Category Archives: Learning Japanese and Chinese
Huliganov’s non-pretty, non-intense Japanese lesson
Original YT playout date: 5 July 2009
Duration: 6:13
Just because I don’t know anything about a subject doesn’t mean I can’t teach a lesson in it. After all, it never bothers quite a few people on YouTube!
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Japanese Calligraphy
Original YT playout date: 11 March 2009
Duration: 50:40
Takahiro-san not only gave me a wonderful present of a fantastic set of classical writing implements from Japan, but also gave me the chance to learn and share with you the way to do Japanese calligraphy the traditional way.
I hope you enjoy this unique film in which this ancient and subtle art form is fully demonstrated.
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A thousand words in 6 weeks
Those of my readers who are also on Olly Richards mailing list – and there may well be a sizeable crossover due to common interests – will have noted that he has a guest on this week, one “memory scientist” Anthony Metivier telling people that according to his method it is possible to learn 1000 words in six weeks.
Now just for the record let me say that learning words in isolation isn’t optial, better to learn short phrases showing the word in use with its collocations and recalling a range of grammar, but you certainly can learn words if you want to.
I just wanted to compare the results of people using the GoldList Method and certainly my own experience using the GoldList Method with this run rate of 1000 words in six weeks.
I prefer to use the term lines, and how many new words equate to 100 new lines depends entirely on the material. If it’s a dictionary it can be 100% or near. Probably the average is around half of that, and in some cases even less. Certainly I take several lines for each new word in Japanese, while in Czech I have 24,000 lines of Headlist and I know that there are around 18,000 words in there. Imiagine that we wanted to focus on words, we’d prepare material in order that a line was a word. So for this thought experiment I will take the idea 1 line of GLM = 1 word per Mr Metivier’s Method. GLM is very flexible so it will work around that.
To learn 1000 lines in GLM means to entirely distil them away. This cannot actually be done in six weeks as you can do a maximum of two distillations in that time. So instead you have to apply the long-term run rate which is 3 line repetitions on average per line of Headlist, because a 1000 line Headlist will distil out at somthing like this:
H = 1000,
D1 = 680,
D2 = 460,
D3 = 310
Bronze total 2,450
D4 = 175,
D5 = 125,
D6 = 90
D7 = 60
Silver Total 450
D8 = 40
D9 = 25
D10 = 15
D11 = 10
Gold Total 100
Grand total 3,000
3000/1000 = 3
It will vary from maybe 2.6 to 3.4 but in the main it will be around 3.
So to learn 1000 lines to the long term memory you need to do 3,000 lines in those 3 weeks.
That will be the equivalent of learning 1000 words, but you won’t necessarily know which of them they are. It won’t be a question of guaranteeing that all the words in a list of 1000 are in long-term memory, instead it is a question of following a long-term run rate.
So, how 3000 lines in 6 weeks is 500 lines a week.
That’s the same as the 5,000 level target on the 70 day challenges.
So effectively what Metivier is doing and what we are doing is a very similar result.
In our case, it should be possible using an average of 1.5 hours per day.
What is more interesting is to see which method gives the best passive recall two years after the six weeks in question are over.
Mandarin Chinese made easy
Playout date: 2 February 2007
Duration: 1:08
Views at the time added to HTV: 2,908
Likes at the time added to HTV: 6
Dislikes at time added to HTV: 6
Popularity % ” ” ” =L/(L+D): 50.0%
Comments at time added: 2
Total interactions at time added: 14
Camera: Panasonic DMZ -FZ30
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – slight use
Location: Lesozavodsk, Siberia
Other people featured: David Yang, Wincy Liu
Genre: Friends
Music used: None
Languages used: English, Mandarin
Animals/plants featured: None
Other remarks:
This footage was taken further east than China, over in the Rusian far east with collegues from the Horwath (now Crowe Horwath International) network’s Beijing office. We had a summer valuing for Bank of China a huge Siberian forest as big as a European country, full of tigers, bears, snow leopards and chipmunks.
Here David Yang and Wincy Liu demonstrate some Chinese tongue twisters and we practice the phrase “Ni zhen niu” – or “you are a genuine ox”, along with the de rigueuer thumbs up sign, which apparently menas like “well done”, “you’re a good bloke”, etc.
