Wanna Challenge Your Chinese?

Yeah I Love characters But its very hard

to learn alot i Know about 30 My problem is

i study /go over a whole list when i should study just 3 of them & get them Down.

I also get some chinese newspapers just to have

some chinese people have this ( why you cant Read ) look on their face, Any ways im still trying & still Love it

hey, guys, let's continue to challenge your chinese!

1.“说曹操曹操到”指的是曹操吗？

2.你知道“王婆卖瓜自卖自夸”是什么意思吗？

mingkuo,

幸好你最终还是回到家了！^_^

我是在当天的公投在台北的。我几乎错过了我的回家航班因为台北的交通拥堵很大。很多人回来投票了。

Thank you for the study aid, Cassie. It's fun to explore the nuances of QQ language.

This could be very useful for hardcopy stuff:

http://www.amazon.com/English-Chinese-Scan-PenPower-Super-Scaneye/dp/B000BCDDH4

Accordingly to one of the review though it's doesn't include pinyin.

oops... a typo with "AuntySue"

大家好，

I’ve just tried an experiment, following last precious AuntieSue’s suggestion, but I did some variation:

I’ve chosen an Italian online newspaper which offers a Chinese text version of the main subjects.

Found an article, whose subject I knew less or more (even though this should not interfere too much with the result, I did so attempting to add a little bit of emotional motivation to my experiment).

Then I’ve copied and pasted the text into my word editor, afterward I’ve signed the characters I know using the marker tool with a colour, and the ones I partially know with another.

First surprise: the page became pretty full of colours, really over my best expectations, even though, if I’d repeat the test signing only known words instead of characters, the result certainly would be much worse!! In any case, I’ve realised for the first time, within a clear visual perception, the gap between the mere knowledge of a certain number of characters and my (insufficient) overall understanding ability!!

Finally I’ve saved the document as a “web page”, and now I can open it with Mozilla, and I can browse it using the ChinesePera-kun plug-in, and believe me, it’s a pure relief, at the end!

P.S.: If someone is interested, the link to the newspaper is this: http://www.corriere.it/

PS, don't forget to set PlecoDict in traditional character mode, since all of our printed publications in Oz use trad only.

light487, this is how I use the local Chinese rag. I pick an ordinary looking page, and go through with a highlighter marking any character I know really well. Speed speed speed, the well known ones will leap out of the page at you and say hi (or bu4, or whatever).

Next I grab another colour of highlighter, and spend a little more time actually looking for characters that I recognise, either known or half known. The half known ones then get looked up so that I can give myself a satisfying smack on the forehead.

This way, a $1 newspaper can last you for weeks if you do a page a day. Later on, there's instant visual feedback of how much of the page was covered in each colour. And you don't waste good study time doing futile dictionary lookups of new words that you might not have chosen to learn anyway.

Do you have PlecoDict on your PDA? If not, buy it right away, you won't regret it. If you have it, do you know you can draw a character and it will look it up for you?

Hi Brent,

I am sorry for answering your question so late.

About my new avatar, can you see there is a sentence? May be it is hard for you to see that sentence, it is a little small one.“我们永远是朋友。”=We are friends forever. And the sentence was wrote on a annual ring/growth ring年轮nian2lun2. That is the hint for a long time friendship.

Hi Changye,

Thank you for your suggestion. I would love to. But I still not figure out which blog website i should use yet. "sigh"

I did try to use blogger from google, but it is a kind of weird that i just can see the Dashboard and can not view the blog by myself."sigh"

BAH!!!!!!!!

One of the characters I could not find was 文！ How annoying.. Seeing it in this conversation with 中 next to it made me immediately recognise the character.. *sigh* I looked and looked and looked.. I found the radicals that made up the character, checked the 4-stroke index.. everything.. I couldn't find it at all.. but now.. it's so clear..

I can't write them into the mdbg.net thing to find out what they are either :(

哈哈! it took me 30 minutes to look up a single character in the newspaper today and I don't even know if I found the right one. I need to get a replacement battery for my PDA and then load some sort of stroke-based recognition Chinese writing program on there so I can quickly write in a character and get the meaning I think..

May be I am just getting ahead of myself and trying to tackle the impossible too quickly.. 我不知道！

Hi casie,

Maybe you should release some pages from your diary, with annotations and comments, on your future blog. I think that they are definitely more intriguing, informative and educational for Mandarin learners than Yang Jie’s diary!

Hi user30796,

Chineseperakun is really useful and helpful. It is an indispensable tool for me when I read newspaper articles on the Internet, but please be noted that you sometimes come across errors in tone marks (声调符号), perhaps as is often the case with online Chinese dictionaries.

ok I bought Australian Chinese Newspaper this morning.. I think it will take me a year to read it though.. :) So I will eventually know what happened today 23 April 2008.. in 23 April 2009.. :)

What I did start doing was creating a quick reference pocket dictionary for myself. I'm writing out all the most common (as well as characters known to me) characters in a little notepad. I'll probably need to redo it since my writing in zhongwen is not very good right now.... but I would rather have that then a 2000+ character textbook to look at every time I need to look up a character.. which at this stage is every 2nd character.. :)

It's no good writing the pinyin translation of what I am reading.. because that would be double handling.. I think it will be beneficial to read outloud (even in my head) so I get used to the sounds etc though.. but I should concentrate on reading the characters directly rather than a 3-stage process of zongwen-pinyin-english

Hi All, in one of the other conversations Mirjam recommended downloading the Chinese dictionary "ChinesePera-kun" from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349.

