well. This is what I was planning on eventually doing with Mandarin anyway, but with several pronunciations instead of Middle Chinese only. By studying the components of each character, this will give me a Heisig-like experience of starting with the smallest building blocks and working my way up, but I will be learning pronunciation (which is a major component of the characters), not shoehorned mnemonics. So it will be the best of both worlds.

Even though I am now planning on learning the characters early after all, I am still looking forward to Japanese: The Spoken Language because of its emphasis on pitch accent.

In terms of the kana, I am about half-way finished with the Duolingo script lessons for Hiragana. My long-term retention for Hiragana is much better than Katakana, maybe 80% vs. 50%, so I'll have a lot more refreshing to do with katakana.

I'm also learning to type. As I understand it, most Japanese people simply use Romaji input to type. The advantage is that you don't need to learn a new keyboard layout, and they already need to know QWERTY to type in URLs and things like that. There is also two other good options. There is kana input, which also comes standard on Windows. You only need one keystroke per kana, which appeals to me; the tradeoff is that your hands need to travel all over the keyboard to type. This is the option that I have chosen; I've already learned the home keys and I'm working on some others. It should only take me a few more sessions to have the entire layout learned. For full support, it does require a few extra keys (106 or 109 keys, vs the standard 101 or 102 key Western layout). I luckily have enough extra keys on my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard that I can type with all the available Japanese functionality.

Another option is a thumb-shift layout. This is not widely used but is apparently popular with professional typists, so it appeals to me. It uses only the easiest-to reach keys, so many kana need an extra keystroke to type. The spacebar is replaced with two thumb-shift keys. You use the thumb-shift key on the same side as the key you are typing to get the alternate kana, or the thumb-shift key on the opposite side to get the voiced version of the kana on the base key. Unfortunately, these layouts do not come standard on Windows, and most of the documentation is in Japanese, so I think I will need to wait until I'm literate in Japanese before I can learn it. But I'm not too worried about learning one new layout only to switch to another one later. Learning a new layout is honestly much quicker than you might think and I enjoy the process.
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