Virtual Mandarin

我很抱歉! wǒ hěn bào qiàn - My humble apologies

Four weeks since my last post and I have to say 我很抱歉 wǒ hěn bào qiàn because although I've been thinking lots about Chinese and my attempts to learn it, I've just not had the time to follow up my thoughts with some blog posting. Work has been very busy over the past few weeks - I've been travelling a lot. But while I've been travelling I've been trying to catch up with my Chinese vocabulary and, in particular, with my knowledge of Chinese characters. Despite my self-imposed restrictions relating to learning Chinese only through the internet I've actually bought a couple of books and a set of "multimedia flashcards" from Sinolingua. However, I'm a bit disappointed in these flashcards because like many Chinese writing courses they seem to jump straight into fairly complex characters, even providing complex "character in context" sentences. See below for a scan of a sample card. I'll maybe try to follow up with a review of the materials, but for the meantime I'm just trying to get something on the blog!!!

I've still been following Chinesepod.com and I'm hoping that tomorrow I'll get the chance to firm up on lessons 6 and 7 for which I've already prepared my flashcards and just need to find the time to do a bit more work. The Chinesepod website continues to develop and I'm astounded at the amount of development there is on the site. I've let my full subscription slip for the moment - primarily because through June and July I knew that I wouldn't have time to use it and therefore get my money's worth (who says 苏格兰人 sū gè lán rén are stingy?!) but once I get back into my Chinese I'll definitely be resubscribing!

More soon.

Long time no post!

It's been a while since I've posted anything on my Chinese blog, mainly because I've been really busy at work and haven't had much of a chance. However, as of tomorrow I'm off for a week's holiday and since I'm all packed (believe it or not!) I've just spent an hour doing iPod image versions of the conversations in Chinesepod lessons 1-9. I'll take these with me and when I get a minute while we're on holiday I'll try to make some progress with my Chinese!

Thanks, by the way, to everyone from the Chinesepod community who has commented on my flashcards. There will be more, especially of the character ones, just as soon as I can get round to it.

Chinesepod Blogroll

This is really just a "你好" to everyone over at Chinesepod. Today they've launched the Community part of the site which means that Chinese learners like me will be able to keep track on what other learners are saying on their blogs. I look forward to learning more with everyone, and hope that some of you may be able to use some of the materials I've created to aid my own learning - all available here on Virtual Mandarin.

Hopefully this will automatically appear on the blogroll!

我很忙 wǒ hěn máng - again!

It's been another really busy week and things aren't likely to get much better until after our Film Festival, and I'm only getting the chance to write something here while I'm waiting for one of the mastered movies to export.

At this year's Film Festival we'll have films in French, German, Spanish and, for the first time this year, Japanese. Hopefully if things go according to plan, next year's films will include a Chinese language film too!

A real 谈话 tánhuà!

On leaving work today I bumped into a colleague who was involved in a visit to China last summer with students from one of the schools with which I work. Another group is heading back this year and I hope to follow their progress (and indeed gatecrash the conversation classes when they start!). Anyway, Stuart had accompanied the group to China last year and had been involved in the Chinese lessons. Our conversation, much to the bewilderment of other colleagues in the carpark, went something like this:

Stuart: 你好！
Mark: 你好！
Stuart: 你好吗？
Mark: 我很好，谢谢。

Stuart: nǐ hǎo!
Mark: nǐ hǎo!
Stuart: nǐ hǎo ma?
Mark: wǒ hěn hǎo, xiè xie.

That's about as much as we managed, but it all came fairly naturally! Very chuffed!

The mysterious 不

I mentioned in a recent post that I'd discovered something a bit strange about the word 不. I'd learned it first in the sentence 不是美国人， 是应国人 (bú shì měiguórén) and in this sentence 不 is pronounced bú. However, I've been reading that 不 is sometimes pronounced bù. Indeed, it's pronounced bù much more commonly than bú.

There is a rule. And it's seemingly exceptionally simple! 不 is pronounced bù (ie. fourth tone) unless it's followed by a word in the fourth tone, in which case it's pronounced in second tone! 是 shì is fourth tone, so that's why 不是 bú shì, and not 不是 bù shì.

