(zhōngwén yǔfǎ wéijī 中文语法维基)

It’s basically an online grammar textbook that will grow with time (although it’s already pretty extensive) and should eventually have answers to every grammar question we ever have. It’s headed up by John Pasden (who is also Academic Director and co-host of ChinesePod).

Background

In 2010, John and I (and my sister) sat on the roof of the ChinesePod building in Shanghai eating pizza, talking about the gaps in the materials for foreigners learning Chinese. My main beef was (and still is) the problems with all the dictionaries (as I mentioned here). John’s was grammar. He said he was working on something and I told him I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have filling the grammar gap. And now he’s unveiled it!

Originally just for clients of John’s AllSet Learning consultancy, the wiki is now available to all us laowai-s who need grammar explanations (especially those of us who zìxué 自学 our way through the language).

How to Use the Grammar Wiki

If you’ve used Wikipedia, the Chinese Grammar Wiki will look very familiar to you. I’m not going to explain about all the wiki stuff (like editing) because I don’t have a clue about it myself. I’m going to talk about reading and learning from the wiki as if it were a textbook.

Step 1: Get yourself some pinyin.

There is no pinyin in the wiki! But don’t worry worry less: there are solutions. The solutions involve installing a plugin or little program for your mouse to popup with pinyin when you hover it over the hanzi. They’re actually not that bad. I’ve got some suggestions here.

I asked John why there’s no pinyin in the wiki and here’s what he said:

“It’s not that I don’t think it’s necessary; I would agree that pinyin and translations for everything is the way to go.  But…I’ve learned from extensive experience that adding pinyin and translations to everything is a TON OF WORK, and I was worried that adding that extra work would delay us too much, and the wiki might never launch.  That’s unacceptable!”

I see his point. When I was writing Chinese 24/7 (and faceless too), it was kind of a nightmare to type pinyin (with tones) and hanzi for everything.

Step 2: Pick a starting point.

I’ve come up with two “paths” you can take to browse through the wiki at the moment (the search function isn’t quite running as well as I’d like yet).

• Path 1: Table of Contents by Level. This isn’t quite as easy as I’d like it to be yet, but it’s pretty good. Go to the Grammar Points By Level page and pick a level you’d like to look at. It’s actually a separate table of contents for each level (I’d love to have the option of seeing everything in one, HUGE screen-full). If you go by level, you’ll have a more systematic progression through the articles (rather than wondering “how important is this to me at my level?”).
• Path 2: Index by Part of Speech. Go to the Parts of speech overview and read to your hearts content what it’s all about. Or you can just skip right to Parts of Speech category page. Once you get there, you just click you way through to articles that are about any of the sub categories. For example, to see all the articles filed under “Measure Words” you would click on the Measure words link and then choose an article from the next list you get. The only thing to keep in mind for this process is that some articles may be labeled as being in 2 or more categories (so you might start to see some repeats as you go).

Step 3: Read some articles.

I’ve only started scratching the surface with this wiki, but I plan to read every article eventually. I’ve already found out some great information that I never knew. And that’s the whole point. This is a way to fill in the “curious gaps” in my Chinese grammar knowledge. I’m excited to watch the wiki expand and grow. Thanks John and your team for all the hard work!

• Pinyin Dictionary for Microsoft Word
• “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page Grand Unveiling
• New Song: Chinese Do Re Mi (Dou Rui Mi)
• MDBG Online Dictionary – Tutorial
• Gaps in Current Chinese Teaching Materials and Methods

Since the last time I talked (asked) about this was in 2007, I thought an update was in order.

If you want to put your mouse over hanzi (like this: 汉字) and get pinyin and English, I only know of a few options (please feel free to add to this list).

Browser Plugins

These are little programs that run only inside your Internet browsers. They’re all free, but only work for web pages (i.e. not MS Word, etc.).

• Chrome: Zhongwen - I’m trying this right now and I think it’s mostly good.
• FireFox and Chrome: Perapera-kun - I haven’t tried the newest version yet but others have recommended it to me.

Programs

These are programs that run in your computer’s “system tray” (down near the clock in the lower right) and can be used for any Chinese text on your whole computer including web pages, MS Word, Excel, Notepad, etc.. I only know of one right now.

For Windows

• MDBG Chinese Reader - I use this all the time and really like it. I haven’t tried the newest version, but there is now a free version (which I’ve also not tried), which is cool. It takes a really long time to start the program. But once you’ve got it loaded, you can turn it on and off without closing it.
• Lingoes – Recommended by Zhangyanglu and Simake

For Mac

• XiaoCiDian 小词典 – Recommended by Rob

For Phones and Mobile Devices

• Pleco – Recommended by Alastair and Aaron

Please feel free to leave comments and recommendations and I’ll add them into the main body of the article as they come in.

• A Facelift for the Blog
• Field Notes
• The Future for Chinese/English Dictionaries
• Why Is Nǎlǐ 哪里 Written Wrong?
• MDBG Online Dictionary – Tutorial

For a printer-friendly version in MS Word, click here:

 The Future of Chinese/English Dictionaries

Albert Wolfe, October 2011

Intro

This blog is usually for us “Old Hundred Names” (common folk) learning Chinese, but this article is different because I’m appealing for help and trying to cast a vision for the future. Unlike my usual posts that have something immediately applicable for learners of Chinese, this article is one step removed and talks about a gap in the materials, something we learners of Chinese need but can’t get for ourselves: a complete and useful Chinese-English/English-Chinese (C/E) dictionary.

In this article I’m going to describe the ideal “Super Dictionary” of the future in hopes that people who can bring it about (which includes us Old Hundred Names, as you’ll see) can make it so.

This article is inspired by:

• Six years of frustration with the currently available C/E dictionaries.
• MDBG: the closest thing I’ve seen to the community project required to solve the problem.
• The Longman English Dictionary: a model for the sort of information a foreign language learner needs in a dictionary.
• The advent of CreateSpace: high-quality, super cheap, print-on-demand self publishing.
• Skills 4, 9, and especially 10 from The Institute for the Future’s “Future Work Skills 2020 (pdf)” report.

Outline

The Problems

Not Complete

Missing Entries and Definitions (E→C)

Missing Entries and Definitions (C→E)

Missing corresponding words (C↔E)

Not Useful

E→C: Can’t find the word everyone uses

E→C: Too Many Choices (and Different Dictionaries Don’t Agree)

C→E: Too Many Definitions

The Problem of Pages

The Solutions

What We Need

How We Can Get It

Challenges

Action

The Problems

We learners of Chinese turn to dictionaries to answer the following two questions:

1. What does  (Chinese word)  mean in English?
2. How do you say  (English word)  in Chinese?

Problems trying to find the answer to question number one, going from Chinese to English (C→E), are less common than problems with question number two. But there are still a disturbing number of times when the dictionaries we consult aren’t complete enough to give either the appropriate definition of a Chinese word or the word itself. There are also some English words that do not appear as headwords in the dictionaries, making an E→C search frustrating.

The majority of our problems with C/E dictionaries come from trying to answer question number two, going from English to Chinese (E→C). We cannot trust that the Chinese definitions given in our dictionaries are the appropriate ones to use. Furthermore, cross-checking multiple dictionaries often yields different words rather than confirmation of certain words. So we are at best insecure about our word choices and at worst secure but wrong. We need a more complete and more useful dictionary.

