02 Jul 2014

July Goals

After three days on the internship, I now have an idea what this month is going to be like and it's time for me to set some Chinese related goals.

30 new MCDs + all reps for the day

I didn't manage to do 30 last month, but I will have ~45 minutes of daily commute, which is the ideal surrounding to get some reps done: No internet and nothing else to do (reading books on the Tube is impossible during rush hour). One thing I want to get away from, is mining news paper articles, which is what I have been using to make MCDs so far. Maybe some MCDs of novels would be nice.

Read one page in a real book

Reading physical books makes looking up words very time consuming. This seems and feels constraining, but I use popup dictionaries extensively on my computer and it's a more...

29 Jun 2014

June Goals Update

This is an update to the June Goals post that I wrote earlier this month.

30 new MCDs

While I didn't add the full 30 cards every day, I added cards on most days and, more importantly, I stayed on top of my reviews (come to speak of it, I still have to finish todays...). After my six or so months of Anki-burnout, I consider this a success.

10 minutes of using Skygge

I only did this once before realising that using Skygge with the sentences that come with it may not be the best way to improve my pronunciation at this point. While I do struggle with certain sounds when I'm not careful (especially 'x'), my girlfriend, who was sitting next to me, only corrected my pronunciation a couple of times during the ten minutes. Maybe a better approach would be to go for quantity more...

27 Jun 2014

Splitting Text into Words, Part I: Defining the Problem

This is a post about algorithms. If you are not interested in Computer Science, or if you are suffering from maths phobia, why not continue reading here?

Splitting Chinese text into words is a problem that a great majority of programs, that deal with Chinese text face. While simple solutions to this problem are easy to come up with, splitting text efficiently is not a trivial problem. This series of posts will describe a cool and clever algorithm that can split even long texts in a fraction of a second. It's intended for people with a general interest in computer science and algorithms, but it's meant as a gentle introduction and presupposes no existing knowledge. These posts will contain code snippets, but they should be easy to understand after reading the explanations in the posts, even for someone without programming experience.

This first part will give a formal description more...

07 Jun 2014

June Goals

This is going to be a short month for me, but I still want to set some goals starting Monday, when I'm back in London. These are all daily goals.

30 new MCDs

This is an ambitious goal for me, because card reviews pile up very quickly. If I get overwhelmed by 30, I'll down adjust my card count, but broadening my narrow vocabulary is one of my weakest points and I expect MCDs help with that. I just have to make sure I mine texts that are about topics that are new to me.

10 minutes of using Skygge

I always fancied myself someone with very good Chinese pronunciation, so my ego took a big hit when I recorded myself for the first time. My neutral tone is way to heavy and my 'x' and 'j' sounds are way off. My 'x' sounds like the 'ch' in German more...

05 Jun 2014

Introducing Skygge

Now that finals are over, I want to share a project that I wrote last month when procrastinating. I've become more and more interested in shadowing after reading a lot about it and trying it myself (I plan to write down my thoughts on shadowing in a future post; it's essentially the process of parroting native speakers, recording yourself while doing so and comparing your version to the original). While shadowing is entirely possible with existing programs, they are not exactly user friendly. This program aims to make the entire process of finding audio, playing and looping it, and recording yourself as painless as possible. I'm pretty satisfied with the result and I'm calling it "Skygge", which the internet tells me is Danish for "shadow" :D.

Downloads

You can download Skygge for free here:

• Mac app for people without Java. If you have a Mac try this first. more...

03 May 2014

Taiwanese Society and the Sunflower Movement

This image appeared on my facebook wall the other day. It's a drawing of the different types of people in Taiwanese society from the point of view of someone who supports the sunflower movement. It's remarkably well made and quite funny, so I thought I would make an attempt to translate it. There are some parts I don't understand and some others where I'm not completely certain, so if you catch a mistake, please leave a comment below!

Below each type, there's a quote of what a person of that type might think about the demonstrations or a short description and next to that a comment of the person who made the image.

From right to left, this is what I can make out:

A) "I wish I could say something"; Because of the current situation, this person doesn't dare to or isn't able to express more...

25 Apr 2014

Review: Reading & Writing Chinese

Update 4. May 2014: I just saw that there's a third edition of the simplified version of this book that came out last year. I will update this post once I get my hands on a copy of this new edition.

This is a book review of the revised edition of "Reading & Writing Chinese" by William McNaughton and Li Ying. I thought it would be a good idea to write down my thoughts on some of the Chinese textbooks that I've used. "Reading & Writing Chinese" was the very first book on Chinese that I bought, and it's going to be the first I review. This book comes in a simplified and a traditional version. I own both, but beause they are very similar, and I don't have the simplified edition here in London, I will describe the traditional version only.

Although on its cover, "Reading & Writing Chinese" more...

22 Apr 2014

Study Methods, Part II: MCDs

MCD (Massive-Context Cloze-Deletion) is a flash card format popularised by Khatzumoto on his Ajatt blog. How much he really added to the ideas of cloze-deletion and incremental reading besides the acronym is a controversial topic that I don't want to discuss in this post. I will use his terminology, but if this method interests you, it might be a good idea to head over to the Supermemo website. Spread over two or three decks, I have created and studied about 6'000 of these cards. In this post, I'll give a brief description of the format and my experience with this method.

MCDs in their most basic form have a paragraph of text on the front with one character hidden ("clozed") and the same paragraph on the back with that character shown and usually highlighted. Sometimes, dictionary definitions are added to the back, that translate or explain the words more...

21 Apr 2014

Study Methods, Part I: Remembering the Hanzi

After a long break, I've decided to revive this blog. I've been learning Chinese for over four years now, and I've been stuck in intermediate hell for most of that time. Over the summer, I want to finally push through the plateau that I have been on for so long. To prepare for the time after my finals, I want to use this blog to sort out my thoughts on learning Chinese.

This is the first of a number of posts I plan to write on the different study methods I've tried over the last four years. It will describe my experiences with Heisig's method of using nmemoric stories to memorise Chinese characters. I first learned about this method from Khatzumoto's blog in 2010. In the beginning of 2011, I finished the first book (there are four books in total, two each for both simplified and traditional characters). I more...