Ting -- Chinese English Study Center

Thank you University of Maine at Farmington for what must have been a great deal of work on your Ting website. I found it and think it is useful enough to post about. It is useful to have organized vocabulary lists by topic and it also useful to have that vocabulary to listen to as pronounced by multiple speakers.

The Chinese Character Challenge

The Chinese Character Challenge is a character learning game, very lo-fi and simple but also fun, usable and useful.

Character Pop!

Character Pop is a place/app for folks to share mnemonic stories for hanzi. The site/app is well executed and very cute, I wish I had thought of it.

Random Web Surfing 结果: chinesehacks.com and "Carols Crazy Chinese"

So yesterday, thanks to my old chinese professor I saw this post at chinesehacks.com about different chinese greetings.  chinesehacks.com is a much more professional blog than this one, I must say, and from cursory surfing at that blog I found this series of videos: Carols Crazy Chinese.  Anyway I note them here because although these both appear to be interesting resources for chinese learners, I just don't have time to explore them right this second.

Chinese Radio + VLC

One thing that is going for Chinese learners who live in the Bay Area is the possibility to listen to radio broadcasts in Mandarin.  KSQQ 96.1 is *mostly* broadcast in Mandarin (except on weekends and from 2:00 to 4:00 PM weekdays when it is in Portuguese) This station's format is mostly talk which is perfect for learners.  Many of the shows are topical (so today sadly there was a lot of discussion about Robin Williams.)  And there is also news, weather, traffic and financial market reporting.  I am not entirely sure what the listening area is for the station but it definitely comes in all around the SiliconValley just fine.  And if you are not in your car (Nowadays, who has any radio at home but a clock radio?)  it is also streaming (either iTunes or VLC should be able to open this link) on the internet.
So that is cool; you can listen to mandarin news/talk while doing chores around the house.  But here's the thing, at least if your mandarin is as lame as mine, a lot of the time, you are going hear a lot that you do not understand.  And I often hear some word over and over and wonder what it means but find that just from the tones/pinyin but no context it is hard to look up a word on your own. And when that happens you wish that you had a native speaker handy to help translate. :-)
Now for the cool geeky bit that you might not know: Using VLC you can record the audio stream while you listen to it!  This way you can possibly send the audio to your tutor/buddy to give you that little bit of help.
Anyway here is how to record the stream using VLC: first, from the File menu select "Streaming/Exporting Wizard...". Now just work through the screens as follow.
(Hmmm, so today, 8/13, I began having problems doing transcoding using VLC (on my macbook).  I do not yet know what is going on though it seems to be a VLC transcoding bug.
One thing that I have tried with some success is using a different URL for the KSQQ stream: http://192.240.97.69:9299. Sigh, anyway, until further notice, when using this technique, your mileage may vary.)

怎么 vs. 怎样 （or this is where my time goes)

Yesterday and today I have been going through a chinese pod lesson (#2290) about Chinese Class Placement.  It covers all sorts of good chinese learner vocabulary (比如：水平，口语，发音，声调，什么的）Besides listening to the dialogue (对话！）It also has accompanying expansion materials to help you really use your new words and patterns.  Anyway one of the expansion sentences is "How can I improve my chinese skill level quickly?") My first stab at 翻译 was:
 "我怎么快地提高我的中文水平。"
Wǒ zěnme kuài dì tígāo wǒ de zhōngwén shuǐpíng.

However, to my surprise the their answer was

"怎样才能很快地提高我的中文水平?"
Zěnyàng cáinéng hěn kuài dì tígāo wǒ de zhōngwén shuǐpíng?

Besides my use of an extra 我, I immediately wondered about 怎样 (Zěnyàng) since this is the first time I have seen this word in three years of study.  Why that instead of good ole 怎么?
I was able to look up the word in NCIKU but that did not help much.  Then I tried in the chinese grammar wiki and got no love.  Finally I just google searched on "怎么 vs. 怎样 " and found this discussion.  And then I thought "Hey this would make a nice blog post..."
P.S. I was also curious about the "才能" in the chinese pod translation.  So I went looking for explanation and found some here. It seems that 才 is just adding emphasis to 能.  So perhaps this sentence in english would read, "How *can* I improve my chinese skill level quickly."

