劳伦的博客 - Epistolia Laurentii

[lorinth]

Thanks smallwhite, that's the kind of stuff I would never have found by myself, it requires a sort of "cultural knowledge" that I don't have. When reading Chinese, I'm often reminded, or I try not to forget, that I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg: even when I understand the words, that are more things to learn than thing learnt. Thanks for pointing this!

[lorinth]

ZH

I've finished reading 病毒. The last quarter was a bit sickening, with the hero walking around with sliced heads and swapping them between the bodies of a Qing empress turned zombie and a former lover resuscitated from the deads. Overall a good read, though: the language is very accessible for intermediate learners and you get to learn some interesting stuff about the atmosphere and the hidden scars of the cultural revolution (NB: practically every contemporary Chinese novel that I have read all try to get to grips, in one way or another, with the aftermath of that era). The literary value, though, is limited to the fact that the reader often wants to know what will happen next.

So what will I read next? As I'd like to read less pulp - I've read a lot of it already - and more culturally significant books, I tried the beginning of 鲁迅 Lu Xun's 呐喊, but it's still above my level for comfortable, extensive reading. I may try 巴金 Ba Jin's 家, of which I read an abridged version two or three years ago.

余华 is relatively easy to read but I've already read "To Live" 活着 , "Chronicle of a Blood Merchant" 许三观卖血记 and the short story 我没有自己的名字 in Chinese, plus the French translations of "Brothers" and "China in Ten Words". So that's enough.

BTW, I think I'll leave aside 《中国哲学简史》for the moment.

Listening comprehension/transcription exercises: I've worked on Slow Chinese podcast #147 about 手机依赖症, #150 about 恶搞 and am now working on #146 about 农民工。

LA

Before I read some Erasmus, I'd also read and studied Seneca's third letter to Lucillius, about friendship and trust.

GR

At Assimil lesson 11.

Plus, I've worked a bit with Athenaze, lesson 1. Not that I want to drop Assimil as my main textbook but I like to reinforce what I learn through several approaches. In addition, my command of the Greek alphabet is still a bit shaky, so I need to read a lot of material, even if I don't understand everything.

Astounded by the quantity of material available to learn ancient Greek. I've found this delicious little French book: Eulalie ou le grec sans larmes (PDF) (1911). It consists in a series of letters from a teacher to a young girl who wants to learn ancient Greek.

[lorinth]

ZH

I started reading 家 by 巴金/Ba Jin . From the first few pages, it seems well within my reach. As I read an abridged version a few years ago, I roughly remember the plot, and I know where the linguistic difficulties will lie: for instance family relationship terms and slightly antiquated vocabulary as used by an old fashioned Chinese family of the 1920s.

The conventional wisdom (based on Krashen's studies) is that you should understand 98% of the vocabulary to read a book comfortably in the extensive reading mode. But Krashen published his studies before the invention of popup dictionaries, so I'm pretty sure you can start at a lower level than that with ebooks and popup dictionaries. In my case, I use a Chinese-Chinese dictionary on my Kindle, so even when I look up a word, I'm reading Chinese anyway; and the number of cases when I don't understand a Chinese definition at all, while the context of the word doesn't help me either, is pretty low (often, the definition gives me a hint which, with the help of the context, helps me understand the word). Which brings me in the 98% range, I'd say.

I've continued reading a bit of a children edition of Confucius' 论语 , with the original text, explanations and an adaptation in modern Chinese. Last time I'd checked it was too hard for me. This weekend, I had a second look and it was much easier.

LA

Read and studied Seneca's letter I, 4 ad Lucillium.

GR

Dixit lesson 14: "Of course you don't have to study the declension tables". I'm not sure about that. Having studied other, declension-rich languages before, I believe it's hard to make any progress and to cement your knowledge unless and until you've sat down at your desk and started cramming a bit. So I've purchased a few notepads and I'm dutifully copying and rehearsing Greek declensions. Peeking at the grammar part, at the end of the book, in particular the section about verbs, is rather frightening though.

PAPER

Speaking of notepads, I'm using less and less electronic files and more and more school notebooks for my studies - one or more for each language. Writing in longhand feels good and it gives me the (false?) impression that I'm retaining more. And say what you will about paperless life, I've constantly found out that paper is less perishable than electrons.

[Expugnator]

Well-done lorinth, it is an impressive level of comprehension for a language with a writing system like the Chinese one. Writing things by hand indeed improves retention, if only because it forces you to spend more time in each word. Though I sometimes would write completely mechanically and the effect was thus almost null.

[lorinth]

Expugnator, oh yes, you're absolutely right about mechanical repetition ruining the benefits of writing. I've done that with Chinese characters for years with very little success. Progress only came when I stopped and tried to understand the logic behind characters and their building blocks. Sheer repetition without understanding the structure is a waste of time.

[lorinth]

GR

Yesterday, I was alluding to the different methods for learning "morphologically-rich languages". I have no idea whether that's a valid concept - what I mean is: languages with lots of declensions or similar morphological complexities. Morphology constitutes a (theoretically) finite set of forms linked to functions that you have to learn. That set can be relatively small (Chinese, English…) or relatively large (Finnish, Greek...). Obviously, I'm not saying that Chinese is "easier" than Finnish or Greek but that the difficulty of each language is of a different nature and that, assuming morphology is a problem, it could be useful to devise specific strategies to tackle such "morphogically-rich" languages. So what are some strategies I have seen suggested here and there?

- Assimil suggests to let the morphology build up "by immersion", with lots of examples in action and the occasional formal table as a summary. But you are invited "not to study by heart".

- Many Latin and Greek textbooks (the word 'text' should be in inverted commas, because there's not a lot of text) are built around lessons that present the morphology (and then the syntax) in ordered, bite-size parts: lesson #1 has declension #1, lesson #2 has declension #2, lesson #10 has the indicative present, lesson #11 the indicative imperfect, etc. The rest of the lessons consists in themes and versions, and maybe bits of authentic texts at later stages.

- Oerberg keeps the "bite-size, ordered" approach (lesson #1 for the nominative and ablative, lesson #2 for the accusative, lesson #3 for the genitive, etc.) but starts by presenting many many examples of the morphological item to be studied in an interesting narrative. Only then does Oerberg present a summary/table of the forms.

- Another way, as expounded e.g. by Professor William Dowling (in his article Latin by the Dowling Method), is to cram all declensions upfront, by sheer repetition, hundreds of times, and then start with a narrative.

- And finally, I stumbled upon another interesting approach (The intelligent person's guide to greek, no less), suggested by William Harris, Prof. Em. Middlebury College, which consists in first getting a general overview of the whole morphology and only then start with real texts.

I'm tempted to try the latter approach. I don't think it could hurt and I only see benefits to it: after that, when I'm confronted with real morphemes in context (in Assimil e.g.), it may be easier to understand and retain them because I will have an idea (albeit a cursory one at that stage) of where each part fits in the general system of the language. Afterwards, reading a lot will hopefully start cementing the knowledge of each part (declensions, conjugation…) and of the whole system in which they are bound.

NB: There's a related discussion going on here.

[Expugnator]

Let me tell you what I do about Russian:

I learned the basic rules, the philosophy behind cases, but didn't cram declensions or stuff. Then I started lots of input. Russian was the language I had the least interest on activating, so I went on a silent period of a couple of years, it just happened lile that. Recently I started to chat and I noticed the endings come up naturally, just from what 'feels right' - even the insane adjectival endings. I remember well enough to come up with the entire nominal expression with the noun and adjective properly declined. I don't know them actively, but well enough to understand if Google Translate is displaying the correct ending, for example.

[lorinth]

Hi Expugnator, your way looks like the intelligent person's in my previous post I have to admit that that's one method I haven't tried yet. It sounds promising though, so I think I'll give it a go.

[lorinth]

TYPICAL DAY

This is what I managed to do yesterday within the interstices of my professional and family life. I certainly would love to do more and yet it's amazing what you can stuff in the recesses of time - on a good day.

- I studied Chinese characters with Skritter for about 30 minutes divided into several episodes
- I read a few e-pages of Ba Jin's 家, maybe 5 or 6, or the equivalent of 2 or 3 paper pages
- I put some order into the notes I had written down in my Latin/Greek notebook while reading Seneca's letter (I, 4) to Lucillius (vocab, glosses, random thoughts)
- I transcribed the first 2 minutes of Slow Chinese's podcast #151 and checked the (woeful) result against the transcript; checked the mistakes and wrote the results in my transcription notebook.
- I read one paragraph of my children's edition of the Confucius' 论语 and took notes in my Chinese notebook
- I studied a bit of Assimil ancient Greek, lesson 15: I listened, read, read and listened, read the notes, jotted down some notes in my Latin/Greek notebook. I also read a bit of the article titled The intelligent person's guide to greek.

[lorinth]

For the record.

ZH

Transcription exercises with Slow Chinese #151 and #131, as well as a podcast by IMandarinPod 听新闻学汉. I've also listened to several old Chinesepod podcasts while driving.

Reading Ba Jin's 家 Jia: now in chapter 10/40.

Continued experimenting with paper notebooks: eg, been creating mind map for vocab.

GR

Assimil lesson 17.