Thinking of learning Chinese (or Japanese)

[jolson88]

I've loved Go since I first learned about it. And at times, I have a strong desire to learn a foreign language for a change (which I've never done). In some ways, it's almost like my love of Go is a "gateway drug" into these other cultures. I love Japanese culture. But Chinese would obviously be a good choice as well. And with China's increasing role in the global economy (and being a tech guy for a living), Chinese certainly seems like a good long term choice.

Have any other English speakers here learned a foreign language as different as Chinese/Japanese before? Any recommendations on apps or software to help learn?

[gowan]

It is entirely reasonable to learn languages like Japanese or Chinese and doing so will greatly expand your enjoyment of Go (Weiqi) and the culture of the country. There are many online and other options. Two that I have had experience with are JapanesePod: http://www.japanesepod101.com/

and ChinesePod: http://chinesepod.com/

[SoDesuNe]

I started with Chinese a few years back and can only recommend to focus on reading and writing Hanzi. All of China uses the simplified Hanzi (even TV shows are mostly subtitled) but there are dozens of dialects which makes speaking and listening quite hard.
If you start with Hanzi, don't bother with Pinyin (phonetic transcription). You might learn how to read Hanzi out loud but for that to work you need to learn another language (Pinyin) yet again, which is in itself completely useless because no chinese will understand it.

I heard "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" by James W. Heisig is quite good and offers a "new" approach. You'll learn Hanzi by memorizing short stories which tell you about the shape of the pictogram and its meaning (translation).

[often]

go terms in chinese are incredibly hard, and from what i've heard, they are quite difficult in japanese as well
this is probably because go has been in their "language" more than in english, so there are casual terms that aren't easily explained in english

the easiest example is the endgame sequence on the edge of the board where there is a hane, then the opponent blocks, and you connect
in chinese they just say "ban zhan"

doing a live translation of this is hard cause they say "banzhan" and then keep moving to the next thing
i've had to rush and say "this sequence happens" although now i'm tempted to say "hane block connect" in hopes that people get it quickly

not to completley discourage you from learning and using it though
definitley as you learn more terms in chinese/japanese it can become more nuanced and it's helped me learn and retain concepts easier

[jts]

I started with Chinese a few years back and can only recommend to focus on reading and writing Hanzi. All of China uses the simplified Hanzi (even TV shows are mostly subtitled) but there are dozens of dialects which makes speaking and listening quite hard.
If you start with Hanzi, don't bother with Pinyin (phonetic transcription). You might learn how to read Hanzi out loud but for that to work you need to learn another language (Pinyin) yet again, which is in itself completely useless because no chinese will understand it.

I heard "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" by James W. Heisig is quite good and offers a "new" approach. You'll learn Hanzi by memorizing short stories which tell you about the shape of the pictogram and its meaning (translation).

... how would you learn the language without the phonetics?

[xed_over]

I started with Chinese a few years back and can only recommend to focus on reading and writing Hanzi. All of China uses the simplified Hanzi (even TV shows are mostly subtitled) but there are dozens of dialects which makes speaking and listening quite hard.
If you start with Hanzi, don't bother with Pinyin (phonetic transcription). You might learn how to read Hanzi out loud but for that to work you need to learn another language (Pinyin) yet again, which is in itself completely useless because no chinese will understand it.

I heard "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" by James W. Heisig is quite good and offers a "new" approach. You'll learn Hanzi by memorizing short stories which tell you about the shape of the pictogram and its meaning (translation).

... how would you learn the language without the phonetics?

the phonetics is a crutch that actually will slow your learning and leads to bad pronunciation (in my opinion). I agree with SoDesuNe. I did much better with Japanese when I forced myself to learn kana instead of romaji.

but then again, learning the kana really helped with the phonetics of learning the kanji

[daal]

Have any other English speakers here learned a foreign language as different as Chinese/Japanese before? Any recommendations on apps or software to help learn?

I am learning Chinese, basically for the fun of it, and one thing that I can recommend is Anki, which is a flashcard program. You can get an add-on to it called Chinese Support which will provide your flashcards with the meaning of the words, the pinyin, audio files and more. I've tried a few apps, but the only one I use halfway regularly is a dictionary (Hanping Chinese Lite) by embermitre.

Chinese is challenging to learn for two reasons. First, the tonal aspect of spoken Chinese takes a while to internalize, and second the written characters offer very little information as to their pronunciation.

I agree in principle with SoDesuNe that it's probably good at least initially to restrict your studies in one way or another. I decided to focus first on speaking, not lastly because spoken language makes it easier to get in contact with local Chinese speaking people.

[Kirby]

...the phonetics is a crutch that actually will slow your learning and leads to bad pronunciation (in my opinion). I agree with SoDesuNe. I did much better with Japanese when I forced myself to learn kana instead of romaji.

but then again, learning the kana really helped with the phonetics of learning the kanji

IMO, learning kana can't be considered learning "without the phonetics". I would relate learning "without the phonetics" to maybe studying only an English-translated meaning of various Chinese characters. I don't personally think this approach is great for long-term learning, but it might be OK to do if you just want to understand some billboards here and there.

Something like, "Ooh, I remember that funny symbol. That means student. No idea how to say student in this language, but this is probably an ad for students.."

Still, "learning" the language, to me, includes learning the sounds, characters, and even culture of the speakers of the language you're studying.

[Kirby]

To the OP, I would recommend studying the language that interests you the most. There will be times when it seems less exciting to study than others, and you will have greater chance of success if you have genuine interest in what you're studying.

[SoDesuNe]

I started with Chinese a few years back and can only recommend to focus on reading and writing Hanzi. All of China uses the simplified Hanzi (even TV shows are mostly subtitled) but there are dozens of dialects which makes speaking and listening quite hard.
If you start with Hanzi, don't bother with Pinyin (phonetic transcription). You might learn how to read Hanzi out loud but for that to work you need to learn another language (Pinyin) yet again, which is in itself completely useless because no chinese will understand it.

I heard "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" by James W. Heisig is quite good and offers a "new" approach. You'll learn Hanzi by memorizing short stories which tell you about the shape of the pictogram and its meaning (translation).

... how would you learn the language without the phonetics?

You don't learn the "language" ; )
You learn to read and write Hanzi because - in my opinion - you will have a much easier time embracing Chinese with this. You can browse chinese websites, read newspapers, blogs, books and even watch a lot of chinese television because it's subtitled.
If you start with phonetics, you will learn putonghua - the "official chinese" (which is in my opinion harder to learn [correctly] because of the tones than Hanzi). But like in every culture the people do not speak the official version, e.g. in China every big city has its own dialect. Add to that that you will most likely speak with a accent of your own because you are not Chinese.

I don't say you should never learn to speak, I'm just recommending to start with reading and writing because it is far easier to train on your own and because you will have access to almost everything Chinese while you progress.

[EdLee]

You learn to read and write Hanzi...
If you start with phonetics, you will learn putonghua...

We have to look at what's important for the student:
If read and writing, but not verbal skills, is important to the student, then you're correct, focus on the characters.
But if listening and speaking skills are important to the student, then learning putonghua and pinyin is a must, IMO.

And if reading, writing, and verbal skills are all important, then, you need to study it all.

[jts]

Yeah, what Kirby said: kana are the phonetic input system for Japanese. It's even how Chinese schoolchildren learn how to pronounce characters. (In China. I hear in Taiwan they still use mopobofo, which is similar to kana.) And unlike learning Hepburn, pinyin isn't a crutch that will distract you from how natives think about the phonology (as represented by kana) - it's more equivalent to Kunreisiki.

