Virtual Mandarin

Reading, reading and more reading

While I've not really been posting to the blog over the past few days, I have spent some time reading on various websites and discovering new materials aimed at the learner of Mandarin Chinese.

Here are some of the things I've been discovering:

Sinosplice
A brilliant website covering lots of information for learners of Chinese and those generally interested in Chinese life and culture. Its author John is a grad student in applied linguistics and has written some really good stuff on pronunciation, already making me question some of the things I've been reading.

Dr Blair's Chinese in No Time
Think this still qualifies as sourcing online material! I downloaded this from the iTunes Music Store. It's quite funny - the idea is that you're a PhD student on an island off the coast of China. You start out on a yacht off the coast when you get a phonecall to say that the island has been taken over by pirates. You must save the day with your knowledge of Chinese which you learn by tuning into a course over Short Wave radio. A good idea and it gets you involved. I've only listened to the first part so far, and that was at the weekend. It's quite impressive how much I remember actually - like the word for "pirate" which I believe is something like hai dou, though because it's all audio I'd need to check the pinyin and Chinese characters. Good fun, though, and I'll definitely be listening more when my ears get more tuned to Chinese sounds. Favourite bit so far: "Hair" is "tou fa" in Chinese. Imagine saying to someone "with that hairstyle you've gone tou fa (too far)", but said in a real Mickey Blue Eyes New Yorker accent!

Chinese Tools
I mentioned this the other day in my McDonald's post. It's a collection of online tools, eg. pinyin convertors, "Character pronunciation" tools, etc. The Character pronunciation one is quite good - if you can copy the Chinese text from, eg. a Chinese website and paste it in, it gives you the text back in pinyin with tone markings.

I've also done a lot more reading at Wikipedia and at the Britannica online site about the Chinese language situation. All very interesting stuff!

The one other thing I have discovered - and I don't actually know if this can qualify for my self-imposed "online only" restriction - is that I actually receive CCTV, Chinese State TV, at home. I've got a free-to-air satellite decoder which is currently pointing to one of the European Satellites for the European free-to-air channels like TV5, arte, RTL, RAI uno, etc. Sitting among all these channels are CCTV4 and CCTV9. CCTV4 is a Chinese language channel and CCTV9 is the English language channel broadcasting to Asia and across the world. At this stage in my learning I don't really think I'm going to pick up a huge amount from the newsreaders and voiceovers, but having it on in the background as I work certainly helps to tune my ears to the sounds of Mandarin. It's also quite interesting because as far as I can tell, every programme on CCTV4 is subtitled. Perhaps to make them available to speakers of Cantonese, Wu, etc. I have recognised a few 你好s nǐ hǎos in programme introductions!

A wee update then on my Mandarin adventures to date. I'll be doing some more "serious" learning tomorrow - I've loaded the next ChinesePod onto my iPod to listen to in the car, and I've also downloaded the first couple of programmes of Serge Melnyk's Learn Mandarin podcast so I'll see what that's like too.

我就喜欢 I'm lovin' it...

I never expected to be learning Mandarin from a McDonald's paper bag. [I had a salad, promise!] OK, so it is hardly a major academic achievement, but I have to admit to being fair excited when I realised I recognised the 我 wǒ character on the multilingual "I'm lovin' it" logo of McDonald's! Having done a bit of investigation the other characters include 喜欢 xǐhuan, one of the words used for "love" when talking about things or activities. I wonder what the 2nd character is...

Update
On a mission to "unlock the code" that is recognising Chinese characters I started off by looking at the Wikipedia list of Chinese radicals to see if I could identify the characters which made up the missing character. This proved too difficult - I don't really understand the radicals enough yet. So, Googled "我 喜欢 McDonalds" (wǒ xǐhuan) and found a few references where I recognised the 2nd characted. I then headed over to Chinese-tools.com to the Chinese text to pinyin convertor and entered the four characters, 我就喜欢, and all was explained: the missing link was the character 就, in pinyin jiù. As a follow up, I tried I couple of online translators* and the combination of 我就喜欢 wǒ jiù xǐhuan seems to give "I like", which I guess fits in with the McDonald's theme!

If any native Mandarin speakers want to give a better translation of 我就喜欢, please feel free to post a comment! And I was going to say no to the McDonald's lunch to be more healthy! Still glad I had the salad... ;)

Here's the full logo, now that I know the four characters:

*I would stress that I'm NOT suggesting that the use of online translators is an effective method of getting an accurate translation, but they can help sometimes in confirming meanings as long as they're used carefully!