I’m a big fan of Chad’s website and blog, ZhToolKit. He’s programmer and a Chinese learner; his writings and tools a great combination of nerdy and informative. He doesn’t blog a huge amount, but it’s clear that each peice is researched and well thought out.
Chad’s process for studying Chinese also intriuges me: I’m impressed by his analytical approach. In the future, I believe that Chinese learning tools will contain much of the analysis and ideas that people like Chad are bringing to the forefront (I’m building one platform[LINK] that’s trying to do so).
About Chad
When did you start studying Chinese? Why Chinese?
I started learning 6 years ago. My study habits have been quite erratic, so I’m not disappointed that I haven’t achieved my fluency goals yet.
I started with Japanese about 7 years ago, primarily from an interest in anime. After studying for a year, I went on a week’s tour of Japan. I had an amazing time; however, after coming home I realized I hadn’t spoken to a single Japanese person while I was there. Meanwhile, I had some Chinese friends at my workplace, and there are more Chinese than Japanese in the US in general. So choosing Chinese was about opportunities for interaction and making personal connections. Also a factor was the increasing presence of Chinese on the internet. If you can’t read Chinese, a major section of the web is inaccessible. But if you can read Chinese, all that potential opens up, and the size of your online world expands profoundly.
What inspired you to create your tools and start blogging about them?
All the software I write for myself, to “scratch an itch.” If someone else finds a particular application useful, it’s a satisfying feeling. It’s the same with the investigations I do, and with tips and techniques, or various ponderings; they are all to satisfy my own curiosity first. The stuff I post publicly are what I hope are useful to other people in their own studies.
There are a lot of great blogs about the Chinese language and on learning Chinese already. What motivated me to start my blog was to think about and understand better that vast stretch known as the intermediate level. I’m pretty good at learning grammar and the mechanics of a language, and if I am interested in a language I can quickly get to around the lower intermediate level. But progress from there to fluency is proportionately longer, advances are less noticeable, and the path to advanced language skill is less clear. It’s at this level that I’ve been stuck in with every language I’ve tried. With Chinese, I’m interested enough in the language and dedicated to my personal fluency goals that I’m tackling these issues instead of being deterred by them. And if other people benefit from my findings and opinions, great!
Quick Questions
Mandarin.
Traditional or Simplified:
Simplified.
Pinyin or Characters:
Definitely characters.
Speaking/Listening or Writing/Reading:
Mainly reading. I struggle with listening skills.
What’s the one blog post from ZhToolkit that you think every Chinese learner should read?
Many of my posts are pretty specialized. Maybe the one that is the most broadly useful is “Harry Potter in Chinese” . I’m not suggesting that every Chinese learner should read Harry Potter. But reading one’s first full-length book in a foreign language is an important milestone. It’s a very different feeling from reading short articles, and the accomplishment can give you a lot of confidence and increasing enthusiasm for further learning.
What advice would you give to a Chinese newbie?
Some housekeeping: Before you even start studying, you’ll find out quickly that you are missing East Asian language support, good fonts, a pinyin input method, and a dictionary. So take care of the basic setup right away. Browser plugins to give popup word definitions are also great for new learners, since you can then dive into Chinese web pages right away and get exposed to vocabulary.
Get the foundations right from the beginning, instead of correcting bad habits later. Learn correct pronunciation. Learn what tones are and how to read pinyin, and also learn the tone sandhi rules for reading tones combinations which are different from how they are written. Also, learn some basics of stroke order (easily found online, or get a trial Skritter account at http://www.skritter.com) even if you don’t plan to learn writing, as it will help to understand the nature of characters. Both of these are quite easy to pick up in a few hours. Another sort of foundation is to learn the correct tones when studying words. This is notoriously difficult to correct for later.
Second, understanding some aspects of the language will help you in your study plan. One character does not equal one word in Chinese. I recommend studying mainly words, but it doesn’t hurt to study characters too. Learn how characters are made of phonetic and semantic components, and get familiar with the list of radicals. Also important to know is that the overlap between writing/reading and speaking/listening is limited. It’s quite possible to be fluent in reading but unable to understand speech, for example. Thus, think about what your ultimate goals are, and focus on the skills that will get you there. But “cross training” once in a while can also be beneficial.
Finally, don’t be afraid to explore and experiment. If a study method is too boring or not accomplishing much, try something different. If you’re taking classes, be adventurous. Learn words outside the curriculum, talk to native speakers, watch movies, or read something difficult but interesting. Having fun doesn’t mean being lazy. Meeting challenges can be enjoyable too.
Any “itches” that you are currently planning to scratch?
For now, bug fixes and enhancements to existing software are my priority. I also want to make available the source for my remaining projects that still are private, and that’s just a matter of cleaning up ugly code. After that, I do have something new in the works, but it’s still too early to say anything about it.
I also want to revisit my known words experiment. The result I found was that the probability of knowing a word is related to its frequency, but the chance doesn’t drop to zero with rare words, because many of them are easy to figure out from their component characters. I think counting these as “known words” for many purposes is fine, since you wouldn’t be looking them up in a dictionary if you encountered them while reading. However, it does skew the known word count by making it too dependent on the testing sample size. I want to use my results in a planned project to identify texts that are appropriate to one’s current level (e.g., Krashen’s N+1 level), but I need to improve the quantitative methods in order to make it work.
In a perfect world, what kind of tools or methods would be available for intermediate to advanced learners?
I’m not a good enough visionary to imagine perfection, so instead let me mention some areas where things are lacking. For intermediate learners, I think bilingual texts are a good way to pick up vocabulary and to understand grammatical usage. However, the amount of bilingual content is limited. Another area severely lacking is audio content with transcripts. There are a few newscasts and some audiobooks, but if you want more informal speech such as from TV shows or conversations, there is little out there. If you are an advanced learner, TV shows with burned-in subtitles are sufficient to help you with unclear phrases. But if you are at a lower level, there are a lot more words to look up, and it may take time to identify unfamiliar characters, especially for online content that tends to be blurry. Text transcripts would be useful for easier dictionary lookups and for the ability to study them at less than the speed of normal speech. Contrast that with English: sites like http://www.tvsubtitles.net/ have a huge amount of content suitable for English learners, available as text files.
Related to that last point, I am a big fan of the audio flashcards from the Tatoeba project (the “Tatoeba chinese-english deck with audio and pinyin” shared deck in Anki). My listening skill is bad, and going through those cards helped a lot. Unfortunately, there are only 1,700 cards, and I ran out of material after a few months. Thus, for people like me where this exercise benefits, I would wish for a lot more of this kind of sentence-level audio content.