This little bit of blog, if you can even call it that, was being hosted on a platform that was going to cost me a decent chunk of money. So, I recently moved the blog to a place that would host for free. (The domain still costs a bit.) Unfortunately, I didn't get the pictures moved over like I had hoped, so it'll be a bit before I have this looking the way it was before. Also, the links between the posts probably don't work any more.
Oops!
You have no reason to care to know anything about me, but since this is a site that holds my observations and opinions, it might be helpful to know a little about what forms the basis of my opinions. This is not my “day job”. All opinions, helpful as well as off-the-wall, are mine and are formed based on my experience and my own background.
Learning Chinese is a hobby for me. I’m not working toward a degree, although I’ll probably end up taking some of the HSK tests. Maybe someday it will be useful in a job, but right now all of my Chinese colleagues speak infinitely better English than I speak Chinese. My native language is (American) English. Although I’ve learned bits and pieces of other languages, this is only the second foreign language that I’m putting a large effort into learning. I am fluent in German, which I learned under much different circumstances. It is often interesting to compare the two languages and methods of learning.
As of early 2021, I am about halfway through the HSK 3 course. I have not actually taken the official HSK 1 and HSK 2 tests, but I did take practice tests that indicated I would have passed them. I had intended on taking the HSK 2 test, but 2020 happened. I do hope to take the HSK 3 test some time in 2021, if it’s possible. So, I am not far removed from those ultra-beginning stages when learning Chinese seems like an almost insurmountable task. I’m still excited about learning the language and I hope to help keep you interested, too.
Update: I passed the HSK 3 test in June of 2021!
I’m an adult and not in school, so any time I spend comes from my oh-so precious free time. Why should I spend that free time on a website that will likely be seen by a total of 3 people? That’s an excellent question. I’m glad you asked. Anyway…. There are many, many tools and methods out there to help you learn Chinese. I’ve tried many of them. Some are very effective, some less so. Some resources cost a pretty penny (or yuan?), others are free. All require time from you, which is, of course, not in infinite supply, either. I hope by offering up my experiences to you, you can make better choices in where you spend your time and money. If I’m not successful at that, I’m sorry. Here’s a video of a talking raven playing a piano as consolation.
As I mentioned, this website is not my day job. It does cost me real money to make this website available, though, so I may eventually add affiliate links from time to time to help cover costs. Please let me know if any of them are obnoxious. As of late 2022, there are no affiliate links
This is a copy of the review I left on Google for Mandarin Blueprint March 3, 2023
Given how bad my handwriting is, regardless of in English or not, it may be a surprise to anyone who knows me that I enjoy writing things down. I even have a love for fountain pens. By the way, a fancy pen does not guarantee fancy handwriting!
As part of my journey through learning Chinese, I’ve enjoyed incorporating putting pen (or pencil) to paper. Currently, and for the past year and a half, I’ve been working through the Mandarin Blueprint Method for learning Chinese. This course is made to teach you characters and words. It’s not required to write characters, but it’s recommended. In fact, I’ve heard even native speakers don’t write much, since most interactions are online or electronic. Sure, it is easier to type characters, but I found that differentiating similar characters when typing was getting harder and harder as I learned more characters.
I also find the muscle memory of writing characters helps me remember their structure. It also takes a little longer, so I’m required to focus a little more attention and therefore am more likely to remember it.
For a long time, I wrote in a wide-ruled composition book. The problem with writing in a lined notebook was that my characters often had odd proportions. So, I started looking for paper I could print out to write characters on. There are two main types of paper with guides, mi zi ge (米字格) and tian zi ge (田字格), where the respective guide lines in the boxes you write in look like the character 米or 田.
I found most of the paper I was able to print out had boxes that were too large, had lines that were too dark, or some other thing I wanted to improve. So, I pulled up Excel and made my own paper. I tried many different versions of the paper until I settled on a style I liked. After using this style quite a bit, I had loose practice paper all over the place. I really wished I had this paper in a notebook. All of the notebooks I found had boxes that were too big and most were larger than I wanted. I take my practice paper with me everywhere in my purse, so I can work on my reviews whenever I have a free minute.