Not Complete

Missing Entries and Definitions (E→C)

• Common words and phrases. “Velcro” and “grade on a curve” are missing from every dictionary I’ve ever seen. (Velcro has been added to MDBG but I still don’t know how to say “grade on a curve”, and I’m even required to do it at my college here inChina. They just explain it in terms of the number of As, Bs, etc. I’m allowed to give.)
• Special / technical terms. For example, medical terms seem to be getting slowly added to the online dictionaries. I needed a new Albuterol inhaler and had to figure out how to say it without the aid of a dictionary. (Here’s the story of how I found out and then added it to MDBG).

Missing Entries and Definitions (C→E)

• Common words or definitions. “Yàobù” 要不 can mean: “How about (we do something)…?” That particular meaning doesn’t appear in any of my paper dictionaries and only appears in sentence examples at Nciku but not in the definitions. (It has since been added to MDBG.)
• Proverbs / idioms. One of my English student asked me how to say “yīn ài chéng hèn 因爱成恨” in English (so we know it’s commonly known and used, not just some ancient literary phrase). I didn’t know so we looked it up. None of the online dictionaries nor my paper dictionaries including a specialty proverbs/idioms dictionary had it, yet it got over 2 million hits on Google. (I’ve since added it to MDBG.)
• New slang. Of course, every language is evolving. That’s why adding new slang like “gěilì” 给力 is essential for us to keep up with the modern usage of Chinese.

Missing corresponding words (C↔E)

Paper dictionaries have a special problem that online dictionaries don’t have to deal with because of the nature of online searches.

I’m going to pick on the Oxford Minidictionary (affectionately know as “Chubby“) for a moment. Here’s the entry under “shower“ in the E→C side:

“n (for washing) línyù 淋浴; a shower yí gè línyù 一个淋浴；to have a shower xǐ línyù 洗淋浴; (rain)…”

And then it moves on to rain, which we’re not interested in right now.

Now the problem is that in the C→E side you can find this entry:

“洗澡 xǐzǎo vb to have a bath/shower”

So, why isn’t “洗澡 xǐzǎo” listed in the E→C side? It’s an oversight, that’s all. This is just one of many examples of inconsistent internal cross-references that occur in every paper C/E dictionary I’ve ever used (see another example).

Not Useful

Even though incomplete dictionaries are frustrating because we can’t find a word we’re looking for, the problem of usefulness is much more urgent. When we want to find how to say an English word in Chinese, even if the dictionary contains an entry for the English and Chinese, we cannot trust that the word we get is the right one.

E→C: Can’t find the word everyone uses

The Problem of “Shower”

First of all, “xǐ zǎo” 洗澡 is definitely the most-used word for “to take a shower / to bathe” all over the country. I can even remember a joke (one of the few I understood) from the Spring Festival Variety Show (春节晚会) a few years ago when one of the actors used it. There are other ways to say it, and the noun and verb form are different (as confirmed anecdotally by this post), but I’m convinced that “xǐ zǎo” 洗澡 is the word to use.

So we need that to be indicated in the dictionaries. Remember, the chubby little Oxford Minidictionary only gives “xǐ línyù” 洗淋浴and I’ve never heard that used once. My shower post on this blog confirms that xǐ zǎo” 洗澡 is missing from other dictionaries. Yet it is the word everyone seems to use for something they do every day. That makes the dictionaries useless for answering the question, “How should I say ‘shower’ in Chinese?” And there are many other examples just like “shower.”

The Problem of “Go”

My friend Brad asked me a question his first month inChinathat perfectly illustrates another aspect of the learner-unfriendliness of our dictionaries.

“Hey, how do you say ‘go’? You know like, ‘I’m going now.’”

I explained “go” in English can be translated into many different words in Chinese, but in this situation “zǒu” 走 is the best.

He couldn’t find the answer himself in the dictionaries. I checked the two little dictionaries I always recommend, “Chubby” and “Lenny” (the little Langenscheidt), and neither helped.

Lenny gives “qù” 去 first (which would be used in “I’m going to China”). Next is “líkāi” 离开 which would work for Brad’s example, but isn’t as common as “zǒu” 走, which appeared halfway down the list under “I must be ~ing”. The translation is good: “wǒ děi zǒu le” 我得走了. But there is nothing to indicate which of the four words is “go.”

Chubby gives almost a full two pages to “go” and various collocations of the word, arranged in alphabetical order rather than by usefulness or frequency. First is “go across” chuānguò 穿过 and then “go after” (physically) zhuī 追. “Zǒu” 走 makes a few appearances, but is buried among such nuggets as “go off (when talking about food becoming bad)” biànzhì 变质.

Online dictionaries don’t help much either. A search at MDBG for “go” gives 100 results (on the first page). “Qù” 去 is number 9 and “zǒu” 走 is number 15. A search at nciku shows去 first (no pinyin until you hover your mouse) and then “zǒu” 走 after about 20 other entries.

Poor Brad. He was deluged with information and the dictionaries gave him no guidance as to what information is more or less important. The dictionaries need to be sorted for learners in terms of usefulness rather than just alphabetically. Since they aren’t, he really couldn’t find the word he needed without asking for help.

E→C: Too Many Choices (and Different Dictionaries Don’t Agree)

The Problem of “Spoon”

Finding out how to say “spoon” is hard too. Just to clarify, this is not a Western invention that is rare in Chinese restaurants (like the fork). I’m not demanding the Chinese come up and agree on a word for a strange foreign object. I’m talking about the sort of spoon that every single restaurant inChinabrings every customer automatically with soup or fried rice, and has been doing so for centuries.

Let me show you the entries for “spoon” in the various dictionaries I’ve got lying around:

• Oxford Minidictionary: sháozi 勺子 / chízi 匙子
• Langenscheidt: sháo 勺
• Commercial Press: chí 匙 / tiáogēng 调羹
• Readers of this blog contributed 6 more: tāngchí 汤匙  / piáogēn 瓢根 / piáozi 瓢子 / sháor 勺儿 / chígēng匙羹 / qǐgēng 匙羹
• Total ways to say spoon: 11

The little “zi” 子 and “r” 儿 endings may not be as important as the other differences. But still, how should I, a learner of Chinese, go ask the waitress to bring me a second spoon at the restaurant tonight? And what’s the difference between all of the choices? Are some more “correct” than others? Judging from the comments, the differences seem to be largely regional. So which word is most likely to be understood no matter where I go inChina? These are questions that I can’t find the answers to.

The Problem of “Bus”

Sometimes, the differences between the words are more about usage than region. Take “bus” for example. I’ve heard all the following words used for “bus” in the same general area:

• qìchē 汽车 / gōnggòng qìchē 公共汽车 / gōngjiāo chē公交车 / bāshì 巴士 / dàbā 大巴 / xiǎobā小巴

The word you choose depends on the situation you’re talking about. For example, “bus station” uses qìchē 汽车 but “city bus” is usually gōngjiāo chē公交车. To be truly useful, the dictionaries need to explain the usage differences and give example phrases or sentences to illustrate the differences.

C→E: Too Many Definitions

Especially in online dictionaries, where no editing choices need to be made to save pages, there are often just too many definitions for a single Chinese headword. As a result, the guys at Skritter have started trimming down MDBG’s CC-CEDICT database, which Skritter uses for their excellent writing training site. They’ve ended up creating their own version of the MDBG dictionary—one that they feel is more useful to learners.

