The massive input strategy

Tweet For many students (myself included), the study of Chinese is largely facilitated through textbooks, podcasts, and other learning materials. We work on one lesson until we grasp the material and then move onto the next.This is how I have spent nearly 5 years studying Chinese and I've learned a lot about the language in the process. However, when I was sitting in my Computer Assisted Chinese Language Learning class a few weeks ago, my teacher brought up a different strategy, which I'll call massive input.

What is the massive input strategy?

 

Massive input/output is essential opening the floodgates of a language and letting the information wash over you. It is not studying in the traditional sense-- no flashcards, textbooks or fancy iPhone Apps necessary. Massive input is about increasing exposure to a language during your daily routine and giving you a better feel for that language. It doesn't matter if you don't understand everything that you are hearing, the point is that your brain is still  subconsciously processing some of the information.

This means trying to expose yourself to more of the language in its natural form. Music is, I think, the most obvious way to use this strategy, but we should really be using the same tactics with other materials as well: books, poems, movies, TV shows, radio broadcasts and blogs are all great ways increase your exposure to the language. By understanding that you are not going to understand everything from the beginning, it makes it easier to just let the language flood over you. Don't understand a word, a sentence, a paragraph... who cares cause you're not going to look it up anyway (at least not yet). 

The reward doesn't come from "learning" new things, rather, massive input is about linking together everything  you already know to estimate, guess, and predict the meaning of what you are being exposed to. 

As my teacher metaphorically described, massive input is about building a skyscraper not a house. Massive input helps us build the "skyscraper" by stacking a ton of information higher and higher. Traditionally, studying and the material to study from is very controlled. Vocabulary and grammar patterns are presented systematically, which is good for building a foundation for a language (or a two story house), but there is nothing natural about it. However, it is also something that we should not, and cannot, ignore, it helps fills the gaps of information that are missing for our skyscraper... it is the cement in our metaphorical language building. 

My own experience with massive input

Ever since that lesson I've been trying to apply this strategy to my own life to better understand what my teacher was saying. On top of reading a an article from a Chinese newspaper every morning during breakfast, and watching the news or movies when I have some time, I'm also currently reading two books in Chinese:《安德的遊戲》,a translated copy of Ender's Game , and《大小雞婆》.  Since Ender's Game is a book I have read quite a few times in English I'm not looking anything up... ever. I'll probably go back through once I'm done to start and cement the gaps in the language, but right now I'm just reading for pleasure. It was frustrating at first, but after a while I started to get a feel for the text and the translation a way that looking up every other word cannot provide. 

With  《大小雞婆》, a book originally written in Chinese, I'm reading it chapter by chapter. Instead of stopping to look up words that I don't know I'm just highlighting them and making guesses about the meaning based on context. Once I'm done with the chapter I will go back and check the dictionary for every word that I highlighted. I've found that this process takes about an hour a day. 

More than anything I've found that my reading comprehension is increasing at a very rapid pace. I'm beginning to notice how certain nuances contained in grammar patterns, simply because I'm seeing them in a space that isn't controlled by a textbook. Since I don't worry (as much) about individual characters or phrases, I'm able to focus on the overall meaning of a text without too much effort. Hopefully this should pay off greatly when reading academic articles or taking any kind of standard test in Chinese. 

Do any of you use a similar strategy with your language learning process? If so please leave a comment below. 

Reaction: Benny's video two weeks into the challenge.

Tweet Last night Benny put his first video attempt in Mandarin on the web for the world to see... or to use a Chinese phrase I learned yesterday (在眾目睽睽下Benny開口了說出國語)

After speaking Chinese for just two weeks, it is clear that tones are a big focus for him. As well they should be. It will allow him to be understood while speaking to a native speaker who is not a Chinese teacher. I'll talk more about this in another post, but for now I'll just say I think we should all start learning Chinese this way. Don't wait a month or a year to learn tones. Learn them and use them from day one. 

This video has a very raw quality to it. For nearly 10 minutes we watch Benny struggle for every word, trying his best to get the tones right. As he states on his website the video is scripted, translated by his Chinese teacher. No doubt that during the process he also learned everything that we hear him say into the camera, so no need for monkey jokes. 

My big question, however, is how we as language learners (or teachers) should feel about how the video was made. There is no doubt that he is speaking Chinese, and I can understand just about everything he said, but he didn't write the script. In his words: 

"So with that in mind, a couple of days ago I asked my Chinese teacher (I’ve getting private lessons for now) to translate a script with everything I would say if I was giving a tour of my home in a language I speak fluently. I wanted to explain complex things, like that I replaced my laptop with a desktop, that I don’t really use my fridge etc., and she wrote it up for me in Chinese (which I used for the captions) and in pinyin, which I was studying to learn all the new vocabulary, and memorising the lines themselves since then."

For some this is blasphemy, "he is using a teacher, or  "he didn't write the script" they say, but negativity never seemed like a very good way to learn anything, so instead I want to discuss what we might learn from his video.