Final Thoughts (for now) on the Four Function Diagram
I don’t really like the term “final thoughts” as it sounds as if I am planning to stop thinking afterwards, or maybe stop existing altogether, which I am certainly not considering if I can help it, however I do need, as Victor Berrjod kindly reminds me, to round this off, hence the title.
Let me just get a coffee, this could be a longish article, maybe you would like one as well?
Right, let’s continue. The story so far is that we’ve divided the things or activities that you can do in a language, be it counting, swearing, praying, reading the paper, watching TV, learning the songs of the language or filling in a visa form or a job application into four basic types or functions, as shown in the above table:
1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Listening
4. Speaking
Just about anything you can do in a language bases on one or more of these four functions.
Take a moment if you like to see of you can think of any activity involving language that is an exception, and by all means tell me in the comments. Personally I could not think of any exceptions.
We’ve also considered that for one pair of these functions, listening and reading, the learner is on the receiving end of polished language and therefore is able to use his or her passive knowledge to engage in the function and its related activities. Listening is more challenging than reading because the user has less ability to control the speed, although there are instruments available based on developing listening skills where you can control the pace of listening. We talked about audio courses where you have your pause button, and another good one is Audible where you can buy audiobooks in other languages and set a slower narrator speed, or a higher one in order to develop ‘listening fluency’. However, in the main, for the passive pair as long as a word is known passively the learner will not be put off his or her stride by reading or hearing it as they will be able to recall its meaning when it is given in the language much easier than when he or she needs to generate the expression and knows it passively, but is not in an active state, and the mind goes blank.
Conversely, we’ve recognised that the other pair of functions, speaking and writing, are ones in which we the learner are called upon to generate the learned language and not just fluently recognise meaning and stay with the flow of the presented foreign language material. This represents an additional challenge but one essential to get to grips with sooner or later if you want to SPEAK the language. We are always hearing the term “what languages do you speak?” rather than which can you read, listen to with understanding or even write in. Now more than ever nobody seem to be all that impressed by the ability to write in a foreign language – unless they actually watch you forming calligraphic kanjis with your hand – because things like Google Translate are available. And even though in the main the Google Translate users do give themselves away pretty quickly, seeing that the quality of that service is not yet all one might be led to expect, nevertheless sometimes quite convincing written language comes at you over the internet from people who don’t really know the language in question at all. They are having fun, but it also serves to undermine the value placed by the online community on written foreign language skills and so now, more than ever, the gold standard is really what you can speak. Read the rest of this entry
Further Thoughts on the Four Function Diagram
I am now returning, having received a moment ago a timely reminder from Victor Berrjod, to the discussion on the above diagram, and what it can show us of use to the learners of language.
In the earlier article, I wrote about how in reading and in listening the language user is passive – not having to generate his own grammatically correct language or have the right word at hand. Therefore reading and listening are intrinsically less challenging than writing or speaking. For someone not in an active state with his command of a foreign language, reading and listening creates less of a problem than writing or speaking. If he, or she, knows the word in their passive memory then it should be that they can deal with reading it or listening to it. In order to be able to speak or writing a person must find that word for themselves.
So we have compared the two rows in the diagram. Let us now compare the two columns.
In the leftmost column, the one containing reading as the passive skill or function and writing as the active skill, we can say that the learner is able to exercise more control over timing when reading and writing than when speaking and listening. Read the rest of this entry
Chinese from scratch – a 1260 hour work Programme optimising your result.

If you want to learn Mandarin you can’t duck out of the time it takes – you can only optimise it. Here we see some mandarin ducks optimising their time on a lake.
Reader Jarad Mayers wrote the following very good question:
Hi,
I want to learn Mandarin. I am not sure how to go about it. This is the very first language I am attempting to learn. I have not done anything yet. I am on very tight budget and currently not employed. I tried to access the free material on Mandarin (http://fsi-language-courses.org/ )but it is no longer accessible . I was wondering if I could use your experince and if possible sort of outline the steps I need to follow.BTW, I am not sure where to post my question. I am sorry if this the wrong place for posting it.
