Beginning Chinese Reader

What Hacker News says

1. tokenadultJul 2015
   I began my study of Chinese in 1975. I got to be good enough in reading Chinese to set the ceiling of scores obtained in an experimental administration of a test for Chinese language for speakers of English. (The test was not further developed by the test developers, but I saw the summary of norming administration scores.) I worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter for government-sponsored people-to-people visits to the United States. I was just reading Chinese-language newspapers via Google News just before bopping over here to Hacker News.

   Simply put, the biggest single mistake learners of Chinese make in learning Chinese characters is learning them only in isolation and not also by reading connected Chinese-language text in which Chinese characters appear in "compounds" (meaningful Chinese words). The full argument for doing this is developed by the late John DeFrancis (a brilliant language teacher and textbook author) in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader,[1] which is still a very worthwhile book decades after it was first published. DeFrancis built in a lot of spaced repetition in the book lessons, back in the days before "spaced repetition" was a trendy term, but he crucially also makes sure the lesson texts illustrate the various ways that Chinese characters enter into compounds to form high-frequency words in the modern Chinese vocabulary. Try it if you'd like to more Chinese in the most efficient way possible.

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chinese-Reader-Part/dp/03000...

   P.S. for a more extensive discussion of how to learn natural human languages effectively, see a comment of mine from about two years ago that was very popular with other readers of HN:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302276#up_6302816

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2. tokenadultAug 2013
   Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator. I'll back up what pg said with a data point from academic research. The online article "How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist,"

   http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html

   by a Nobel laureate in physics who is a native speaker of Dutch, makes clear what the key learning task is to be a good physicist: "English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand English." On his list of things to learn for physics, that even comes before mathematics.

   I like to share advice on language learning, because this topic comes up on Hacker News frequently. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

   http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

   But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

   It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

   Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

   with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

   http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

   Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

   After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

   The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

   The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

   I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

   http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

   and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

   The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

   http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

   http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

   http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

   http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

   and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

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3. tokenadultOct 2012
   Ben, I didn't realize you had a child of just that age. Please allow me to recommend to you and to other HN participants who surf by who are parents of children learning to read the best--bar none--approach to initial reading instruction in English for native speakers of English. It has worked for all four of my children, including the three who spent significant parts of their childhood in a mostly Chinese-speaking environment (reducing their exposure to English speech and English printed materials). The book Let's Read, a Linguistic Approach

   http://wsupress.wayne.edu/slp/bloomfieldlr.htm

   http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...

   by Leonard Bloomfield (an eminent linguist and pioneer of new methods of teaching hard-to-learn languages) and Clarence L. Barnhart (a lexicographer) has now been revised by Cynthia A. Barnhart and Robert K. Barnhart (I presume they are the original co-author's children). I used the first edition, and can recommend it UNRESERVEDLY. The first edition appears to no longer be in print, and some Amazon reviewers say they prefer the first edition, but the second edition, currently available, surely is better than the great mass of school materials used for English reading instruction. How I used the book is to set a goal of somewhere between one lesson a day and six or seven pages a day, and then read each lesson out loud to my child, with my child then reading the lesson back to me, with adaptation earlier in the book to do the reading and reading back a sentence at a time, and near the end of the book for the child to read by himself or herself without me reading first. All my children are strong readers who love to read. You'll find that this book, under Bloomfield's pedagogical influence, makes good use of spaced repetition of the key sound-symbol correspondences in Engish. But this is reading connected text, rather than just looking at flash cards, and the stories are remarkably interesting for their carefully graded vocabulary.

   More details if you like. My main online involvement in the early 1990s was discussion of optimal reading instruction approaches for United States schools, but now I've discovered that mathematics education needs at least as much help, and have shifted focus to that. But I could provide (old) links to rationale for this approach if you like, and anyway an ounce of inexpensive prevention is worth a pound of expensive cure when helping a child's initial reading instruction prevents future reading and spelling difficulties. And kudos to you for continuing to read aloud to your child as he learns to read. Not reading to children beyond school age is one of the big missed opportunities in many middle-class families.

   Aside to other participants: I'm wondering how many people who have used flash cards for foreign language learning have put their languages to the test in a country where those languages are spoken. I have studied many languages (I think there is a partial list in my user profile), and what I have observed over and over is how each language maps reality in a different way, so that ones rarely correspond one-to-one in the manner expected by flashcards. I much preferred learning to read Chinese, for example, by using the excellent Chinese Reader series by John DeFrancis

   http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chinese-Reader-Part/dp/03000...

   through which I first learned about Bloomfield's approach to foreign language teaching. (DeFrancis was a student of Bloomfield's.)

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4. tokenadultOct 2012
   This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner. (As disclosed in my HN user profile, I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese to the proficiency that I was able to work as a translator and as a Chinese-English interpreter.)

   Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other language. As the saying goes, "The map is not the territory." Each language has its own peculiarities of dividing up the Universe of experience into words, and especially each language has a different approach to arranging words into sentences and longer utterances with grammar and syntax.

   I know of a Web page that lists some language-learning resources, especially useful for the case of learning one Indo-European language (like the blog post author's native langauge) while already knowing another.

   http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

   The best single bit of advice I can give for someone who wants to learn a language thoroughly is to do a lot of what the blog post author is doing: reading in the target language. The section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975 has great advice: "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original).