When we open a text book we are presented with new material. There is a dialogue or maybe even a short essay. After the essay we get a nice word bank (with further examples if we are lucky) and a section on grammar. Some of us memorize that material.  That is essential what Benny did, he memorized the textbook, only he also helped write the textbook... or script rather. While this video may not be his own words (or at least the Chinese) yet he now has a pretty good understanding of how to talk about: time, location, distance, direction etc. He can also tell people why he can or can't do something (因為....所以).

Okay, now for my point. Sometimes when learning a language we need to memorize things. We can't do it passively, cause that is a huge waste of time, but we should do it actively, taking sentences or phrases and committing them to memory. However, we can't stop there. Once we have the phrase (or sentence) we need to make it our own, by swapping out nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. to create new strings of communication, sort of like what I did at the start of this blog. The phrase 眾目睽睽 isn't my own, but through the active process of studying it, understanding it, and committing it to memory, I learned how to use it.

I'm sure that Benny will be a lot more comfortable "in the wild" now that he understands everything he said in the video. Even if he can't create sentences of his own using some of the grammatical phrases (yet), he will be able to understand them in reading and listening when they come up.

This  in Chinese is called 語言定式教學法, a sort of formulaic speech teaching method and I find it quite effective. I've wrote roughly about how it works in a classroom setting in a past entry called Stuff the Duck.

I would love to hear all your thoughts, so please post them below.

Making time for language.

Tweet There are very few people in this world (if any) who can wake up one morning and decide they're going to run a marathon the next day, the next week, heck... even the next month. We aren't able to pick up the guitar and shred like Jimi Hendrix after just a few lessons. Things we do in life require practice, patience, and most importantly dedication. Learning a second language, especially for those of us who can hardly even remember what hitting puberty was like anymore, takes time and energy. 

Go out and ask someone who does something really well how they achieved success.  99.99% of the time it's because they put in a lot of time. They got up every day and worked toward their goal until it became a reality. So what does that mean for us, the language learner? It means we need to stop thinking that things are going to come without effort, or over night. Those kind of thoughts lead to disappointment and failure.

Maybe it's time we take a different approach. Learning a language isn't riding a bike. If you don't keep peddling (and peddling often) you are going to forget how to do it (or rather speak it in this case). So today, I propose that we re-think about how we go about learning a language. Let's start making the time, every single day, so that we can obtain our goal. Of course, the more time we spend, the better the results... but first and foremost lets find our rhythm. 
 
With the rise of the Internet, possibilities are endless. Everywhere you turn there is information ripe for the taking. We have music, movies, blogs, news, textbooks, podcasts etc. all just a single mouse click away. However, just like learning to shred like Jimi, or pushing yourself harder and harder to reach that end goal of 26 miles (and 385 meters) in a marathon, we need to be active and engaged. We need a healthy balance of output and input (especially to speak a language) and we need to practice... a lot. 
 
I don't know about you, but my goals are set high, and I'm going to take the first step toward reaching those goals... I'm going to make the time.

Study More Chinese: A website with a fresh look at daily study drills.

Tweet Recently I found a community project that is focused on providing free (and fun) ways to learn Chinese. The name is simple-- Study More Chinese. The project is filled with videos, blogs, photos and an open forum. Unlike the pay as you go sites on the net, this site depends on user content to grow and develop, if you find something that you think is interesting, then post it up and share with others. I came across the site on Twitter when Brandon, the creator of Study More Chinese posted a video titled: "Best Chinese Girlfriend Ever at the QingDao China Beer Festival" 

The video is filled with some great vocabulary and got me curious enough to join the site. And I have to admit, that guy has one heck of a girlfriend! One of the things I really enjoy about Brandon's project is the "Daily Chinese Sentence". As he states on the group page: 

A new twist on the passive  'daily word' / 'daily sentence'.  Join this group to receive new Chinese words each day by email & then respond by using them in a new sentence.

It certainly is a twist. Rather than having your inbox filled with random vocabulary words that you will passively observe, this site asks the users to actually join the conversation. It is certainly a fresh take on all those Chinese word of the day messages that are floating around cyberspace. As a group member you can see how others make those two vocabulary words their own. 

If any of you feeling like trying your hand at the Daily Chinese Sentences, then swing over to Study More Chinese and become a part of the community. Part of learning a language means being active in your study, and find things that interest you. This site is a great way to take that to the next level, by allowing you to share your interests with others too.  

“填鸭式” (tiányāshì): Stuff The Duck

Tweet After a two month hiatus I'm glad that I can get back to blogging. The past two months have been incredibly busy, with a lot of life changing things going on. In late May I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Just a week later I took a road trip across America, helping my girlfriend take all her belongs to Fremont, California, where she started her residency program. A week after that I was China bound. For the past 4 weeks I have been living in Beijing, China and studying at Central University for Nationalities（中央民族大学）.