For example, here is MDBG’s definition for “jiǎ” 甲:

jiǎ 甲: first of the ten heavenly stems 十天干[shi2 tian1 gan1] / (used for an unspecified person or thing) / first (in a list, as a party to a contract etc) / armor plating / shell or carapace / (of the fingers or toes) nail / bladed leather or metal armor (old) / ranking system used in the Imperial examinations (old) / civil administration unit (old)

And here’s Skritter’s definition:

jiǎ 甲: one; armor (1st Heavenly Stem)

For beginners, I think Skritter’s is much more useful. I would suggest adding “nail (finger or toe)” to Skritter’s as well. But the point is: Skritter has helped the learner sort through the huge volume of information by simply removing what they feel is less important.

Just to give MDBG a break, the goal of MDBG and the CC-CEDICT database behind it is to provide a one way, Chinese-English translation tool that provides the most complete English definition list possible (including all the ancient meanings). But for learners of Chinese, it’s not as useful as we’d like.

There is a solution that can meet both goals: weight the definitions for usefulness rather than removing them. I’ll explain how in the next section.

But sometimes the definitions are so out of date they’re laughable and need to be edited rather than just weighted. For example, compare the following:

(MDBG) tāo tāo bù jué 滔滔不绝: unceasing torrent (idiom) / talking non-stop / gabbling forty to the dozen

and

(Skritter) tāo tāo bù jué 滔滔不绝: (saying) talking non-stop; gushing; torrential

I think it’s obvious that the Skritter dictionary’s definitions are more appropriate for this century. In this case I would recommend changing the MDBG definitions rather than just weighting them.

The Problem of Pages

It would be impractical to include every Chinese and English word in a printed dictionary (see what happened when a UK student printed some of Wikipedia). Editors have to be selective. But before that selection can happen, all the data and definitions need to be compiled.

I understand that printers of dictionaries such as my old favorite the Oxford Minidictionary have to pick and choose what to add. But I have the distinct feeling that those choices are not made very scientifically. For example, consider this entry that made it into the 633 pages of the little dictionary:

showjumping n qímá yuè zhàng yùndòng 骑马越障运动

And yet headwords such as “similar” are missing.

How are the decisions made about what to include in paper dictionaries? Could it be that one of the editors, Boping Yuan or Sally Church, was interested in showjumping? I’m interested in a more scientific approach involving sorting huge amounts of data for frequency, popularity, and usefulness to inform the choices of what to include or not.

To do that, we need to make the core database for the Super Dictionary an online resource. Online dictionaries have the advantage of virtually limitless space that anyone on the planet can access at any time. At the time of this writing, there is still no single database that contains all known words and phrases.

Of course, there’s no way to ever have a 100% complete Chinese-English dictionary because of the nature of language change. There will always be new slang and new terms coming out. But we haven’t even got the old ones all compiled into one place yet.

Once the Super Dictionary is reasonably complete, the task becomes sorting and arranging the information and definitions into the most useful, learner-friendly format possible. Then various printed books can be produced if there’s interest.

So how can we 1) get that information, 2) arrange it in order of usefulness? I’ve got a few ideas.

The Solutions

Disclaimers:

• I’m a horrible business man. (As proof: there are no advertisements on this blog and I give all my music away for free.) I don’t have any plan for how I, personally (nor anyone else, for that matter), can make money off the community project described below. I don’t claim any ownership of the ideas, data, information structure, or processes described below. All I care about it getting the information to the masses (and going on record as being the one to propose this project). If I can participate in the project in some way, I’d be delighted.
• I’m a volunteer editor for the MDBG dictionary (although I’ve been pretty uninvolved recently).
• I’ve recently published a book with CreateSpace at my own expense (coming out soon).
• I have no other affiliations with any of the other individuals or companies mentioned below. None of the individuals or companies mentioned (including MDBG and CreateSpace) have agreed to participate in a project like the one described below, nor have any individuals or companies expressed any approval or endorsement of the ideas presented in this article. They are simply cited as examples of popular online services that could be included in a community project in the future if they agreed to do so.

What We Need

Look at all the info the Longman Dictionary give English learners who look up “drink”.

There are more definitions and sentence examples that I cropped off.

This serves as an excellent model of a very useful learner’s dictionary. We need something equally useful for our Chinese/English Super Dictionary.

1. Pronunciation

We need pinyin (and variations for the pinyin) for every word and sentence example. Many dictionaries neglect the pinyin for sentence examples. I’ve never quite been able to figure out why they give pinyin for the headword, but leave it out for the usage examples.

2. Part of Speech

“Chinese words don’t have parts of speech” is a common myth. Sure, some words function as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, but that’s true in English as well. And sometimes there is a clear difference in Chinese. For example, “héshì” 合适 (meaning “suitable”) usually functions as an adjective and “shìhé” 适合 (meaning “to be suitable for”) as a verb.

Chinese parts of speech may not directly correspond to English ones but we need them labeled anyway. For example, Chinese particles like “le” 了，”ba” 吧，”ne” 呢, etc. don’t have English equivalents. But we still need them indicated as “particle” (or something) in the dictionary.

Adsotrans seems to have the most data about parts of speech at the moment, but it still needs work and could benefit from a team of users and editors constantly improving it in the way I’m suggesting. For example, at the time of this writing the two entries for “jiǎ” 甲 (meaning “1st, finger nail,” etc.) list the parts of speech as “NOUN” and “HEAVENLY,” respectively.

3. Extra Info about Part of Speech

Learners of English need to know if a verb is transitive or intransitive, how the verb is conjugated into different tenses, and whether a noun is countable or uncountable. Learners of Chinese need to know, for example, what measure words are associated with which nouns, and which category a verb falls into (“stative, activity, achievement” are the three categories given by Claudia Ross).

4. Frequency Data

The Longman entry for “Bicycle” has this icon  meaning it’s in the top 3000 written words yet “bike” has this icon  indicating it is in the top 2000 spoken words. So English learners can assume that “bike” is less formal and “bicycle” is more formal. Now the decision of which synonym to use in which context has been made easier: use “bike” when talking to your friends and use “bicycle” when writing a business contract or even a note.

Something like that would certainly help us sort through the ocean of synonyms in Chinese.

5. Sentence Examples

The Longman sentence examples are all extremely practical and useful. Compare them to the sentence examples given for “hē” 喝 (drink) at JuKuu and nciku. My favorites from the first few entries are:

7. He is fond of a dram. 他喜欢喝一点酒。(Jukuu)

1. We can’t solve these problems through arranging dinners and parties.  这些问题不是靠吃吃喝喝就能解决的。(nciku)

Not only do these example fail to use the word “drink,” notice that pinyin is not given at JuKuu and is only available on mouse hover at nciku (see number 1 in this section).

There is a new community project called tatoeba that links sentence examples from a bunch of languages together. They seem to be much more on the right track. The first three sentence examples from this search for “drink” give excellent usages of the word “hē” 喝 and provide pinyin and hanzi.

