News Reading Challenge: 新聞閱讀挑戰

Tweet Winter break used to be about catching up on video games, TV shows, and movies. It used to be about finding a job over break that would put some cash in my pocket. These days, however, winter break is the best opportunity for me to spend heaps of time improving my Chinese.

As the title suggests, one area I'm working on is my news reading ability. After an intense discussion with Olle from HackingChinese, we've outline a few goals for taking our Chinese to the next level in a short period of time. Our short-term/ semi-long term goals are identified as the following:

• Pass TOCFL (and later the HSK)
• Be able to produce academic text in Chinese
• Be able to participate in academic discussions
• Be able to explain Chinese (grammar, vocab etc. in Chinese)
• Expand vocabulary beyond current comfort zone
• Be able to write 5000 characters

 Identifying goals was an important first step, but we also needed to figure out why we weren't already able to do the above mentioned goal, which meant identifying the things that are currently lacking, and then (naturally) coming up with a plan of action.

After taking the TOCFL last year, I already knew where my problems were regarding reading, but I was missing the latter--a proper plan of action. Thankfully, that has all changed, and I'll be ready to face the exam with the confidence and reading speed that I'll need.

So how am I going to do it? That is what my "News Reading Challenge" is all about. Here are my personal goals for this challenge:

• Read articles in as many different areas as possible
• Read for speed (pretend it's an exam)
• Read for content and/or language
• Plug obvious linguistic holes (but only important ones)
• Quantity > Quality

In order to accomplish these goals, Olle and I have decided that reading 5 articles a day for speed is an excellent challenge. With lots of other things on my plate, this also is something that I can finish in less than two hours. In order to eliminate too much personal bias, we have decided to stagger the articles we personal choose, so one day I pick five articles, and the next day they are provided by Olle. The articles, all written for native speakers, a selected from the following sources:

• 維基百科
• 自由時報 (The Liberty Times)
• Yahoo 新聞
• 紐約時報中文網
• RTI: Radio Taiwan International
• 大紀元 (Epoch Times)

Once the five articles have been selected, we head over to the ZH Tool Kit, for a character count. The application also provides a word list, but we are really just after the number of characters that appear in the text we've selected. After that we read. Since we are using this challenge as a way to A) improve reading speed and B) prepare for an exam, we've been timing how fast we can read the article accurately... that means no dictionaries, and now slowing down to work through characters we "might" know. Once I've read the article I record the time it took me to read it and move on to the next.

26.3 minutes of reading with an average speed fo 136.06. It's slow, but a great benchmark.

After reading for speed, it is time to "plug obvious linguistic holes." I'm sure Olle has his own method for doing this, but I prefer to take the text and plug it into Chinese Reader for Mac, an app created by Skritter user Byzanti, and give the article another read. 

This time I look up everything I didn't know the first time, and actually read for details. The great thing about this app is its integration into Skritter's API. Any words that I want to study on Skritter are added with the click of a button. The think I really like, however, is the ability to sort words by occurrences and frequency. While it's not my only guide for what words I should already know, it makes selecting "important" linguistic gaps much easier. 

Chinese Reader's summary interface

After that I can call it quits for the day and move onto another task. Over the past two days I've added 60+ new words to Skritter. Hopefully by the end that number will be reduced. And of course, I look forward to seeing my average reading speed drop dramatically.

I look forward to sharing my results after classes resume on the 17th. I have a feeling the are going to be quite dramatic!

Developing Advanced Language Skills

Tweet Part of me wishes I could go back and start my program in Taiwan over again. Not because I got bad grades or didn't learn a lot over the past three semesters, but because there is just so much I didn't know about the program then that I do now. One of those things happens to be the importance of the small lecture series that is always going on in our program. The past four weeks have been very exciting for me in this regard. I've heard lectures for Enya Dai (Associate Professor at Monterey Institute), participated in Taiwan's 2012 International Conference of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, and heard a compelling lecture from Cornelius C. Kubler (顧百里: Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College).

All of these events have changed my life as a Chinese language student/teacher, giving me new ways to think about teaching, research, and my own linguistic development. I've made some amazing connections with professors, scholars, and students like me from all over the world. I wish that I could go back and start my program over so that I could have attended even more of these events. Since I'm not a Timelord I'll just have to keep calm and carry on (or something like that). 