I am currently attending Associated Colleges in China (ACC) K-12 Chinese Teachers Training Program, a six week long summer training program dedicated to increasing proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, while simultaneously attending lectures and discussion labs that are focused on how to effectively teach Mandarin Chinese. I am blessed to have a wonderful group of fellow students (who also happen to be Chinese teachers during the school year) with me on the program. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the ACC Summer Programs, they are know for their incredibly high expectations of students, and their blazing fast pace. The average student who attends ACC's six week program will cover roughly one year of college level Chinese.

Before I started the program, I was curious as to how the students and teachers are able to achieve so much in so little time. After the first hour of class I found out, they "stuff the duck," or as we say in Mandarin 填鸭式 (tiányāshì). For two hours of class we become Chinese learning robots, mimicking our teacher's every sentence pattern. While the original form of 填鸭式  has fallen under a lot of scrutiny due to its apparent inability to clearly teach "why" something is the way it is, that is not my take for learning a foreign language. After over three weeks in ACC's Summer Program I would say that it is an effective tool for learning Chinese. And here is why:

• In a class setting it allows for maximum repetition of target language goals.

• It forces language learners to use new grammar patterns to express their opinions (over and over and over again)

• After a single student is done saying the sentence every other student is forced to repeat (again) the sentence, thus maximizing the students ability to listen to new sentence patterns as well as speak them. 

The above is only possible because the teacher has complete control over the lesson plan, and what  students are allowed to say. For the past three weeks I have not be able to truly express my own opinion in the classroom unless it strictly pertained to the topic we were covering. Because of the structure of the class students are able to hear sentence patterns and new vocabulary at least 80 times during the course of the two hours. Of course, I also have another two hours of class a day where I can freely speak about the topics we are discussion, but of course the use of newly learned grammar patterns and vocabulary is ideal.

Assuming that students do their part outside of class to review materials studied during the day, it is a rather successful way of teaching a language. Of course, my program is geared toward this style of teaching. And, although I'm living in Beijing, I haven't had much time to get away from campus to do any exploring, I'm simply too busy studying all the time (grumble, grumble).

While it has been hard work the results are staggering. I can feel my Chinese constantly growing stronger and my grasp of the grammar points and vocabulary words is quite strong. Although, that might also be related to the 10+ hours that I have put in on Anki since my arrival in China, and the language pledge that we signed at the beginning of the program. Regardless, I feel a strong command over roughly 500 new vocabulary words related to effectively teaching Chinese.

If anything, this has been the prefect way to prepare for graduate school in Taiwan.

App Review: Chinese Word Search Lite

Tweet First up for iLearn Mandarin is an app that I downloaded for my iPhone when it first came out in 2009: Chinese Word Search Lite by iWalkingfish.com.

This app takes Chinese character recognition and really tries to make it fun in the form of a good old fashion word search. The word searches are organized by themes with a lot of good selections. You can choose: random; basic 200; basic 500; conversation; food and drinks; brand names; the Three Kingdoms; Countries etc. I have tried most of the themes and recommend that you stick to basic 200, basic 500 and conversation if you are just starting out. The other themes introduce some rather specific vocabulary that you can always look up in a dictionary at a later date (especially if you are still trying to get down the basics).

What I like most about Chinese Word Search Lite is the ability to control the challenges based on your Chinese ability. This can be done in a variety of ways. First you can select how big the word search is. The larger the world search the more Chinese characters will appear. However, the best way to control the difficulty will come from the prompt settings. Users have the ability to turn Pinyin, Chinese, and English on and off. If you are looking for a real challenge, make the Word Search as large as it will go and then only turn on the English prompt.

 For those language learners who are just starting out, I would recommend keeping all the prompts on. It will allow you to visual the Chinese, Pinyin and English meanings at the same time, without having the other characters distort your comprehension. Once you think you have the image of the character down let the searching begin!

The strength of this app is ultimately how easy it is to use. A single word search only takes a few minutes each time, and with the variety of themes you can spend hours encountering new material. The downside to the Lite version is both the lack of Traditional Chinese characters and the inability to hear a native speaker pronounce the words as you find them. But, based on my research those two things are available in the standard version.

I know that this app will be a standard for me when I am looking to kill some time while studying Chinese. I would recommend it to all levels of Chinese learner. The app is very stable as well, so you don't have to worry about it crashing right as you find those characters. Happy word searching!

Launching iLearn Mandarin

Tweet Hey everyone.

Welcome to iLearn Mandarin! This blog will be a sort of application review for people, like me, who are interested in learning Mandarin Chinese outside of the classroom. I have about 30 applications on my iPhone right now that are geared toward Chinese learners. I would like to provide a space (other than the iTunes store) that gives other users a feel for the various educational apps online. Expect my first real post to go up sometime this weekend.

Updates to follow soon, but I wanted to get things moving. And what better way to motivate myself than by having a deadline. Look for the first official iLearn Mandarin review in the next few days.