And that, it appears, is all there is to it! As I read more about Mandarin there are quite a few things which have surprised me by their simplicity. The pronounciation is still one of the most difficult things I'm finding, as is actually learning the words with no reference to fall back on. However, I keep finding things which seem to be surprisingly straightforward about the language: no articles, in many cases quite English word order, etc. The particles will get me in the end though! Lots to learn there!

Catching up

晚上好 Wǎnshang hǎo! It's actually been a whole week since my last post here. I've had a busy week and haven't had much of a chance to do much blogging about my adventures in learning Mandarin. However, I've been trying to keep up with things, in particular listening to Chinesepod on the way to work each day. Hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up this weekend!

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.

A good start!

晚上好！ Wǎnshang hǎo! Good evening one and all. Thanks primarily to Ewan who posted about Virtual Mandarin on edublogs and the MFLE, and some discussion on the LinguaNet Forum, my adventures in Mandarin seem to have generated a fair bit of interest, even after my first official post!

Thanks to everyone for their comments and words of encouragement on the various discussion boards and blogs. Vincent believes I can get away with using CD/DVD-roms in my task, and I probably can, but for the time being I'd like to limit myself to online resources, just to see if it's possible! I've used many different types of resources when learning other languages in the past, and I have to be honest: my preference is probably for a *good* book and some contact with native speakers. But this particular task I've set myself is something of a challenge - an experiment - to see how possible it is.

The other major resource I'm depending on is the help of "real" people, both learners and native speakers. Even on my first day I've been sent lots of links (谢谢, Ros!), and 谢谢 also to 林凡 for her comment! :)

I was thinking today that since the challenge began officially on the 26th April I have 5 months until the European Day of Languages on the 26th September. Maybe that will be an opportunity to put what I've learned into practice!

One final thing. I'd like to make it really clear that I'm not intending this site as a resource for people to learn Mandarin Chinese. Without wishing to sound "selfish", everything I do on the site is for me. If anyone can take any benefit from what's there then please feel free, and if anyone wants to learn with me then great. Equally, I'm hoping that native speakers and more experienced learners will correct any mistakes I make on the site: that's the whole point of keeping this learning log!

Anyway, enough talk. On with today's learning...

你好！ Nǐ hǎo!

Welcome to this blog, a journey in one person's attempts to master a new language. My name is Mark Pentleton and I have set myself a challenge: to learn Mandarin Chinese. My language-learning career began in 1983 when, as an 11 year-old I started French at secondary school. Since then I've formally studied Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and in later life picked up some German, Norwegian, Catalan and most recently Japanese.

I work in the west of Scotland as the coordinator of the PiE project, a modern languages and technology project running currently in 29 secondary schools. Through this project and in my previous life as a teacher in the south side of Glasgow I've seen more and more possibilities develop for language-learning using online resources.

So... I've decided to make this a linguistic and technical challenge: I'm actually challenging myself to learn Mandarin Chinese only using technology-based resources. That means no books, no audio cds, no teacher or class. Only what I can find online!

Maybe I should be a bit more specific. And I should also admit to having bought one book: the Oxford Chinese Minidictionary which is quite a nice wee dictionary! But as far as course books etc. are concerned, there won't be any Teach Yourself Chinese or anything like that for me. I'll be relying on the various materials I can find via the internet, etc. I may permit myself to download some audio from the iTunes Music Store, but other than that I think I can probably find everything I need on the various websites I've already come across.

Of course, learning a language requires someone to speak to! So, if you're a native Mandarin speaker, or indeed a learner like me, then get in touch via the comments on this blog. Most of all, if you want to learn along with me then let me know. I'll be posting various things I prepare for myself on this blog, eg. virtual flashcards for my iPod I prepare to help me get to grips with learning Chinese characters, and maybe even some podcasts so that someone out there in this virtual world can help me with my pronunciation! One of the main tools I'll be using is the ChinesePod podcast, and that's certainly where I'm starting.

I'll also post reviews of websites, podcasts, and other materials I come across, and hopefully these will be of interest to other learners out there.

So, in advance I'll say 谢谢, or xiè xie, which I've already learned is "thank you". Incidentally, if you can't read the Chinese characters, or indeed the extended Roman alphabet characters to mark the tones of Chinese then I've found that wikipedia does a good job of explaining how to set up your computer to do just that.

I'll do my best to keep posting regularly - it's not always possible cos things are very busy. Please do give me some feedback and feel free to join with me and learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese!