Language Trainers Blog

China isn’t well known for its free speech policies, but occasionally there are big enough issues that the people have to say something.  The most recent uproar in southern China was over language.  Over a thousand outraged protesters came together to oppose a local politician’s push to ban the Cantonese language on a major television network in favour of broadcasting solely in the national language Mandarin.

Cantonese is widely spoken as a first language in Hong Kong, Guangdong province, and in many expat Chinese communities around the world.  Hong Kong’s considerable film and pop music industries are also predominantly in Cantonese.

There have been more than a few controversial incidents where governing bodies have tried to suppress regional dialects within China and surrounding areas, and this is no exception.  News of the protest rally was suppressed on Chinese news networks.  Hopefully this anti-Cantonese proposal will remain just a proposal.

Full article: New York Times.

One of my Chinese teacher’s favourite things to tell me is that you have to ‘lose your face’ if you want to progress with any kind language learning.  You need to try to express yourself, even if you aren’t 100% sure, and even if there is a chance that someone will correct you (and/or have a pretty good laugh at your expense).

Face is a very important concept in China, more so than in most places in the world.  There are a lot of ways that people can lose it, and a lot of things are done in order to maintain it.  Things which you and I might not find embarrassing could be mortifying for a Chinese person, but yet I find that most Chinese people I meet are willing to try to speak English with me.  I have a great deal of respect for them in this, because I am one of those people who needs to be 100% sure.  It has taken me a long time to just get out there and try to use what I know.

It goes without saying that we will improve more the more we try to speak.  It’s just that sometimes it’s difficult to do so.  I’m not saying that we should aim to embarrass ourselves every time we speak in a foreign language, but we need to try things out, despite any potential embarrassing consequences.

One way to do this is to consider the alternatives - is it worse to try to say a sentence or to have to try to write it down?  Is it more embarrassing to mispronounce a word, or to have to mime entire sentences?  Or you can make it clear that you know your weaknesses by using comical aids such as the iLingual app that I talked about last time.

Do you have a trick to help you speak more often?

Image: Melle_Oh.

As a student of Mandarin Chinese, I use the romanisation system pinyin to ’spell out’ the sound of Chinese characters, including their tones.  Each tone marking shows what sound you should make for the vowels.  For a long time, I have been looking for an input engine that would allow me to type tones directly, instead of having to use letters and numbers, or go through a complicated special symbol input.  I wanted to be able to type something like e3 and come up with ě on the screen.  Until recently, my only options were to use the input engine NJStar (which works really well, except that the full version is really expensive), copy and paste special characters each time I wanted to use them, or create complicated macros which would only work in certain programs.

A while back, I thought I could use Texter, which is a tiny yet powerful text replacement program from Lifehacker.  Unfortunately it doesn’t support Unicode characters, which are the ones I wanted (although give it a go if you type the same things a lot and want shortcuts that work in all your programs).  I couldn’t find many other alternatives online, although I found a few other people online who had the same (pinyin writing) issues as me.

Then I found a link to PhraseExpress, another text replacement program, and I thought I’d give it a go.  Well, lo and behold, it works perfectly!  All you have to do is add your desired characters (e.g. ā) and the key combination you want to associate it with.  You can even add whole pages of text instead of just special characters, and export your shortcuts so you can use them on different computers.

I did have to fiddle a bit with the format of the shortcuts (you obviously have to use something which you don’t use anywhere else), but finally decided on using .[letter][tone number] as my template.  So now if I type “.i2,” I get “í”.  Magic!

If you have been wanting to type special characters in any language simply and quickly, I highly recommend downloading the PhraseExpress software.  It’s completely free for personal use.

If anyone has any additional comments or recommendations, that’s what the comments box is for!

With the script technology available these days, it’s uncommon for language learners to focus so much on the writing of languages like Japanese and Chinese.  All you need to do is recognise a character, and know what it sounds like, to be able to write it on a computer.  Even in my own study, I am trying to focus more on reading, listening, and speaking, as it seems like it will take a long time to rote learn individual characters.

On the flip side, learning how to write characters yourself helps make them more concrete in your mind, and can really help you understand them and their relationships to other words and characters.  A useful tool I’ve found to help you write Japanese or Chinese (on the computer, no less!) is Skritter.  With Skritter, you can practice writing characters on the screen, and the program can help you with stroke order as well as giving useful information about the characters and radicals.  It also provides a tracking service so you can see your progress, and focus more on characters that you are having trouble with.

They provide a two week full service trial for learners of Japanese and Chinese (both traditional and simplified), so if you want to improve your writing skills, check it out!

On the major Chinese television network, CCTV, newscasters have been told to stop using commonly-understood English acronyms in their broadcasts.  Instead of using short forms like NBA and WHO, TV presenters have been told they must use the full Chinese translations, which are sometimes very long and might in turn be confusing to viewers.  If newscasters accidentally use the abbreviations, they must use the full translation immediately afterwards to establish what they are talking about.

The reasoning behind this move is that government officials do not want the Chinese language to be infiltrated by English and become some sort of mongrel in a few years.  I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, but it is somewhat reminiscent of the Académie française’s crusade to keep French pure.