Today's Learning Activity: A Bite of China

I did not have a lot of energy to put in to studying today so I watched an episode of 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite of China) from CCTV.  I could understand 20 to 30 percent of it.  But after 45 minutes I got bored - you can only watch food porn for so long (even if it is absolutely beautifully produced).  It looks like there are two seasons of this series to watch when I have the energy and time.
I wonder if this show is more for foreigners because it seems to really be telling stories around the food that I can not imagine natives of china would find interesting.  For example one of the "subplots" to this episode was about preparing a good breakfast (the theme of this show was breakfast) for a high school student on the day of the 高考.  But hey, I am a 外国人, so thank you CCTV.
PS: And speaking of food and china... (I noticed this NYT article seconds after I hit publish on this blog entry)

Looking for Subtitles to the Movie: 手机

Thanks to the previously posted learning strategies video, I went looking for movies from 冯小刚 (Xiǎo Gāng Féng).  The first one I found is called "手机" and is out on You Tube but without any subtitles. I watched about 15 minutes of it and it seems interesting.  Also the dialogue is not too fast.  However, that does not mean I can completely (or even mostly) understand this movie.  But it is tantalizing that I understand bits of it.   Anybody know where I can find it with (mandarin) subtitles?

-- Thanks to Jennie for the clue.  All I needed to do was search for "电影手机" Which is exactly how I would search for an american movie named "Telephone". (e.g. search for "movie telephone")  But apparently all common sense deserted me once I was thinking of searching for a chinese movie.

Rules for Writing Pinyin

For whatever reason, this morning I finally (after three years!) decided it was worth trying to learn the correct way to write pinyin. That is, assuming you know the correct syllable and tone, how do you write it? If, for example, you are given "huai" 4th tone -- is it hùai, huài, or huaì? (the answer is huài.) I found the very concise rules here. For my own reference I am going to blatantly copy them:

A and e trump all other vowels and always take the tone mark. There are no Mandarin syllables in Hanyu Pinyin that contain both a and e.

In the combination ou, o takes the mark.

In all other cases, the final vowel takes the mark.

My Family in Shanghai / FluentU / 乐乐Elmo

My Family in Shanghai(free registration required)

Thanks to the learning strategies video from my last post I discovered FluentU.  And thanks to FluentU I found this nice subtitled outtake from 乐乐Elmo.   I had told people at my Meetup group that 乐乐Elmo was interesting as an intermediate mandarin learner and got some incredulous reactions.  But this (free subscription required) video demonstrates exactly the content in 乐乐Elmo that I was attempting (badly) to describe. 

Chinese Learning Strategies with the Experts (YangYang Cheng Video)

This is a long but interesting video. But if you are not patient, the best stuff is available by clicking on "show more" (right above the comments) and then looking for "Resources".

Sesame Street - 乐乐Elmo

At this morning's language exchange somebody said that they wished there was a chinese language Sesame Street.  And of course such a thing exists!  我很喜欢乐乐Elmo. 谢谢你们，芝麻街！

An Exercise (Mabo Dofu "Recipe")

I am trying to do one exercise a week where I write something and speak it.  This week was a mapodoufu recipe.

Here is the original (audio) and here is the corrected (audio) version
Thank you so much, Kieve and Ruiqi, for your help.
Things I learned:

• (counter for)"a handful of skinny things": 把
• (counter for) small boxes: 盒
• set the stove to medium high: 把炉子设置中高热度
• practiced using the ba pattern.

Speak Mandarin in 500 Words

This morning thanks to random surfing I found yet another beginner textbook: "Speak Mandarin in 500 Words".  It is available free thanks to the Taiwanese Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. As you might expect, it is aimed at folks who desire to learn Taiwanese Chinese (Traditional Characters using bopomofo phonetics) however it also has pinyin. And for added bonus the book has French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Thai and Indonesian editions in addition to English. And for even more added bonus, you can get the (PDF format) text book with embedded audio for the lesson dialogues. (Who knew that you could embed audio in PDF! However, at least on OSX, you will need Adobe Reader in order to hear the embedded audio - Preview does not handle sound in PDFs) In any case, this textbook seems to be very well crafted and very suitable for a beginner and hey its free.  Here is a (slow) link