Trying to learn Chinese without pinyin is, if anything, crazier than trying to learn Japanese without kana (or romaji). As you say, Sodesune, the tones are hard to learn, but they are integral to the meaning of the word. T ld b lk trng t lrn nglsh tht th vwls; - cn prbbl gss t m trng t s f r flnt lrd, bt cn - mgn trng t lrn ths w? There are also consonant sounds that English speakers need to practice. I have no idea what might be going through your head when you read 大學之道，在明明德，在親民，在止於至善 or something similar. Do you see a sentence in German? In English? Certainly if you don't know how to pronounce the characters, it can't be Chinese.

As for the large variety of languages in China - this is sort of like saying, "Well, I've decided not to learn English because most countries in Europe speak a different language." Naturally. The solution is to learn the language that is spoken in the region you want to visit - or conversely, to visit the region whose language you learned.

[SoDesuNe]

jts: You can't really compare a language which is based on a small alphabet (so that a lot of words are unique in their writing) to Chinese, which is based on thousands of pictograms, which sound almost exactly the same a lot of the times.

To counter your jibberish example:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.


《施氏食狮史》

石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。
氏时时适市视狮。
十时，适十狮适市。
是时，适施氏适市。
氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。
氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。
石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。
食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。
试释是事。

Pinyin is not really saving you the day here.

James W. Heisig, the author of the book mentioned above, talks a bit about his approach to neglect the pronounciation for the time being. He has a chapter for it. It's called "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning". You can read it completely with Amazon's Look-Inside-feature.


post scriptum: Ha ha ha, I retract my "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"-jibberish. I just stumpled accros the wikipedia article and it seems this pronounciation refers only to an older version of written chinese. The modern version (differenct characters) is readable in Pinyin. "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning" should still be an interesting read =)

[jts]

jts: You can't really compare a language which is based on a small alphabet (so that a lot of words are unique in their writing) to Chinese, which is based on thousands of pictograms, which sound almost exactly the same a lot of the times.

To counter your jibberish example:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.


《施氏食狮史》

石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。
氏时时适市视狮。
十时，适十狮适市。
是时，适施氏适市。
氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。
氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。
石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。
食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。
试释是事。

Pinyin is not really saving you the day here.

James W. Heisig, the author of the book mentioned above, talks a bit about his approach to neglect the pronounciation for the time being. He has a chapter for it. It's called "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning". You can read it completely with Amazon's Look-Inside-feature.


post scriptum: Ha ha ha, I retract my "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"-jibberish. I just stumpled accros the wikipedia article and it seems this pronounciation refers only to an older version of written chinese. The modern version (differenct characters) is readable in Pinyin. "Uprooting Biases About Character Learning" should still be an interesting read =)

Seriously, if you're white and in China and are practically tone-deaf practically the only thing anyone wants to do is teach you tongue twisters. And I've never seen anyone write down the hanzi to explain them.

Given that Heisig's book (if I'm thinking of the right one) is a word-for-word reproduction of "Remembering the Kanji", the claim that it is uniquely suited to the needs of Chinese learners shows noteworthy chutzpah. I will also remind you that the characters are based on the language, rather than vice versa. Can you imagine if you needed to pass someone a written record to explain yourself in day-to-day conversation?

(And no, I could never get the forty-four stone lions correct. I had notable successes with another one, though - I can't remember if it was about a bottle hitting a pan or a pan hitting a bottle.)

[jolson88]

Wow!!!! Thanks everybody. Lots of stuff to digest here . Considering I've never learned a second spoken language ever, it seems fairly daunting to know where to begin.

My first primary goal was to be able to read Chinese. I would _love_ to get to the point of being able to read the Chinese Weiqi Association website in native Chinese. I had originally thought about Japanese because of my fascination with Japanese culture, but I can't see myself using it at all outside of Go. I can see many ways for me to use Chinese in the future.

So while I would eventually like to learn to speak it, it's a lower priority to me.

Anybody have experience with Rosetta Stone software? I have a coworker that has an unopened Rosetta Stone package for Chinese that they are willing to let me borrow. I also grabbed a couple of apps for the iPad, not sure how good they are but they had pretty good ratings.