It has helped me tremendously and I strongly recommend it. I am able to read Chinese news, but like many, I guess the meaning and pronunciation of a lot of the words and phrases. This "in-line" dictionary is so convenient I am improving my reading as much as I am learning to speak.

Unfortunately the download is only applicable if you are using Firefox. However it is worth making the switch if just

for this.

Hi Changye, the bit about 满大人 is most interesting. Thanks..

Hi light487,

You raised a very interesting question. There are several words that mean “Chinese language”, and their nuances are a little different from each other. Of course, some of them are often used interchangeably.

汉语 implies “汉族人’s language”, not “other 少数民族’s (ethnic groups) languages”, therefore, for example, Chinese linguists and historians commonly employ the word “汉语” in their books and writings.

On the other hand, 中文 has a nuance of 中国’s language, not foreign countries’ language (外文, 外语), and the word also implies “written Chinese.” Anyway, 汉语 and 中文 are usually interchangeable.

中国话 is the more conversational version of 中文, and 中国语 is rarely used and is a very formal word. Btw, Mandarin is the transliteration of “满大人 (man3 da4 ren2)”, high-ranking bureaucrats in the Qing dynasty (清朝).

Cassie, I still need to improve quite a lot, but learning to read well is my main goal really. Reading your text unaided I have trouble with the overall meaning, but if I delve into a bit deeper I should be able to understand it. :)

Beware, it's critically important to keep this "lots of reading practice" idea within its appropriate context.

To sit down and do lots of reading of Chinese, you need material which is 80 or 90 percent understandable. Otherwise you're not reading the text, you're reading the dictionary. If you have to look up one in every ten words, it gets a bit boring and strays from "practising reading" per se. Any more than that, and it's not reading, not by any stretch of the imagination, it's study and analysis of a sentence, like a lesson. Still good, but very, very different.

So here we're either talking about advanced learners who alredy have some good reading ability (and bear in mind the vast majority of cpoddies are newbies or barely elementary level), or else we're talking about a rare kind of reading material.

That rare material, containing only easy words for reading, would probably only cut in at an upper elementary level, and even then it works best when tied to a progressive course so that the text can contain mostly words that the student has already encountered. Or else, like I said, it might be useful but it's not reading practice, it's dictionary work.

So basically I'm saying it's futile to talk about reading practice until the student has reached a reasonably high level (which most of us are not) and also appropriate reading material is available (which in Chinese, compared to other learning languages, is almost totally absent). We're either talking to those who can already read, or talking about dictionary practice, not reading practice.

For myself, I have never ever found anything I can just read (looking up say ten percent of words), but only ever seen text which contain in excess of 50 percent unfamiliar words. In my book, that's not "reading", no way, not even approaching it.

When I can read a lot more, maybe in 2 or 3 years, sure, I'll be reading everything Chinese that I can get my hands on! Just not yet.

路加，

You can say 汉语/中文 both mean chinese.

henning,

Now i know why you are so knowledgeble.lols

You have abundant of resources and you know how to use them. I hope i guessed right!

Changye,

I know you can absolutely understand my chinese diary since you are a advance user here on Chinesepod.^_^ You set a very good example for other poddies. Thank you for your good wish.

wuts up chinese people

Hi casie,

Thanks a lot for your diary. I’ve really enjoyed reading those everyday-life essays, full of real (地道的) Chinese, written by a typical (in a good sense) Chinese university student. I sincerely hope, as well as other poddies, that you will successfully pass the English proficiency test 八级 in May.

casie,

Wirtschaftsinformatik

which is a variant of "Information Systems"

信息系统

Why is it 中文 Instead of 中语？ Just one of those things...?

henning,

Thank you !

It is very common for teacher to Grade exams and homeworks. Grade homeworks改作业, hope i said that right.

Btw, Henning, what subject do you teach in College? German？德语吗？

Adam,

You get up SO Early, I guess it is just about 5am there in San Diego. I am not expect that you will say“我知道了/我明白了”. Umm, still long way to go!

路加，

You are right, that is very natural Chinese.

Henning,

It will be more natural if you say不过学生都等待我揭晓结果/答案。 No need to add什么here in the end of the sentence. But you can add什么in the end of a question, like结果是什么？答案是什么？

casie: I would say: "Grade exams"

light,

I did it with flashcards - first paper based: I got a set of 1375 German-Hanzi ones with pronounciation, basic meaning, and example vocab. Later I worked with an electronic flash card program which had up to about 4000 characters.