6. Other Info (not pictured)

In addition to the examples in the above image from Longman, we learners of Chinese need the following information in our Super Dictionary:

• Regional differences in usage and pronunciation (蜗牛 wōniú / guāniú [taiwan] = snail).
• Category and meta tags (chuānghu 窗户 = window [building, vehicle]; chēchuāng 车窗 = window [vehicle]; shìchuāng 视窗 = Windows [computer operating system]).
• Formality tags (qīzi 妻子 = wife [formal]; lǎopó 老婆 = wife [informal]).
• Traditional / Simplified variants for characters (中国 [simplified] / 中國 [traditional]).
• R-hua (érhuà) 儿化 variants and whether that changes the meaning (tóu 头 = head / hair; tóur 头儿 = leader).
• HSK levels and TOP levels for learners who are preparing for those tests.
• Literal breakdown of hanzi (fēijī 飞机 = airplane [fly machine].
• Radical breakdown of characters (机 = 木 + 几) and what each radical means (if anything).

MDBG and nciku have many of those things. But regional differences, frequency (or even popularity) ratings, and all the parts of speech and category meta tags are still either completely absent or incomplete.

It’s too much to ask anyone individual, or even company to do all this work. That’s why I propose a system of uniting everyone together to collect and constantly improve on the data we all need.

How We Can Get It

Because of the complexity of the project I’m envisioning, I’ve created a little diagram to use as a guide for discussing the various points.

1. Users register for Super Dictionary

Currently, the main online dictionaries don’t require registration for use. I think that’s fine. But there should be an opt-in system for allowing users to help improve the dictionary. As long as users understand the reasoning behind the registration and have assurances that private data will be protected, I think people would be willing to pitch in to improve the world of Chinese learning.

NOTE: This diagram is only showing what Chinese learners would do. But getting native Chinese speakers (learners of English) involved is essential too. Maybe each user’s first language (and region) should be part of the registration process to round out the data. I haven’t thought that all through yet.

2. They are associated with a region

The regions on the map (image credit) are simply an example. Rather than choose pre-determined regions and ask users to “pick the kind of Chinese you want to learn,” I think it would be better for users to agree to say where they are learning Chinese and then let the computer extrapolate regions from the data later. For example, if users say which cities they’re in, the computer can then look for patterns and see which cities (and then larger regions) use which words.

Also, for users who are not in a Chinese-speaking environment, they should indicate which area they are most likely more exposed to. For example, if my wife were fromBeijing, I’d list my region as “Beijing” even though I might be living inDenmark. If my Chinese teacher atCaliforniaUniversityis fromGuangzhou, I’d put “Guangzhou” as my region.

It wouldn’t be completely useful all the time, but the important thing would be to start collecting the information and then let the computer start looking for patterns.

3. Their usage data goes into to the database

Raw Popularity Weighting

The system should watch search queries and the user won’t have to do anything different for the computer to start learning. For example, I’m in Guangzhou and I search the dictionary for “pāituō” 拍拖. The computer should remember that someone searched for “pāituō” 拍拖 and also that the person was in Guangzhou.

Then, the user can help even more. When I see the results for “pāituō” 拍拖, I realize that the context that I heard it in was “to court” or “to date”. So I can click a little link on that definition that tells the computer: “This is the meaning I heard for that word.” So the computer can start to figure out that “to court” is a popular definition for “pāituō” 拍拖.

This could also help show where new phrases start from. For example, I’ve heard that “pāituō” 拍拖 is being used more and more all over the country. A system of regional tracking could corroborate the hypothesis that it originated in Cantonese-speakingGuangdongprovince.

Spoken vs. Written Popularity

It can go one step further by offering two icons, let’s say an ear   and an eye . Now, if I heard “pāituō” 拍拖 in a spoken context (if it came up in conversation, for example), I click the ear icon above “to date”. So the computer learns that it should give that definition more of an oral weighting.

Conversely, when I look up “sell” in English, the computer makes note that “sell” has been searched for. Then I see the definitions and click the ear for “mài” 卖 and the eye for “shòu” 售. That means that “mài” 卖 is used more for oral Chinese and “shòu” 售 is more for written Chinese.

Of course, many times, especially when going from English to Chinese, users won’t know which word is used in more spoken or written contexts. That’s fine. You don’t have to click anything.

Missing Entries

If a user searches for something that’s not in the dictionary (for example “velcro” or “gěilì” 给力), the computer will show “no results found” but should send a note to the experts so they can determine whether it should be added or not. According to this, nciku already has some of this sort of system in place but not as sophisticated as the one I’m proposing.

4. Experts add data common users can’t

Finding the experts will be the biggest problem. I think academic institutions and volunteers could be enlisted, but that’s its own issue.

Assuming for a moment there is a team of experts, they will serve mainly to correct and enhance the data that are coming from all the common users. The experts could be associated with a region as well to monitor how geography affects their decisions.

They would be able to add (or approve) tags to entries regarding any of the following:

• Written variations (traditional / simplified, alternative characters, etc.)
• Spoken variations (zhè / zhèi for 这; wōniú / guāniú for 蜗牛)
• Formal / informal register tags (qīzi 妻子 [formal]; lǎopó 老婆 [informal])
• Part of speech tags (héshì 合适 [adjective] ; shìhé 适合 [verb])
• Sentence examples that are useful, common, and not too long.

BONUS: Corpus Data

What we really need is some objective data for written and spoken frequency. Longman put together their own corpus to get frequency data.

Frequency of single Chinese characters (zì 字) in written material (like newspapers) has been done for a long time (at least since 1993). But we at least need research on the top 1000, 2000, 3000 multi-character words (cí 词) both spoken and written.

I’ve recently become aware of Jun Da’s corpus data that does take into account multi-character words. Perhaps if someone like Professor Hongyin Tao at UCLA or Dr. Richard Xiao at the University of Central Lancaster could be persuaded to join the team. Xiao compiled The Lancaster Los Angeles Spoken Chinese Corpus (LLSCC), a collection of natural and scripted Chinese conversations and transcripts. Professor Tao was also heading up work on the UCLA Chinese Corpus. Work on both projects seems to have stopped in 2008. However, in 2009 Xiao and a few other editors published a Chinese dictionary with frequency data! I haven’t seen it myself, but according to the reviews on Amazon, it’s not as useful as it could have been (for example, it’s missing pinyin for sentence examples). But it’s a step in the right direction.

If Xiao’s, Tao’s and Jun Da’s data were combined (just to name a few) we could have a huge, useful bank of info that could provide guidance to the users of the Super Dictionary. Would they allow that? What’s in it for them to team up? I’m not sure what their goals are so I can’t answer that.

Also, the challenge of getting a spoken corpus will be great. I think QQ chat transcripts might be useful for that, but who’s going to opt in for sharing those?

5. Online / Mobile Services Use the Database

The Skritter guys had to do a lot of work trimming down the dictionary because the MDBG database they imported wasn’t exactly what they wanted. Now, if I want to start my own website I have to “reinvent the wheel” and start from scratch. Why not let the work that the Skritter guys have done benefit everyone in the future as well? If they’re willing to make their data available, they could provide weighting information (rather than removing things that someone might want to add back in later) so that the Super Dictionary is smarter about which definitions are more useful or important to them.

But it’s not just for services who’ve created their own dictionary (like Skritter has) to contribute back to the Super Dictionary. Let’s take Pleco and their iPhone dictionary as an example. The newest version of Pleco allows you to point your iPhone’s camera at any hanzi text and it’ll translate it for you (see cool video demo). So how about letting the Pleco users opt in to send that info back to the Super Dictionary? Then we’d start to see data about how many users scanned which characters and we’d start to know that those characters are at least in common use.

The Super Dictionary database would also benefit from knowing that there are 2,000 Skritter users who have such-and-such character in their vocab list, but only 20 users who have this other character.