Today's post, however, isn't really about looking back on missed opportunities, but rather about pressing forward. After yesterday's lecture by Dr. Kubler I realized for the millionth time that there is so much more I can do to bring my Chinese to an even higher level. Dr. Kubler has been studying Chinese for the past 40 odd years, and while he might not have a perfect accent, he speaks Chinese at an incredibly high level... I'd be lying if said I wasn't a little bit jealous. Thankfully, his entire lecture was about developing advanced language skills. While he was speaking from the perspective of an educator, and what we can do to help learners develop high-level proficiency, I was thinking about the question with a personal vested interest.

One thing I felt his lecture was lacking was student accountability for the learning process, but since he was talking to a group of teachers (not students) I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. So, here are a ideas of things we can do to develop advanced language skills, according to Dr. Kubler.

1. Memorization: It's never too late in your journey of Chinese to memorize 三字經， or 三百首, in fact exposing yourself systematically to this kind of language will help solidify it in your brain for natural recall later. I did this a lot with Tang poetry while living in Beijing, and nothing stops people in their tracks more than a properly quoted line from one of those poems.
2. Paraphrasing: Open up an old textbook that you've used and see if you can take colloquial sentences and make them formal, or the other way around. Take basic grammar patterns and make them 書面語 etc.
3. Transcription: Listen to audio files from native speakers and transcribe them into Chinese (or English). This forces us to step away from language we would usually use in Chinese, and helps to solidify grammatical patterns and word phrases that are used by native speakers. 
4. Get a tutor: I'm not talking about a language partner, or even a person who simply talks to you in Chinese. I'm talking about the kind of person who is anal-retentive about every single mistake you make, someone who will force you to say something again not because it was wrong, but because it is High School level Chinese, not professional. 
5. Translation: Translate Classical Chinese into Modern Chinese. Translate academic Chinese into colloquial Chinese. Translate colloquial Chinese into academic Chinese. Translate English into Chinese etc. While translation is a hotly debated topic in SLA, there is no doubt that translation of any kind forces you to think about the language in different way, exposing you to a lexicon that is not your own, which can be crucial for further linguistic development. Of course, this should probably be done with the help of a tutor, at least at first. 
6. Read Scrolling Text: Part of advanced language levels is the ability to read massive amounts of text in a short period of time. This skill is something that must be acquired through practice, it isn't going to come over night. This skill might be developed by taking text and putting it into a scrolling text program, or even watching Chinese TV shows or movies without sound on. 
7. Parroting: Do you like the way a certain actor talks in Chinese, then why not try to sound just like him? Like memorization, we can work on parroting native speakers to help increase speaking speed, regional accent, and even tones and pronunciation. This again isn't something that will come over night, but it could be very useful at high levels of Chinese. I'll be trying this out in the coming weeks and will be sure to include more details at that time.
8. Stamina：Increase it! To quote from Dr. Kubler's own lecture notes: the ability to maintain high level of accuracy and fluency over a period of time (often under various kinds of stress) is very important to function at a professional level. How long can you speak Chinese in a single day before you get sloppy? How accurate can you be when giving a lecture or presentation in Chinese? These might not be things that the typical language learner needs, but it is certainly something that I have to work on. I have noticed that after about an hour of giving a presentation in Chinese I tend to get "sloppy" with tones. It is something I'll have to work on. 

The above is not a genearl guideline to language learning, but rather things we need to consider when trying to reach incredibly high levels of fluency in our target language. I for one will be working on these skills for the rest of my life. There is so much more to be said about these individual topics, but today I wanted to just get the big picture idea on the page. In the coming weeks I'll be writing about some of the things I'm trying out to increase my command of Chinese. 

Stay tuned! 

Some other characteristics of 著（着）

Tweet Today our Modern Chinese Grammar and Syntax class started talking about Case Grammar Patters (格語法), but our teacher is fond of going off topic today and decide to further look at three functions of 著 (or 着 for you Mainland students), and I thought I would throw that part of the lecture up on the blog (or at least what I understood of it), since using English to work out what my teacher said in Chinese always seems to help me better understand the material. Anyway, lets take a look at 著!