But: Although I want to encourage you to start early with characters, please do not follow my footsteps. Do it in a more meaningful way. I remember Bazza found a good book for learning characters, maybe he helps out...

@urbandweller

你不知道什么？

I hope I said that right.. I just guessed

- 路加

light> I think that it is very important to read groups of characters. The characters are not words in themselves, the composites are! Knowing the individual characters is no guarantee for knowing the composite, but it helps a lot.

In the line you take, there are several composites. Step one is to recognize those composites , and to translate them.

不过 however 学生 student(s) 都 all 等待 (wait) 我 (our) 揭晓 (make public) 结果 (results) 是 (is/are) 什么 (how)。。。

So, in this case, it is enough to knowing the meaning of the words to understand the meaning.. unfortunately, Chinese is not always that simple.

How do you learn "tons of characters" without any real meaning to them.. I mean.. are you looking at the character and then reproducing the pinyin so you can see the tone and sound etc? I have a great reading and writing book but I don't actually write the characters myself: 1 because I don't any decent materials to do it justice, and 2 because I suck at drawing :)

Should I be writing it all out? I dunno.. I just feel I am at a road block with my learning at the moment and I am unable to construct the most basic sentences.. like..

I am a good boy

I like to eat beef

I want to go to Shanghai

My favourite colour is red

I guess I need to start writing lots and lots.. I just don't know where to begin... :/

我不知道！！哈哈！

>'.'<

-亚当

light487,

Here are many good fairy tale story books for kids in China.^_^ Oh, many books are for learning 成语chengyu called成语故事书. And I second henning's suggestion, news is good for you because you can learn the most practical use words in China.

Henning,

Thank you for your reminding, but I think your English is much better than me.^_^

henning, yes, I can understand you. I know it would be boring if you doing (评)改卷子(how to say that in English?)again and again sometimes. And as students, they are always eager to know the result. Ha ha!

First of all you should be extremly careful with the garbage that I produce in Chinese...

;)

Then, the best way to get a feeling for the language is to stick with the podcasts first - go for Elementry to Intermediate. There you learn to identify common phrases and to discinguish high-frequency words and patterns. When I came here two years ago I did the same (before I had already learned some individual words phrases + tons of characters, but no sentence structures, patterns, grammar, etc. All got it here).

And yes, I have been learning for many, many years and still not really consider myself "fluent" (whatever that is).

Let's take this line:

不过学生都等待我揭晓结果是什么。。。

What would be the most beneficial way for me to translate/learn that? Should I break it down into each separate character, then re-write it character by character? Or should I be trying to recognise the groups of characters? Should I be saying the characters out loud as I read them?

May be I am being too hard on myself as I hear some people's stories of learning for many years and still not being able to speak and write fluently...

Adam and Brent, you two should be more patient although I know it is very hard for you to understand those words. If I were you i will figure out those hard words or phrases that I don't know via a dictionary. I do really use dictionary when I do English reading sometimes, but i did not look up every words that i don't know, I just look up those frequently used words that I don't know.^_^ It depends on, some need intensive reading while some need extensive reading.

Bazza,

How is it going? Can you understand most of them, I just heard that you are good at chinese reading from "Bazza and Dating with Chinese girls".^_^

marcelbdt,

Sounds like you can understand my chinese diary. That is cool. Are you in the advance level? How long have you learned Chinese? Ummm, I am studying foreign language and English is my major. I originally thought to have a job that somewhere can relate to English, such as international trade, intermediate translation and interpretation.(It is a little hard for me now since my English is not good enough, but that is still a good dream.) I am going to graduate in two months. I will start work for my present college in this August.

In China is hard for a common graduate college or university student to have the ideal job at the first begin. And the society ,the real world is more and more competitive. Still many students can not find a job after they graduate. In a word, the situation is very tense.

P.S.: Be aware that not all of us are native English speakers. Me for example. Try not to pick up my mistakes...

Thanks, casie,

lots of relevant vocab in there, e.g. 揭晓 (jiēxiǎo, to announce [here: test results])

我刚在判卷子, 枯燥死我了。

不过学生都等待我揭晓结果是什么。。。

light,

those elemetry school readers are the most frustrating, believe me. News are easier.

Hey.. can I ask for recommendation for Chinese books for primary school level readers? I think if I were to start off like children start off reading, I would feel less intimidated if I had books with only a small amount of writing on each page. I remember when I was a kid, I would read picture books that, had at the most, 20 words per page.. however I don't know where to look for these books as I live in Australia..

Cassie> Interesting.. what exactly are you studying? And what kind of work do you want to do when you have finished studying?

Thanks cassie, that should keep me busy for a few hours or days hehe. ;)

好！大家一起研究吧

Hi Brent, You are a night cat again!

Cassie, thanks for challenge! This is a little out of my league however.

I'm curious about your new avatar. Can you explain what's going on?

我不知道！！哈哈！

>'.'<

-亚当

oops, correction, it is "community" not "communication".^_^