So, I ended up self publishing some notebooks on Amazon in the way I like them. I’m really thrilled with how they turned out. By using Amazon, they are printed on demand whenever you order them. I do get a little over a dollar for each one sold, but I assume I’ll be my own main customer!
My first proof copy arrived in October of 2022. I was thrilled to see how well it turned out. However, I was unsure how it would hold up long-term, being thrown in my purse all the time, tossed around the house as I moved from desk to couch to bed. In the end, it held up really well.
I made the notebooks with 88 pages, given the auspiciousness of that number in Chinese culture. In March of 2023, I finally filled up my proof notebook. It had withstood several months of abuse and held up much better than I expected.
Now, I’m on to my first non-proof notebook. This one is, I think, very nice looking. I’m excited to start using it. The quality seems to be the same as the proof notebook, so I’m optimistic that it will also hold up well over time.
Like the red dragon book, there is a title page where you can write information about the book. Then, there are 88 pages of tian zi ge guides to help you write characters nicely. I’ve heard that these types of guides are used in other languages and writing systems, so I think they would work well for those, too.
If you’d like to try one of the notebooks, you are welcome to order one from Amazon. The links are below for the designs currently available. Also, if you have a specific design or color you’d like to see, let me know. I’ll consider adding it. I have a couple more in the works that I will add a little later.
Category: Chinese drama
Language: Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in English and several other languages
Format: Series, 36 episodes, ~50 minutes a piece
Access: Streaming, 7 episodes on YouTube, full series on iQiYi
Ilove a good movie or series about friendships. At it’s heart, that is what Hikaru no Go is. Enjoying the story is, for me, a great reason to watch a series to help learn Chinese, even if I don’t understand all of the Mandarin.
To be clear, I am talking about the Chinese live action series that came out in 2020. I gather there are also Japanese manga and anime series that this Chinese series is based on. I have not seen or read those. You can read the synopsis of this Chinese drama series and see the actors at MyDramaList.
I became interested in this series after seeing clips that were used as example sentences for learning Chinese. That led me to the first few episodes, which were on YouTube. I was hooked. I even signed up for iQiYi, which is the company that made the series and also streams it. It was totally worth the small cost to see the rest of the series.
Recommending series for learning Chinese is tricky. You probably have different tastes in content and language needs than I do. I have found dramas to be the most useful for me. It seems like a lot of Chinese dramas are either set in ancient times or are about a modern romance. Although it was mostly set in the early 2000’s, Hikaru no Go was released in 2020 and takes a different approach than most of those Chinese dramas.
This series has a good helping of cultural examples. You see kids interacting with parents, students interacting with teachers, students interacting with each other, and adults interacting with each other. All of these are helpful to learn in the background as you are learning the language.
I often find very young characters to be helpful to learn from, since they often speak more simply and use more words that I am familiar with. That was true at the beginning of this series. The little boy, Lu Si Yu, who plays the Shi Guang at the beginning is a really good actor! I do think the acting was pretty good by all involved.
This is, of course, a series filmed for native speakers. Although I could often understand a phrase here and there, I did need to use subtitles. The subtitles were well done.
There are a LOT of Chinese dramas out there that are set in ancient times. Hikaru no Go is not, however it does have a touch of ancient times with the Go-obsessed ghost, Chu Yin. I thought that mixture was clever. It was a unique way to combine the two. Highly recommended.
Yesterday morning, I was talking with my Chinese colleague (who is not a false friend!) and came across a problem remembering a certain Chinese word. This morning, soon after waking up, I suddenly realized why I was having a problem yesterday.
Generally, I try to get to a place where I have feeling about a word I’m learning, rather than just strictly translating. With the words in question, they were new enough that that feeling is still under development. This encounter, I believe will go along way to cementing a feeling for the words in question into my brain.