著
Grammatically, we often think of 著 as a durative, or as representing a continued state... as expressed in the following explanation:

表示動作或狀態的持續

The focus here is on the continued state of an action or condition. However, from what I gathered in my lecture today, that is only one of its several functions. I don't pretent to be an expert on the patter (so take the follow with a grain of salt) but this is what I understand.

著 can be used as a "manner adverb" expression, for example: 他慢慢地吃著 (nibble at food). Here the state of being slow and nibbling is being modified by 著 and thus serving as sort of adverb.

For like a million other examples of this occurring check out the link.

著 can also represent a period of time. Let us take the example 紅著臉, or the English to be red in the face (with a blushing face w/e). Here the added 著 is serving as a time marker to indicate that (當下時間) during this present time, so-and-so has a red face. This is not a continuous state, but only a time marker.

Lets look at another example: 忙著讀書 (to be busy reading). Here again, 著 is being used as representing a current period of time, not indicating a continued stated of being busy.

Finally, 著 on a third level can serve as a focal point marker (in an abstract way). Take the example above again 忙著讀書, the focal point (焦點) is on reading (讀書), and since this example phrase is incomplete, one might imagine that you would use this to describe someone perhaps busily reading before going to take a test... or leaving for the day, or something...

It should be noted that 著 is not simply "-ing" in English... it is a little more complicated than that. Again, going back to the 忙著讀書 sentence, if we just wanted to say that someone is reading, we would just say 在讀書, because we cannot say 忙讀書.

I don't know if this helps anyone better understand 著, but if it does please leave your comments below. I hope that from now on, you have a little better grasp of this characters functionality when you see it in the wild.

Writing Assignment: Week 1 （新年願望）

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As mentioned in my previous post, I've decide to turn my goals into a plan of action. Since one of my plans was to write a weekly journal entry, my first post reflects on that idea and trys to capture some of my thoughts in Chinese. Any comments or criticisms are welcome, the purpose of these posts are keep my goals (and plan) public, while also improving my Chinese writing over the course of the year. In the interest of keeping this blog dedicated to learning Chinese, I've also included a selected vocabulary list below. 

Enjoy!

新年伊始，許多人就迫不及待地宣布自己的新年願望。有的人宣布為了減肥要天天運動，有的人要開始學習一門新外語，有的人要戒煙，但是一旦遇到困難，他們就會放棄。就這些人而言，這些新年願望，只是口頭上說說而已，並不是一種真的可以實現的願望。如果有人對我說這種崇高的願望，就對他所說的感到有些疑惑。經驗告訴我，這些願望太高遠，而很有虛偽的意味。宣布者之所以不知道如何達到願望，是因為他們實際上沒什麼計劃。對此，我深有體會。今年我的新年願望和往常一 樣，但我沒有採取實際的計劃與行動。因此，我們得淘汰這些空白的願望，只有穩定的計劃，才能達到我們所要的願望。

怎麼樣的計劃呢？這些計劃應該循序漸進，應該漸漸的呈現。要讓自己每天都有成就感，而不是挫敗感。如果我們真的要減肥，那我們冰箱裡所有的東西應該對身體 健康。此外要對自己每天，每個月有明顯的計劃。我們這樣才不會⎡無所謂⎦地過日子。我現在對自己不能接受失敗，因為我今後制訂了一個計劃，這樣我所有的進步都會從比較出來的。

你自己擁有的到底是個願望還是一個計劃呢？這兩個之間的差別可很大，而且只有一個會讓你成功。

1. 伊始 (yīshǐ n. 〈wr.〉 ①beginning ②from this time forth)

2. 迫不及待 (pòbùjídài f.e. ①too impatient to wait ②urgent)

3. 願望 (yuànwàng* n. desire; wish; aspiration)

4. 崇高 (chónggāo s.v. lofty; sublime)

5. 疑惑 (yíhuò* n./v. ①be perplexed/uncertain ②doubt)

6. 虛偽 (xūwěi* s.v. sham; false; hypocritical)

7. 循序漸進 (xúnxù jiànjìn v.p. proceed step by step)

8. 呈現 (chéngxiàn* v. present; appear; emerge)

9. 擁有 (yōngyǒu v. possess; have; own)