   祝你好運。(Good luck!)

   AFTER EDIT: The comment posted by _feda_ before this comment was posted that it is important to read target language text for meaning beyond one's current reading level, using context rather than a dictionary to figure things out, is correct. That has much to do with improving understanding of the second language, just grappling with the language directly a lot, not always relying on bilingual reference books.

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5. tokenadultMay 2012
   This is unintentionally an illustration of how LOUSY general (all-languages-included) materials for language-learning are. I am a native speaker of English who acquired Chinese as a second language at adult age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, gaining professional work as second-language teacher (Chinese for English speakers and English for Chinese speakers) and translator and interpreter. I don't like Rosetta Stone materials (as I have seen earlier editions of those) for the same reason that I don't like this Memrise lesson: the lesson is based on frameworks of learning Spanish or French for English speakers, and the lesson doesn't work nearly as well for Chinese, a non-Indo-European language.

   The astute criticism already given in another comment has full force--the lesson here doesn't do a thing to teach a reader how to pronounce Chinese. Moreover, the lesson totally muffs up Chinese grammar, because "汉字好学" is not a "condensed form" of an expression that would include a copula verb in Chinese such as "汉字 [form of verb 'to be'] 好学" but rather the sole grammatical way to convey the idea in Chinese. Chinese grammar prefers stative verbs to combinations of copulas and adjectives. The word and character etymologies are also treated abominably poorly in the Memrise story. I never advocate filling one's mind with junk just to have memory hooks for learning new information.

   This approach doesn't lay a good foundation for successful learning of Chinese by a native speaker of English. The tried and true textbooks by the late John DeFrancis from Yale University Press and their accompanying audio recordings reflect an older period of standard northern Mandarin, but are much better resources for learning Chinese than Memrise. Especially, DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader is still the royal road for learning to read Chinese, the subject of the article kindly submitted here. DeFrancis made a very careful analysis of reading difficulties second-language learners of Chinese encounter. That is published in condensed form in the front part of Beginning Chinese Reader, and in full form in the classic article "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association.

   As Confucius said, 學而時習之 不亦說乎, so there is no substitute for practice in language learning. Language learning is overlearning, and learning languages well takes time.

   AFTER EDIT:

   Two kind replies below raise questions about what I've written above. I was asked about James Heisig. I have perused his books about Japanese (another language I have studied, not as much as Chinese). Doing some looking-up just now to answer the question, I would say that the James Heisig interview

   http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979

   gives, in Heisig's own words, cautions about using his texts as a comprehensive approach for learning literacy in Japanese. For memory aids for Chinese characters, I much prefer Grammata Serica Recensa by Bernhard Karlgren, a less popular but much more accurate reference book.

   On the issue of "royal roads" to language learning, I am aware of the work of the Foreign Service language program and of its frequent failings. United States diplomats sometimes attain amazing success in learning languages--I met one once who was the best non-native speaker of Mandarin I have ever met, and who apologized for his Mandarin while saying that Lao is his stronger foreign language--but many United States diplomats are hobbled in their work by poor command of the relevant languages, which plays little role in the selection process for United States diplomats. I'm very respectful of differences among learners and agree with Israel Gelfand that "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages." That said, there is an irreducible body of fact in any new subject that each learner has to learn somehow, one hopes with the guidance of a good teacher. The late John DeFrancis was a very good teacher indeed of Chinese, and by validated test, most of the best readers of Chinese as a second language in my generation came into their reading ability with help from his textbook series. The approach taken by Beginning Chinese Reader is certainly better than that taken by the James Heisig popular books on Japanese, if I may say that to tie together the two kind comments.

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6. ekiddMay 2012
   Well, it's a 3-minute introduction, and it's specifically focused on character mnemonics. Of course it leaves stuff out.

   But my real complaint here is the notion of a "royal road", an ideal path that works best for most students. This goes against 50 years of experience at the US Foreign Service Institute. Let me quote them:

   Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus. Students at FSI and in other government language training programs have learned and still do learn languages successfully from syllabi based on audio-lingual practice of grammatical patterns, linguistic functions, social situations, task-based learning, community language learning, the silent way, and combinations of these and other approaches.

   Let me back this up with some personal experiences. I currently speak French at a level between CEFRL B1 and B2. In other words, I can carry on a social conversation or follow a science documentary on TV, but I can't watch movies or function as an educated adult.

   And I didn't even look at French grammar book until recently. Instead, (1) I overlearned hours of French audio and text with help from English translations, and (2) I spoke with native French speakers. I learned a huge fraction of French grammar from context and occasionally reading a footnote in Assimil New French with Ease.

   So when I first read a grammar book that claimed, "French tends to avoid the passive voice," I thought, "Well, yeah, because I can always use an impersonal subject with 'on', or a reflexive thingy like 'il se dit'. After all, it's nicer that way."

   So if I were going to learn Chinese, I'd begin by working very hard on tones and pronunciation. But after that, I would try to pick up the basic grammar from context. If Chinese strongly favors stative verbs to copulas, I want to figure that out by reading Chinese, not by reading grammar books.

   This isn't to say that the "Beginning Chinese Reader" isn't excellent. I'm sure it works wonderfully for a great many people. But there's a half-dozen good ways to learn any language, and Memrise or LingQ or full-time conversational immersion might work better for somebody else.

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