During the conversion, I wanted to say that I was a little worried about something. The two words that came to my mind that I needed to decide between were 担心 (dānxīn, worry, be anxious, etc.) and 放心 (fàngxīn, rest assured, be at ease, etc.). I knew they were more or less opposites, so I needed to make sure I selected the right one. 担心 was the newer word for me, so I was focusing on trying to remember 放心. I was having conflicting ideas in my mind surrounding 放. One side had the feeling of setting down, like setting down your worries, and the other was picking up or grabbing and holding tight. I was stuck.
We discussed it a bit and I remembered the definition of 放 was along the lines of to put, to place, or to let go of something. Obviously that wasn’t what I wanted to say.
She also mentioned that 担 has a hand component on the left and that 担子 is the traditional way two heavy baskets or buckets are carried with a pole balancing over the shoulder. Now, I even have a great visual to use in the future for 担心 too! (And what an appropriate image! Those baskets of worries can get pretty heavy at times!)
This morning I realized why 放 (fàng) was giving me trouble. Between different languages there is a concept of “false friends.” These are words that seem like they should be equivalent words in the other language, but they aren’t. These are especially interesting to me when their meanings are not only different, but different in a way that could be troublesome. One of my favorites is kind of a false friend love triangle:
English – poison & gift
German – Gift (means poison in English)
French – poisson (means fish in English)
I probably get more joy out of those words than I should.
The meaning that was tripping me up was the German word fangen, which means to catch. If you are going to throw something to someone, you might yell “Fang!” This is pronounced very much like the Chinese 放 (fàng) and not like the toothy English false friend, fang. The related German word gefangen means caught and also captive, like being in a jail, for example. So fangen and 放 (fàng) had a sound connection in my subconscious, but that was already associated with an action that was more or less opposite. What made it harder was that both actions involved using the hands. How interesting!
Recently, I was thinking about dictionaries, partly spurred on by the discussion in episode #68 of You Can Learn Chinese. I might possibly be a bit strange in that I’ve always enjoyed flipping through dictionaries, randomly reading about whatever words I happen upon. When I was intensely learning German, my German dictionary was always with me. (I won’t say “when I was learning German” even though I’m “fluent” by many measures. I think I’ll always be learning German. Heck, I’ll always be learning my native language of English, too!) After a year in Germany, my dictionary was falling apart! I bought a newer, larger one for my continuing studies, but it was never quite as loved as that first one, held together by lots of tape.
While learning Chinese, I had held back on buying a Chinese dictionary. The electronic dictionaries are so much easier for looking up words. Also, I didn’t feel like I was at a level yet where I could successfully look up Chinese words for which I didn’t know the pinyin. I didn’t want to overwhelm myself, at least not more than I already had. However, now that I’ve been studying Chinese for a couple years, I was starting to miss the ability to just flip through a book, or look up a word and see the adjacent words. So at this point (for reference: end of HSK 3, starting to study HSK 4) I decided to take the leap buy a paper dictionary.
I looked through the various options, which are surprisingly small in number. My requirements were I wanted one that had both English-Chinese and Chinese-English and wasn’t too big. I didn’t need 100% of all Chinese words in existence, just a good deal more than I currently know, preferably those I’ll most likely encounter. Oxford and Tuttle were the main publishers who had options I considered. They both also made other versions that were too easy or too hard for me. I didn’t want a beginner’s dictionary and an advanced learner’s dictionary would be overkill at this time. The Tuttle pocket option was interesting, in fact I use their Pleco dictionary quite often. Meriam-Webster also publishes a dictionary, but after reading reviews, I decided that wasn’t the one for me at this time.
I settled on the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary (4th edition), last revised in 2009, due to it having more description of the words and it being arranged in a way that made more sense in my mind. I was a bit wary of buying a 12-year-old dictionary, given how fast things are changing, but so far it seems fine. The vast majority of things I want to talk about any time soon are probably fairly static.