I don’t know if this move will help maintain the grand traditions of the Chinese language, but it definitely won’t be saving the CCTV (err, China Central Television) anchors any time.

Source: CNNGo.

I recently gave in and bought an iPod Touch, and it was, in all honesty, mostly so I could try out some of the hundreds of useful language-learning applications out there.  The incredible potential of having not only mp3s and podcasts, but dictionaries, flashcards, and other learning tools in your pocket is a little bit mind-blowing.

So, you will probably see a few reviews and recommendations for not just individual applications, but general good practices when using your iPhone (or Android).

This first one is a slightly alternative way to use a productivity tool.  I first downloaded the demo version of Use Your Handwriting (UYH) from Gee Whiz Stuff because it provided a seemingly novel way of jotting down notes and to do lists in your own handwriting (or fingerwriting).

After playing with it for a little bit, I realised that it would be an ideal way to practice my Chinese characters, as there’s a simple interface and a big writing/drawing area.  You can easily move to the next screen (it even does it for you if you want), and shake to erase if you’re unhappy with your writing.  If you turn the device vertically, you can write top-to-bottom and left-to-right like they used to do in the old days!  The paid version even has rainbow colours (although you can, of course, choose other ones), which are different for almost every stroke, so you can tell if you are doing them correctly.  It also lets you write long notes and has a very handy email function, so you can send your jottings to yourself, your teacher, or your friends.

If you’re a learner of a language with a non-roman script, I would highly recommend it for practicing your writing (get a stylus for even better results).  It’s also a good place to jot down characters or words that you see during the day but can’t look up immediately.  Or just general note-taking in bright colours!

Do you know any other good apps for this purpose, or language learning in general?

I don’t have children myself, but I’d like to think that if I did, I would expose them to as many learning opportunities as possible.  I was speaking to an expat teacher the other day and she said that at one British school in Shanghai (which her children are no longer attending), children only receive Chinese instruction for two hours a week.  Apparently most parents don’t anticipate their kids being in China for long enough for it to be of value.

Do you agree with this?  I can sort of see why parents would think something like that (especially if they were going to send their kids back to the UK to boarding school), but if the language education isn’t going to encroach too much on their core education, I can’t see how it is a bad thing.  Kids will learn more about the local language and culture, which has obvious social and educational value.

I am a big fan of actually living in the country you’re living in, rather than locking yourself and your family away in a mini version of your home country.  Of course, everyone needs certain home comforts, but I think children should be given more experiences and opportunities, not less.  If they are about to be sent home to experience western culture anyway, why not let them experience the place they’re living in in the meantime?

A lot of phrases in English are understatements, as if we don’t want to commit too much to what we’re saying.  One of them that springs to mind is easy on the eyes, which is another way to say someone is good looking, sexy, beautiful.

In Chinese, there is the opposite.  The word they use for ‘ugly’ is 难看 (nánkàn), which is, literally, hard to look at. Ouch. The Japanese also have the word バックシャン (bakku-shan) for someone who appears hot from behind, but not from the front.

Do you know any other interesting phrases for someone who’s not so easy on the eyes?

*Note: looking up ‘ugly’ on Google Images isn’t really that good of an idea.

Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds taught us all the important lesson that the wrong hand signal could well get you killed (if you were pretending to be a Nazi in the wrong place and time).  In the film, someone gets gunned down because he uses the wrong hand signal for the number three.

A lot of people use the middle three fingers to denote the number three, though some use other combinations.  In the town in Germany mentioned in Inglourious Basterds, people use the thumb and first two fingers.  In China, many people use the last three fingers (similar to the A-OK hand signal).  I found myself using the latter yesterday when buying three bananas.  It used to feel wholly unnatural to me, but it suddenly doesn’t feel so weird any more.  Strange.

Which signal do you use for three?

*Out of interest, you can also use ‘finger’ as a measure of alcohol.  If you hold your finger horizontally against the bottom of the glass and fill it to the depth of the top of your finger, that’s ‘one finger’.  So, three fingers would be a pretty strong drink!

So I guess I don’t have my finger on the pulse, because March 4th was National Grammar Day, and I had no idea it was happening until it already had*.  The day, a chance to celebrate grammar and language in general, was started in 2008 by the founder of SPOGG (Society for the Protection of Good Grammar), and hosted by Mignon Fogarty (also known as Grammar Girl, who brings us the brilliant Quick and Dirty Tips).

Check out the National Grammar Day site for ways to celebrate and find out more about grammar and language, including links to some great cartoons, resources, e-cards and t-shirts. Let that grammar slacker in your life know it’s important to you (well, if it is, of course).

From the site, 10 grammar myths exposed:

1. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence.
2. You shouldn’t start a sentence with the word “however.”
3. “Irregardless” is not a word.
4. There is only one way to write the possessive form of a word that ends in “s.”
5. Passive voice is always wrong.
6. “I.e.” and “e.g.” mean the same thing.
7. You use “a” before words that start with consonants and “an” before words that start with vowels.
8. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.”
9. You shouldn’t split infinitives.
10. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.

(Click here for more information about the list above.)

Did you celebrate the occasion? Do you think grammar deserves its own day?

*I think this is a failing of people who start ‘national’ days.  They should really go big and go international. Grammar is important everywhere!