It would need to be determined exactly how to use the data, but it could only help.

I just had a conversation with Ben Whately, co-founder of Memrise, and he said he was getting ready to import a dictionary database because they have more important things to focus their energy on than making a dictionary (they’re compiling some very exciting data that I hope to discuss in a future post). The problem he’s facing is whether to use Adsotrans (which is maintained by David Lancashire of Popup Chinese) or MDBG/CC-CEDICT. I told him I didn’t really think either was good enough on its own.

What he really needs is the Super Dictionary that includes both plus all the work that the Skritter guys and other people have done. And wouldn’t it be great if Popup Chinese also shared the data about which words they used in their learning materials? They wouldn’t have to make the learning materials public, just the data.

But would companies see that as helping their competitors? I don’t know. My hope is that if the Super Dictionary were available for free, and everyone were contributing to making it better and better, it would make new companies focus on offering new services and new tools rather than making their own dictionaries. Instead of a lot of different wheels being invented, we’d start to see a lot of new vehicles (and maybe some toys!) using the same wheels.

6. Paper Books Can Be Printed

CreateSpace has the following characteristics that make self-publishing a paper dictionary extremely desirable:

• Very high quality printing and many paperback book size options available.
• All you have to do is upload a PDF and they make the book. You buy the first book (called a proof) for about $5-7 dollars and then the book is available on Amazon for the world.
• It’s completely free for the author to set up a book. Various add-on options are available for a price, but CreateSpace make their money each time the book sells rather than when it’s set up. Even the ISBN is provided free by CreateSpace. You only pay for the book itself when it’s printed.
• It takes about one week from the time you upload the PDF to the time the book is ready to print. That means if you want to update the book, you upload a new PDF and a week later, the new version of the book is ready. You can do that as many times as you want.
• The book goes directly on to Amazon so that others can benefit from it as well. You set the price of the book (above a certain minimum price based on the cost of production). CreateSpace prints and ships the book within 24 hours of an order made on Amazon.
• An infinite number of dictionaries with various options can be printed as long as there’s a PDF for each one.

That means that as long as there’s something built into the Super Dictionary that allows users to select various options and output a PDF, the information doesn’t have to stay locked into an online format. The options could include the following:

Total Words

You would be able to choose how many headwords you want in the book. You would also be able to choose how many definitions you want for each word. For example, if you just want a little travel dictionary, you might go with only the most frequently used and popular words and definitions. In this case you’d have the definition for “jiǎ” 甲 be only “one; armor; nail (finger or toe)”. But if you’re going to be doing some sort of scholarly project, you might want the full list of definitions.

Region

You could also produce a special dictionary for certain regions. In other words, if you’re going toTaiwan, you could have it just use the words that are commonly spoken inTaiwan. It would save on pages and then you’d be reasonably certain that you’ll be able to say what you want to say for your area. You could also choose to have traditional characters, simplified, or both.

Sentence Examples

If you want to save more pages, you could opt out of having sentence examples included. If you did want some, you could choose how many sentences examples to include and only use ones that have been marked as popular or useful.

Pronunciation

If you’re a learner of Chinese, you’d want to have pinyin for everything (including sentence examples). But you could choose to have the Chinese side ordered by hanzi or pinyin (most dictionaries order by hanzi but that’s not necessarily the easiest thing for learners).

If you’re a learner of English, you might want to save pages by eliminating pinyin entirely. But you might appreciate English IPA included. That could be one of the options.

Challenges

I’m not aware of anything like the proposed system for the Super Dictionary.

Just to summarize, I think the innovations with this system would be:

• Combining dictionary data from competing, or at least separate, companies into one master database.
• Adding regional data based on user location.
• Weighting headwords and definitions for popularity based on user searches and direct “thumbs up” style voting.
• Infinite, customizable print dictionaries created from the data.

Wikipedia is a good example of the power of collaboration, but there’s nothing built in to allow third-parties to use and then contribute data back into the database. They’ve got the support of their own foundation (the Wikimedia Foundation), which we don’t have. Also, Wikipedia offers printed books through a company (PediPress) that handles all the printing details. We don’t have anyone like that helping us either. But we don’t really need it because CreateSpace is so easy to use anyone can make a book! However, there are a few issues to solve before this can all come to be.

Legal

Who would “own” the Super Dictionary? There are “copy-left” licenses that could be applied, but decisions will have to be made, and some thought needs to be given to the legal side of this project. Also, participating users and companies will need to know what their rights are.

Talent

The sort of project will require a team of very smart people who are good at not just programming, website design, and user interface but also data management, statistical theory, and also have some savvy about China and the Chinese language. I can’t do it. I’m not sure any one person can. And even if we found one person who could do it all, would he or she work on it for free?

Money

Even if we found a team of talented, motivated people who would volunteer their time for this project, the server and bandwidth still costs money.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of The Harvard Business Review, said in an NPR interview about Wikipedia and user-created web content said: “Pretty much the only business model in what’s called ‘web 2.0′ is to get as many people as possible to look at your site and then feed them advertisements.” Carr seems to be saying the future of making money off information, isn’t by owning the information itself, but by advertising revenue. I’m not sure whether that would be enough or not.

An academic institution or foundation that just has a bunch of money lying around would be a great solution to the problem. Anyone know someone like that?

I would hate to see collaboration with other companies discouraged because of licensing disputes or making the partner companies shoulder the financial burden of the project. If some companies were willing to chip in and it didn’t discourage their participation, then that would be fine. But I think some thought needs to be given to the bottom line.

Collaboration

The success of the project depends largely on how many partnering companies can be brought together to share their vocabulary usage data (point number 5 on the diagram). All businesses must ask the question “But what’s in it for me?” I’m not sure my answers are good enough for the bottom line: the quality of your product will improve as the database improves. Also, it might be good press for participating companies. I’d love to see some sort of logo that gets slapped on each participating website that shows they’re using and contributing to the Super Dictionary database. If users were educated about what it meant, it would mean the customers would have more confidence in joining a service that’s participating rather than one that’s independent.

But should all companies who want to participate be allowed? Who’s going to screen them? How will their data be used / weighted? These are all problems to solve.

Printing

If the Super Dictionary does lead to a print book (or many print books) as I hope it will, how will that come to be? How will the PDFs required to print the books be generated? Where will the revenue from the printed books go?

Multilingual

There’s no reason why only English should be used for the Super Dictionary. But making a Chinese-multilingual dictionary is a much bigger project than just Chinese English. Still, with the right talent on board, it might make more sense to design it to accommodate other languages from the beginning so even if it starts out as only Chinese/English, it could be expanded to Chinese/you-name-it more easily.

Action

So what to do now? Any suggestions? You’re welcome to leave comments here on this blog. Or someone could start a Google Group or something. I’ll help if I can.

• MDBG Online Dictionary – My review
• Chubby: Best Paper Dictionary (first year)
• Why Is Nǎlǐ 哪里 Written Wrong?
• Big Red: Best Paper Dictionary (for Your Desk)
• Tone Wars

But it’s made harder by a lack of good materials and inefficient teaching methods.

The Problem

Contrast studying Chinese with, say, Spanish. There are endless dictionaries, flashcard sets, verb charts, grammar explanations, pronunciation guides, audio recordings, etc. for the motivated learner to use. Indeed, with Spanish the problem is having too many materials to choose from. Not so with Chinese. Probably because it hasn’t been taught as widely as other languages in the West, the materials are still lacking in almost all the above listed areas.