It may come to you as no surprise that the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary will not fit into your pocket, unless you have really big pockets and don’t mind whatever pocket you have it in pulling your piece of clothing down. It is not a full-sized book, so it’s easy to hold and take with you, but I doubt you’ll want it in a pocket.
I’ve had the dictionary for a couple weeks now and I’ve been enjoying it. Looking up English words in order to find the Chinese translations is pretty straight forward. The English words are arranged alphabetically, as you’d expect.
The English pronunciation is listed, although I’ll admit I never really learned the international phonetic alphabet. Luckily, I don’t need to look up English pronunciation! It also lists the part of speech and potentially multiple translations including the Chinese characters and the pinyin.
Unfortunately, it seems the example sentences don’t have pinyin, so if I don’t know all of the Chinese words in the example sentences, I have to go the somewhat arduous process of looking them up. So far, I’ve not used this side of the dictionary as much as the other side. I suspect that differentiating between multiple definitions will be hard, but that is true of electronic dictionaries, too, especially considering true dictionaries rather than translators that account for context.
Looking up Chinese characters and words was the main reason I waited to buy a paper dictionary. I didn’t feel I had a good enough grasp of character structure at first to make this feasible. However, I now feel that I am ready for two reasons.
First, I am incredibly interested in characters and their components. I love digging into a character to guess at why this or that part is there. I may be wrong often, but it doesn’t matter. Spending extra time with a character helps me recall it when I see it or want to write it.
Second, I have exposure to a lot more characters now. I’ve encountered a large number of the most common components. This is helpful, because you have to be able to recognize the radical components to look up a character you don’t know the pinyin for.
If you know the pinyin for a character or word, looking it up is fairly straightforward. The characters are arranged by pinyin first by sound then by tone. Words that start with the same character and pinyin are grouped together, which I find interesting. I like to see what other words can be made with the starting character, since it helps me understand more what the feeling is behind the character. I often use this feature in Pleco, too. Although, with Pleco, you can find the character anywhere in the word. If a character has more than one pinyin, you’ll find it under both places.
If you don’t know the pinyin, things get a little more interesting!
First, look up the radical that the character is organized under. What part of the character is the radical may or may not be obvious at first. There are around 188 radicals listed in this dictionary, sorted by the number of strokes in the radical. (I say “around” 188 because a few of them have more than one description for the same look-up number and I’m not yet sure why! At this point, that is not yet important to me to figure out.)
Find the radical and its associated number, then look up a list of characters that use that radical. The characters are mostly arranged according to how many more strokes are used in addition to the radical itself. Once the character is found in the list, the pinyin is listed, which leads the way to the entry for that character.
This dictionary includes both traditional and simplified characters, although it focuses on simplified. (I preferred the focus on simplified characters.) It’s interesting, because often they are listed under the same radical, but, as expected, the traditional characters are farther down the list, since they have more strokes. Traditional characters are designated by parentheses, so they are easy to distinguish.
In the back of the dictionary, there is other information that can be very useful. There is a list of the Chinese words for provinces and regions. Unfortunately, an opportunity was missed here, in that the tones were left off of the pinyin. There are lists of common phrases. There are also Chinese and English model letters, which I think is a nice touch. However, the Chinese models are above my reading level at the moment. There is also a calendar of Chinese festivals and holidays, which is a nice little reference.
Do I really need a paper dictionary? Absolutely not. Compared to the excellent online resources available today, a paper dictionary is slower and harder to use. However, for those of us who learn better by slowing down and occasionally meandering through word lists, a paper dictionary can be a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf. I doubt that this Chinese dictionary will get the extensive use that my beloved German dictionary did back in ancient times before online resources existed, but for me, I think I will use it enough to justify the purchase.
This little bit of blog, if you can even call it that, was being hosted on a platform that was going to cost me a decent chunk of money. So,...