Thanks,
Jarad
I’ve prepared the answer as a table – it is a whole programme to 80% of Chinese that you’d need to get your degree, read newspapers, live an everyday life in China. The rest after that comes down to vocabulary building for which I’d recommend the goldlisting of dictionaries or of bilingual literature. You could spend four times as much time getting from 80% Chinese to 100% Chinese (ask Vilf “the Gilf” Pareto, he’ll tell you why, or might have done, until 1923 – now you’ll have to look up what he thought in order to know why, or simply accept it).
Real Chinese philologists like Victor Berrjod might give you other useful sources better than the ones I have listed. All of the ones I have listed are available on Amazon. The audio courses are expensive so it will pay you to shop around a bit.
1260 hours, based on the number of years/days in Daniel and the Book of Revelation, also happens to be a typical year’s work in a modern Western company. Read the rest of this entry
Someone has had trouble remembering enough words with their Goldlist
Someone (sic) wrote to me recently suggesting that the Goldlist was not for them as they had tried to do a distillation and only remembered 2 of 25 words.
Now I am someone who has just discovered that there is more than one metabolic type, that a good 45% of people are Matebolism B types as opposed to Metabolism A types, and that’s why the traditional diets based just on calories and not concerned with the whole sugar question don’t do the job but actually made me worse. Given that fact, I’m perfectly open to the idea that just as there is more than one type of metabolism, there may be another type of memory and that really not everyone will benefit from the Goldlist method – yes it is perfectly possible. I have an open mind on that question.
However, given that the Goldlist Method has indeed helped the overwhelming majority of people who have tried it, including some who could never learn languages using other methods and now can, as well as some others who were already successful polyglots with their own tried and tested methods who nevertheless saw enough merit in the Method to add it to their armoury of tools, I would be reluctant to give up on it just after not having a great result on the first distillation. Instead I would look at the reasons why a person could find that they distil a headlist and only manage to throw out 2 of the 25 and not something like 6, 8, 10, 12 or even 14 as is the experience of most people using the method. Read the rest of this entry
Some of my Japanese mnemonics
I don’t hold with using mnemonics usually in language learning, but with Japanese there is so much going on at once in a word – the various readings, the shape of the kanji, etc, that sometimes odd wordgames and things like that can help. It’s a waste of time to try and do it for every word, but here are some of mine which I already shared (to greater or lesser levels of appreciation) on http://www.readthekanji.com.
Here’s just ten to be going on with. I probably have done about a hundred, but to see them you need to join http://www.readthekanji.com!
1. To Deliver
届ける
todokeru
とどける
That square head by the basket is like *Todo the dog with the square head in the Wizard of Oz in Dorothy’s cycle basket. That’s the moment when he jumps out, so he can’t be *delivered to the interfering neighbour.
2. Sand
砂
suna
すな
If you get *sand inside your ear, the *suna you get it out, the better.
(Another, less polite one, is based on the reading of “suna” backwards, given the fact that if you slide along a beach backwards you’ll probably get some sand in there. But I didn’t put that one up, at least not yet.)
3. Circumstances
都合
tsugou
つごう
If the *circumstances in the company worsen, the boss le-*ts-u-gou..
4. Or less than, not more than
以下
ika
いか
*Ika-rus was NOT able to get HIGHER THAN other people for long. Is the symbol on the left a bit like his broken wings falling with him the spot in the middle tumbling to the ground?
5. Season
季節
kisetsu
きせつ
The prisoner warders are issued with new *keysets every *season
6. Airport
空港
kuukou
くうこう
“That’s a nice *kuukou clock, where did you buy it?”
“At Geneva *Airport.”
7. Deep
深い
fukai
ふかい
*Fukai didn’t realise it was going to be that *deep!
8. Famous
有名
yuumei
ゆうめい
“Dad, Justin Bieber’s so *famous even *yuu may have heard of him!”
9. Preparation / setup / arrangements
準備
junbi
じゅんび
He had made all the *arrangements and *preparations, but, being of a nervous disposition, he was still very *”junbi” (jumpy) before the event…
10. To bring up
育てる
sodateru
そだてる
Looking at the kanji, you might see the frowning face of a very strict upbringer. He’s a right “sod at err”-ors made by his students.
Related articles
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