Also, Spanish teachers don’t face the same problems that Chinese teachers do (specifically tones and hanzi). Chinese teachers are usually native speakers of Chinese who don’t have natural insight into what it’s like for a learner not to know how to deal with tones and hanzi. They don’t remember how they learned tones (as children) and they do remember how they learned hanzi (in elementary school). Neither of those experiences is particularly relevant to an adult learner of Chinese as a foreign language.

This article will briefly outline what I think are the most pressing needs in Chinese materials and teaching methods. I’ll also give a few solutions, but the purpose of this article is simply to shine a light on the problem so that creative and motivated readers can begin to fill the gaps. Or, if solutions already exist, I’ll be thrilled to hear about them!

Materials

Dictionaries

• The current English-Chinese / Chinese-English dictionaries I’ve seen lack the completeness and usefulness that learners need. Community projects with free licensing options (like MDBG and its CC-CEDICT) are a great start but still not quite enough. There is so much potential for greatness here, I just won’t be able to resist writing another article soon on exactly what we need and how I imagine we could get it. But it’ll take cooperation and a willingness to sacrifice profit for the simple goal of improving the bank of knowledge available to learners (and I’m not sure how many people will be interested in that kind of approach if it doesn’t necessarily generate revenue).

Hanzi

• I myself still have unanswered grammar questions and I’m not sure exactly where to go to get the answers. I’ve heard rumors of a comprehensive grammar resource coming out soon, but I’m not at liberty to divulge any details yet.

Tones

• One of the reasons I wrote Chinese 24/7 (and its 28 pages dedicated only to the tones) was that I felt the available materials didn’t adequately describe what’s going on with the tones (especially in combinations and natural speech).
• The 3rd Tone seems to be the main issue that needs to be addressed now. It’s clear now (to me and many others) that the 3rd tone should just be called the “low tone”. Here’s a short article about John Pasden’s better tone diagram. Olle Linge recently came to the same conclusion in his thesis for Lund University.
• A friend of mine has just released an excellent tone drill app for iPhone and iPad. The Laokang ® Tone Test is elegant in its simplicity, and it also assumes 3rd tone = low tone. It’s also the only thing I’ve ever seen that distinguishes between 3+3 combos and 2+3 (I thought they were exactly the same!).

Audio Recordings

• There are synthesized voices for reading Chinese characters, packs of mp3s for single-syllable pinyin, but we’re still missing ér huà 儿化 recordings (yì diǎnr 一点儿). It’s an important part of the language.

Teaching Methods

Full disclosure: I’ve never actually taken a Chinese class. But I’ve talked to a lot of people who have and I’ve noticed a few patterns.

Tones

The following list of problems is based on these presuppositions:

• The tones are the hardest thing for students learning to speak Chinese.
• Tones should be emphasized from the beginning of a student’s study of Chinese.

I see the following problems with the way tones are taught in most Chinese classes:

1. Native Chinese teachers still use the traditional tone diagram (that says the 3rd tone is a “v” shape) which I believe is not as useful as the 3rd tone as “low tone” diagram.
2. Teachers also focus too much on the tones in isolation rather than the much more important combinations.
3. Teachers expect students to produce the tones before they can even hear the difference between them (especially in combinations). That’s asking too much.
4. Some teachers try to “skip over” the tones with the assumption that students can “add the tones” later after they’ve had some more experience with the language. I believe this is a little bit like learning to drive an automatic transmission and then trying to “add the stick shift” later. It’s usually better to just get going on the tones from the beginning.

One reason I like the Laokang ® Tone Test is that it addresses the first 3 problems in a single screen.

Hanzi

The following list of problems is based on these presuppositions:

• Hanzi is extremely time consuming to learn.
• A knowledge of hanzi is not necessary when learning speaking and listening (pinyin is enough).
• Hanzi is best learned after a learner has a certain degree of fluency in the language (as the Chinese all had before they started learning hanzi).
• Hanzi can be learned just as efficiently (or maybe more efficiently) without a teacher through sheer rote memorization.

I see the following problems with the way hanzi is taught in most Chinese classes:

1. Teachers require students to learn hanzi from the first class. This takes most of the student’s time and energy and yields very slow results. I’ve met people who’ve had a year of formal Chinese classes and still couldn’t communicate with the clerk at the front desk of a hotel. I think the emphasis should be on pinyin, speaking, and listening for at least the first year (maybe two) or until students reach a reasonable level of fluency so their already useful vocabulary need only be linked to the characters rather than trying to learn it all at once.
2. Teachers don’t teach simple characters first. I’ve talked to students who came away from their first week of Chinese class being able to write 你好 nǐ hǎo in hanzi and explain the little “girl + son = good” legend. But they couldn’t say “nǐ hǎo” with the right tones, nor could they explain what’s going on with a 3+3 tone combination. Those two characters are both kind of complicated. If the student already had a working fluency in the language, there could be a system of teaching the characters based on complexity starting with simple first (一， 人，大，太，etc.) instead of starting with the first thing you want to say in a Chinese class (你好).
3. Teachers ask students to spend class and homework time copying and memorizing the characters. I don’t need a teacher to ask me to write a character 20 times. I just need to do it myself. Programs like Skritter (go here if it’s blocked in China) provide all the structure necessary for a systematic review of hanzi (including stroke order) without any need for a teacher.
4. For most of us, reading is more important than writing. Computers and cell phone inputs allow us to choose hanzi from a drop-down list based on pinyin we type. For example:
   So if I don’t need to write anything by hand, I can still write emails, text messages, and even contracts, etc. with a working knowledge of reading and pinyin. Of course this doesn’t produce a “fully literate” student, and students wouldn’t be able to pass hand-written tests like the HSK, but maybe those aren’t part of the student’s goals. If the student’s goals don’t include hand writing, why not give computerized / text message tests? Conversely, if a learner’s goals involve writing, why not organize a separate class for those kinds of learners?

Because of the time-consuming nature of hanzi, teaching Chinese writing should not be treated the same way other foreign language programs (e.g. Spanish) treat writing .

L1 Environment Learners vs. L2 Environment Learners

The following list of problems is based on these presuppositions:

• Most Chinese teaching is focused on materials (textbooks) rather than the concepts of the language (vocabulary, tones, grammar, etc.)
• Learning Chinese in a classroom in America (L1 environment) should be different than learning Chinese in a classroom in China (L2 environment).

I see the following problems with the way Chinese is taught in most Chinese classes:

1. Teachers rely on textbooks too much. I realize that curricula must be planned, syllabuses distributed. But the fact is: a native speaker of Chinese has a brain full of excellent, correct Chinese. That’s all we learners really need access to. Regardless of whether I’m in a Chinese class in America or in China, there are countless real-world situations and objects (i.e. within actual reaching distance of where I’m seated) to drive a class forward. Beginning Chinese class can basically just be the students asking “How do you say ___ in Chinese?” and the teacher modeling correct pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
2. Learners in China especially don’t need a text book. The entire class, regardless of level should be organized around the learner’s own experiences (shopping, buying bus tickets, etc.) and materials (a flyer on the ground, a photo of a street sign, etc.). The teacher should just serve as a consultant to answer the student’s questions and correct errors. I realize most programs require the teachers to give grades at the end, and this can be tricky with the sort of consultant, learner-driven class I’m describing. But even a little more focus on learners supplying the materials would be a great start.
3. Learners outside China might benefit more from a textbook because they probably won’t be “needing” the language in their daily lives like someone in China would.

Those are the main problems I see for now. Anyone see any more? Any solutions to these problems that I don’t know about? Please let me know if I’ve left something out.

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Linguistic Laughingstock-a-phobia
• Organize your Vocab: Hanzi Web
• Pinch Sounds Like It Is
• Stump the Chinese: Hard Hanzi

Hi everyone.
大家好.
da4jia1 hao3.

So I want to highlight the WHOLE DOCUMENT, click a button, and see this:

Hi everyone.
大家好.
dàjiā hǎo.

In other words, it ignores everything without a number, and converts everything with a number to pinyin tones (I know that could convert things I don’t want converted but I’m willing to deal with that).

I’ve already got (as seen in the sidebar under Links > Resources – Pinyin):

• Convert: zhong1wen2 -> zhōngwén – but you’ve got to copy/paste stuff from the document and the worst thing is that you loose all your paragraph returns.
• Type pīnyīn with tone marks – but you’ve got to type in the numbers, it doesn’t convert numbers that are already there (I used this to create the above dàjiā hǎo)
• FireFox Extension: zhong1 -> zhōng converter – I need it everywhere (especially MS Word)

Anyone have any suggestions?

By the way, has anyone done an analysis of the Zhonglish in this clip yet? If so, great! That’ll save me the trouble. If not, please do! I’d rather read it than write it.

• How to type pinyin (pīnyīn) with tone markings
• Dots for Tones
• Pinyin Dictionary for Microsoft Word
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• Pinyin Chart

Here’s the editor’s purpose statement:

Frequently, readers ask us for help when new Chinese phrases or terms pop up in the press or daily conversations. In an attempt to improve the rendering of such terms in English, we have decided to introduce the weekly “Buzzwords” column starting from today (2005-10-07).

This column has three purposes: first, to provide a tentative English translation of new Chinese terms and phrases that have recently appeared in the press as a reference for our readers; second, to tell our readers what are the latest buzzwords in the local press; and third, to invite readers to help us generate better translations.

A lot of the terms seem to be internet and high tech vocabulary.

If you’re interested, they also have information on that same page about contests they hold for the best English translation of these new words.

I’ve added the RSS feed for Buzzword to the iGoogle page (in the middle column). If you’d like it to appear on your Google home page, with all the other (currently 41) feeds to pick and choose from, please get the latest version of the page by clicking this button (it’s free):

Add “Learn Chinese” to iGoogle

• “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page 2.0
• “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page Grand Unveiling
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• Chinese Family Tree
• Field Notes

Presenting the Chinese Name Gender Guesser!

It immediately guessed that 张安平 was a boy and 李娟 was a girl. So I gave it (one name at a time) an entire class roster of 20 of my English students here at the college.

Result: 19/20 gender guessed correctly!

To protect the innocent, I’m not going to give you the name of the girl it thought was a boy. But still, I thought that was pretty good.

Just remember that whatever the first character is will be treated as the family name. So if you only know the given name of the person you’re trying to identify, just make up a family name for him/her (like 张).

I just HAD to know how it worked so I emailed Chinese-Tools. They told me it’s based on this database by Wudi.

Here’s an excerpt from the email I got back from Chinese-Tools:

There’s a database with a lot of Chinese characters, and for each of them a gender level indicator. For example 丽 is 100% female, 军 100% male, but some like 丹 can be both, maybe 65% female. Then an average of both characters of the name is calculated.

Very cool. Yet another example of how creative, open-source, free databases are making everyone’s lives better. Thanks Wudi!

• Wanted: Chinese Name Gender Reference
• He/She Mistake in the News
• Addressing strangers
• Mates
• Will Amazon Sell Chinese 24/7?

If that’s you, there’s a new service that will take you up on that offer: ChineseTeachers.com.

Although this particular site launched for students in April of this year, interactive online language learning/teaching is not a new idea and I’ve long been interested in trying it out. So when I got a personalized email from ChineseTeachers.com inviting me to try out the beta version of the site I was just too flattered to turn it down. (If everyone else got that same email, don’t tell me OK? I want to feel special.)

The Concept

ChineseTeachers.com provides what’s basically a big chat room where everyone except you is a native speaker of Chinese who’s qualified as a Chinese teacher. But you can only chat with one teacher at a time (which is plenty) and you can only voice chat (no typing, which I’ll list later in the cons). So anyone who’s used Skype, GTalk, or QQ to voice chat over the internet should know what to expect as far as technology goes.

You log in, see who’s online, choose a teacher you want to talk to, and then ring ‘em up. As soon as the call connects, the clock starts ticking and you pay for every minute you chat (starting at about $0.20 USD / minute). The first two minutes are always free in case you have some technical difficulties or can’t understand the other teacher. So it’s “Chinese on your terms” like ChinesePod says, but this is interactive instead of just listening.

The Lessons

I tried three different teachers, all female. (I tried to talk to a male teacher but the few that were online were all busy. No, really!)

I deliberately left my profile blank and jumped straight into the lessons just to see how the teachers would handle a new student without any info (such as my Chinese level, goals, etc.). It was surprisingly easy to click a button and immediately start talking to someone with almost no setup whatsoever. The teachers each quickly determined my level and initiated interesting conversations (one of which was about research the teacher had done on pronunciation of certain fāngyán 方言!).

The 1st and 3rd teachers started in English and then asked me to speak a little Chinese. The 2nd teacher started in Chinese and we never used any English. That lead me to believe that the first teacher might have communicated somehow with the 2nd teacher. But then the 3rd teacher didn’t seem to know my level, so I don’t think there’s any interaction between the teachers, even in the form of shared notes about the students.

Now on to my favorite part of the review where I get to mix 1st and 2nd person whenever I feel like it!

Pros

• You direct the learning – You can upload documents or any materials you want help with. If you don’t have any documents (like I didn’t), you can chat about whatever you want and then the teachers will make suggestions and email you study materials for the next class. You also decide how long the lesson/call lasts. All the teachers were very good about sensing that I was drawing the call to a close and didn’t try to keep me on the line any longer than I wanted (even as short as 4 minutes with one teacher).
  
• Flexible schedule – You log on whenever you want and see which teachers are online (and it seems there are always some). I suppose you could find a teacher you really like and ask him/her when a good time to meet again would be.
• Good teachers - I only spoke to three of the 150+ teachers, but they all spoke slowly and clearly and were very patient and willing to repeat things that I didn’t understand. They were all proficient in English and they were all good conversationalists who could keep the ball rolling (I deliberately left some awkward silences to see what they’d do, and they didn’t miss a beat). It’s clear they would all be good informants or “Chat Buddies.”
• Nothing to install – This is huge to me because I HATE installing things on my computer. With this site, you don’t have to install or download any software. You just need the standard Flash Player that anyone who’s watched Youtube (before it was banned!) has.
• Sound quality acceptable – It usually sounds just as good as a normal phone call. I didn’t notice any difference between the quality of these calls and Skype calls. There was a little delay on the 3rd lesson, but that happens sometimes with Skype too.
• Don’t call me, I’ll call you – One of my calls got cut off while we were chatting and I was waiting to see if the teacher would call me back, but she either wouldn’t or couldn’t. Either way it’s good because it keeps the ball in the student’s court.
• Free, immediate tech support – There is at least one staff member in the chat room, whom you can call for free and ask any questions about the site or setup. Even though I’d already done some calls without any need for tech support, I called with one minor question just to see what would happen. The staff member was very helpful (although it was a bit unnerving when she answered with “Hello Albert” but never told me her name – I guess my profile wasn’t completely blank).
• Lots of feedback – After each lesson you evaluate the teacher (out of 5 stars) and the sound quality (out of 5 stars). Then you can write notes to yourself about the teacher and/or the lesson. You can also write a note to the teacher about the lesson. The teacher always seems to write you a little note about the lesson as well.
• Reasonable rates – $12 USD / hour is very reasonable for a private tutor in the States. According to the comparison table, this site seems to be quite competitive in their pricing.

Cons

NOTE: Some of these are not really problems with ChineseTeachers.com as much as they are with the whole concept of online language tutoring.

• Phone calls are hard in a foreign language – You don’t have any visual clues like body language or facial expressions. Also, regardless of how good the sound quality is, it won’t be as clear as talking face-to-face. Misunderstanding was rare, but ironically I misunderstood the word qīngchu 清楚 at one point because I just couldn’t hear the initial consonants clearly.
• No typing - There were a few times during the lessons when it would have been very helpful if the teacher could have just typed a quick word to me (like qīngchu 清楚) or I could have sent a quick note. There may be some reason why they don’t want the teachers and students to have the ability to communicate outside the headset, but I think it would have been very helpful.
  [Update: I just got an email informing me that the teachers actually can type things to me, but I can't type back to them. I guess none of my teachers thought that was necessary.]
  [Update #2: Now both sides can type chat.]
• It’s Scary to Call a Stranger – If you’re insecure about your Chinese during face-to-face interaction with people that you know, this will be even more difficult. I’m paying them so I assume they want to talk to me, but how do I know?! And how do I know I’ll like talking to them? The initial two minutes of free chat are supposed to give me a bailout if the chemistry isn’t right, but for some reason I wouldn’t feel right just ditching someone. I’m the one who called after all! I suppose I will eventually build up some relationships with my favorite teachers, but I found it a bit awkward at first.
• Time pressure – I couldn’t help looking at that ticking clock thinking, “Am I really getting my money’s worth out of this?” I probably was, but how would I even know? For a paid service there’s no way to escape that feeling, but I was surprised how distracted I was by the clock. On a positive note, I was also surprised how quickly the time passed.

Wish List

• Added! Typing chat built in to the lesson screen (as mentioned above).
• Added! Word list – It would be cool if there were some integration with online dictionaries and/or Skritter so that I or the teacher could add words that came up in the lesson for me to review later. There’s a place on the site for notes, but a personal glossary of my own vocabulary would be useful. It would also be good when I switch teachers so the teacher could see what words I know and might like to review.
• Time remaining countdown – I know I just finished complaining about the time pressure, but I needed to know when I was out of time. When my account started running low, I got a little message that said I would soon be out of money and I should recharge. I panicked and quickly said goodbye to the teacher who was on the line with me. When I hung up I saw I still had several minutes left. A little countdown timer would help so I know when to expect the red light (like a lawyer before the Supreme Court).

If you’re willing to pay but you can’t find a good Chinese tutor in your area, or if you’re tired of the Chewbacca Method, this would be a good site for you. But if you don’t like talking on the phone in a foreign language, or are afraid to talk to strangers, you might want to just look around your neighborhood harder.

I haven’t really examined it closely, but apparently, if you’re a Chinese teacher and you’d like to register to be included in the site, it’s free as long as you pass the selection process. Has anyone done that and would like to tell us about the experience of teaching for an online platform?

Has anyone else tried ChineseTeachers.com or a similar service as a student? What did you think? Do tell.

• Read Chinese (NFLC) – My Review
• The Quest for “Anyway” II: Success!
• Google Translation Bot
• Free Gift from ChineseTeachers.com
• Does Dating a Native REALLY Help Your Chinese?

For those of you early adopters who’ve been with us from the beginning, you’ll have to add it afresh to your iGoogle home page to see the new stuff.

For anyone who doesn’t know what it is, read the detailed press release or just try it out (it’s free after all)!

“Learn Chinese” 2.0 is laid out in three columns the same way the 1.0 page was, but 2.0 has even more feeds.

Current Contents

*in alphabetical order
**and a dictionary thrown in for good measure

If you know of a resource that should be on the iGoogle page but isn’t, please let me know.

Also, if your feed is a “member” of the page (included in one of those three columns), you might want to consider adding this button to your site:

The “Learn Chinese” 1.0 members that contacted me noticed a huge jump in RSS subscriptions within the first few weeks of the release of the first version of this page and it’s hard to believe that was just a coincidence. Here’s why it’s a win-win-win, etc. situation:

If your feed is included in the iGoogle page, adding the following code to your website (in WordPress it can just be a “Text” widget) will give each “member” a new subscriber every time someone clicks on the button!

Code:
<a href="http://laowaichinese.net/igoogle" target="_blank"><img src="http://laowaichinese.net/wp-content/uploads/igoogle.gif" border="0" alt="" /> Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle</a><br /> <a href="http://laowaichinese.net/learn-chinese-igoogle-page-grand-unveiling.htm" target="_blank"><em>What's this?</em></a>

Looks like this:

Add “Learn Chinese” to iGoogle
What’s this?

I’m still curious to see if we can get “Learn Chinese” to be automatically listed when you add a generic tab to iGoogle. I think the minimum number of users is 500 so I guess we still don’t have that many yet. This isn’t really what iGoogle pages were meant to be used for so I really don’t know what the rules are for that.

And by the way, Language Learning and Technology (a journal affiliated with Michigan State University) reviewed the “Learn Chinese” iGoogle page in their June 2009 issue (pdf) under the “Emerging Technology (pdf)” column. Just thought you should know how famous you are.

• “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page Grand Unveiling
• ShanghaiDaily’s Buzzword
• Wanted: Chinese-Learning Blog List
• A Facelift for the Blog
• Wanted: Cantonese Materials For Foreigners Who Already Know Mandarin

I have been working with (read: begging) MDBG for the past few weeks to develop and test something that will make self-hosted WordPress bloggers’ lives better.

I’m very proud to announce the arrival of the MDBG wordpress plugin (fanfare please)!

My favorite feature is the automatic linking of all hanzi in posts and comments (!) to the MDBG dictionary. This is especially useful for my “power pidgin” writing style when I often write a sentence with English and Chinese hùn zài yìqǐ 混在一起 and I don’t want to have to explain every word. But it also includes a pinyin tone converter that turns “hun4 zai4 yi4qi3″ into “hùn zài yìqǐ” (with an optional link to pinyin pronunciation files).

That reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask everyone (not just you Joel):

What do you use to make pinyin tones on your computer?

Before this plugin I always used this.

As a final bonus, if you use the plugin on your blog, you get added to a special VIP list at the bottom of the plugin page!

If anyone else is using some sort of auto-linking dictionary plugin, let us know how this one compares.

Can anyone who has a self-hosted WordPress blog think of a reason NOT to use the MDBG plugin at least for automatic linking in comments?

• Colored Tones on MDBG
• Pinyin Dictionary for Microsoft Word
• MDBG Online Dictionary – Tutorial
• Nciku.com – My Review
• Wanted: Chinese-Learning Blog List